What is the difference between Theravada (Hinayana, Pratyekayana), Mahayana and Vajrayana? Is what we study here Theravada?
Draft: Sasha
We read the Majjhima Nikaya, part of the Pali Canon, which is the canon of Theravada. So yes, textually we work inside the Theravada corpus, though the club is not sectarian and people come with all sorts of backgrounds.
The names in the question refer to different kinds of things, which is where the confusion starts. Theravada (Theravāda, “the teaching of the elders”) is a living Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, historically descended from the Sri Lankan Mahāvihāra lineage; later tradition traces it back to the Vibhajjavāda. Mahayana (Mahāyāna, “the great vehicle”) is a broad body of texts and teachings that took shape gradually around the turn of the era. Vajrayana (Vajrayāna, “the diamond vehicle”) is the tantric layer within Mahayana: the first Buddhist tantras appear in the 6th-7th centuries, and the corpus grows through the 7th-12th.
| Theravada | Mahayana | Vajrayana | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texts | the Pali Canon and its commentarial tradition | Mahayana sutras and shastras; the Chinese and Tibetan canons also preserve agamas, vinayas and the abhidharma of the early schools | tantras and their commentaries alongside Mahayana sutras and shastras |
| Ideal | the arahant (arahant) | the bodhisattva (bodhisattva), full Buddhahood for the benefit of all beings | the same ideal, tantric methods |
| Where | Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia | China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam | Tibet, Mongolia, Nepal, Japan |
Those regions overlap: the Tibetan tradition includes sutric Mahayana as well, and in Japan the Vajrayana school Shingon sits alongside other Mahayana schools. All three keep the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and the goal of freedom from suffering.
Theravada is not the same thing as “early Buddhism”. There were many early schools - the traditional lists count eighteen, though the names and genealogies vary from source to source. Early texts are reconstructed by comparing the Pali nikayas with the Chinese agamas and with fragments from other schools. The Pali Canon is the only complete surviving canon in a Middle Indic language and one of our most important sources, but it is not a transcript of the Buddha’s words and not the only witness.
The ladder “first Theravada, then Mahayana, then Vajrayana” is wrong, and the picture of three simultaneous branches off a common root also flattens the history: the inheritance is shared and early Buddhist, but the three took shape at different times and influenced each other.
On “Hinayana”. The Sanskrit hīnayāna, literally “inferior” or “deficient vehicle”, is a polemical label from Mahayana texts. No known school ever used it of itself, and it does not name any single historical tradition. The First General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists passed a resolution in 1950 to replace it with “Theravada” - an ecumenical recommendation about present-day traditions, not a name for all the early schools. Scholars write “early Buddhist schools” or “Nikaya Buddhism”, and where the doctrinal classification of the disciple’s path is specifically meant, śrāvakayāna. We do not use the term.
“Pratyekayana” in the question means pratyekabuddhayāna (Pali paccekabuddhayāna), the path of the pratyekabuddha, who awakens on their own but founds no teaching. It is neither a movement nor a school, but one of the three vehicles in a common Mahayana scheme (śrāvakayāna, pratyekabuddhayāna, bodhisattvayāna), which some Mahayana texts then collapse into one. Theravada commentarial systematics likewise distinguishes three kinds of awakening: sāvakabodhi, paccekabodhi, sammāsambodhi.
An arahant, by the way, is not half-liberated: an arahant and a sammāsambuddha are equally free of the defilements. The difference is that a sammāsambuddha discovers a path nobody had found and makes it known to others, while an arahant walks it as a disciple.
Emptiness is not a Mahayana invention either: the Pali suññatā is there in the early suttas - the world is empty of self and of what belongs to a self. The Mahayana śūnyatā, above all Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka with its critique of intrinsic nature (svabhāva), takes the theme further and in a different direction.
Where to read: MN 121 and MN 122 on the practice of emptiness; SN 35.85 on the world being empty of self and of what belongs to a self; SN 22.58 on how a Buddha differs from liberated disciples.