How many mahayana buddhists are there

The development of Buddhism and its literature is much more complicated than we have realized. In the middle of the 20th century, scholars thought Mahayana Buddhism was developed by lay people who wanted to make a Buddhism for everybody.

It was compared to the Protestant movement in Christianity. But we now know that this picture is not true. The evidence shows that Mahayana Buddhism was spearheaded by the renunciants, the Buddhist monks and nuns. These were the hardcore practitioners of the religion, and they were responsible for writing the Mahayana scriptures and promoting these new ideas.

The lay people were not the initiators. But the full story is even more complicated than that. And Mahayana Buddhism is sort of like a braided stream of several river currents, without one main current. In the last two or three decades, scholars have also discovered a whole lot of texts in a long-lost language, called Gandhari, some of which are related to the Mahayana.

These documents, the oldest of which date to the first century BCE, have been found in a region that now includes Pakistan and parts of North India, Afghanistan and Central Asia. A lot of these texts are very hard to translate and understand. And there is more material that keeps surfacing. All of that is changing our view of the early history of Buddhism.

Alex Shashkevich, Stanford News Service: , ashashkevich stanford. Median Age Globally, Buddhists are older median age of 34 than the overall population median age of Footnotes: 12 Alternatively, some scholars consider there to be two main Buddhist branches — Mahayana and Theravada — and classify Vajrayana as part of the Mahayana branch.

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Mahayana Buddhism Last updated Mahayana Buddhism is not a single group but a collection of Buddhist traditions. The Bodhisattva Mahayana talks a great deal about the bodhisattva the 'enlightenment being' as being the ideal way for a Buddhist to live. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why.

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