Buddhism - Mahayana, "Great Vehicle"
About the beginning of the Christian era there arose in Buddhism a new school of thought, whose members not only developed the original law of impermanence into a theory of the unreality of all things but, going beyond the ideal of attaining Nirvana through sainthood, aspired to become Buddhas themselves by following the career of the Bodhisattvas, or potential Buddhas, and made devotion to Buddhas and Bodhisattvas conceived as personal divinities a prominent part of religion. This system they called Mahayana, "Great Vehicle" as opposed to the HInayana, "Little (or, Inferior) Vehicle," of the older schools.
Different in spirit as the two Vehicles were, they continued to exist side by side in India as recognized divisions of Buddhism, although the kinship of the Mahayana with the Hinduism of the time is unmistakable. About the 6th century AD another school, that of the Tantras, or mystic formulas, sprang up, partly as an offshoot of the Mahayana, and partly as an accommodation of popular and often gross superstitions to the terms of Buddhist mythology. Thus Buddhism in India gradually abandoned its distinctive character and tended, from the 8th century onward, to merge itself in the surrounding Hinduism. There seems to have been little persecution by Brahmanical rulers, but the Mohammedan invaders and conquerors of northern India in the 12th century dealt a fatal blow to Buddhism in its original home by their destruction of the monasteries. From that time it rapidly declined, and it has been practically extinct as a religion in India proper, although traces of its influence are discernible in the rites of certain castes. Only on the slopes of the Himalayas did it partially maintain itself, though in a corrupted form. The Buddhism of the native state Nepal has a special historical importance, since its uninterrupted literary tradition has preserved many theological works that would otherwise have perished.
The great expansion of Buddhism northwards and eastwards began about the Christian era, when under the Indo-Scythian kings it spread from the valley of the Indus over the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs into Turkestan. Thence it was brought to China in the 1st century AD, where it became firmly established in the course of the 4th century. China in turn transmitted the faith to Korea (384 AD), and Korea to Japan (552 AD). In the Far East, however, the Mahayana school early became predominant, and the history of the various Chinese and Japanese sects consequently is not within the scope of this article. In Tibet, which received Buddhism from India in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the Mahayana and Tantra doctrines were combined with the native superstitions and ultimately developed into the peculiar politico-religious system known as Lamaism.
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