ABC
Religious texts
Religious schools and traditions
Heavenly beings and deities
Legendary and historical figures
Legendary and real places
Symbols and art
Doctrines and rituals
- Awakening
- Community
- Compassion
- Craving
- Dependent origination
- Dharma
- Eightfold Path
- Emptiness
- Five Precepts
- Four Noble Truths
- Happiness
- Heavens and hells
- Impermanence
- Karma
- Koan
- Kung fu
- Meditation
- Merit
- Mindfulness
- Nirvana
- Non-self
- Om (mani padme hum)
- Parinirvana
- Pilgrimage sites
- Prajnaparamita
- Puja
- Pure lands
- Realms of existence
- Rebirth
- Recitation
- Renunciation
- Ritual
- Self
- Suffering
- Tales of rebirth
- Three Jewels
- Three-body doctrine
- Universal ruler
- Vesak
- Ye-dhamma formula
- Yoga
Mahayana
Religious schools and traditions
Mahayana means ‘great vehicle’ in Sanskrit. It is a division of Buddhism that evolved in the centuries following the death of the Buddha. Mahayana Buddhists created a rich body of literature; its earliest manuscripts date to around the beginning of the Common Era. They developed a new understanding of the reality of the world (e.g. emptiness), reinterpreted the nature of the Buddha (e.g. the three-body doctrine), and offered a new path to nirvana. Within a few centuries, they founded various schools of Mahayana Buddhism that spread from India across all of Asia.