Between roughly the fourth century BCE and the first century CE, the single Buddhist community divided into a set of schools that the tradition conventionally numbers at eighteen. Only one of them, the Theravada, survives today as an independent ordination lineage. The others are known from their surviving texts, from the polemics of their rivals, from Chinese translations, and from inscriptions.

Understanding this period is unusually useful, because a great many things that look like differences between “Theravada and Mahayana” are in fact inheritances from this much older set of arguments.

What “school” means here #

The English word imports assumptions that do not fit. Two Sanskrit terms are in play, and the distinction matters.

A nikaya is an ordination lineage: a group that performs the fortnightly uposatha ceremony together and shares a recension of the Vinaya. This is the institutional unit, and it is what schism (sanghabheda) divides.

A vada is a doctrinal position — Sarvastivada, “the doctrine that all exists”; Vibhajyavada, “the doctrine of distinguishing.” Holding a vada does not by itself put you in a different nikaya.

The two do not map onto each other neatly. Monks of different doctrinal persuasions could belong to the same ordination lineage, and the Mahayana — which is neither, being a movement across lineages — is the clearest case. Xuanzang, travelling in seventh-century India, routinely reports monasteries housing monks of one Vinaya lineage who studied Mahayana texts alongside those who did not.

The first schism #

The primary division is between the Sthaviravada (Pali: Theravada), “the way of the elders,” and the Mahasamghika, “of the great assembly.” Everything else descends from one side or the other.

The sources disagree about when, why, and even who was in the majority.

The Theravada account ties it to the Second Council at Vesali: the monks whose lax practices were condemned convened a rival assembly of ten thousand and became the Mahasamghika. This makes the split a matter of discipline, with the Mahasamghika as the lax party.

Mahasamghika sources describe the opposite. In their account the dispute concerned an attempt to expand the Vinaya with additional rules, which they refused, making them the conservatives and the Sthaviras the innovators.

A third tradition attributes the split to the “five points of Mahadeva,” a set of propositions limiting the attainments of the arahant — that an arahant can still have nocturnal emissions, can have residual ignorance about ordinary matters, can have doubt, can be instructed by others, and can enter the path by uttering an exclamation.

Modern scholarship, particularly the work of Janice Nattier and Charles Prebish, generally favours a Vinaya-based explanation over a doctrinal one, on the ground that formal schism in Buddhist law is defined in terms of communal ritual acts rather than beliefs. The five points of Mahadeva appear to be a later polemical attribution.

The consequences were real. Mahasamghika thought tended towards an elevated view of the Buddha — supramundane, his physical appearance a skilful appearance rather than the whole story — and a correspondingly reduced view of the arahant. Both tendencies are visible later in Mahayana buddhology, which is why the Mahasamghika is often described as fertile ground for it, though this should not be overstated into a claim of direct descent.

The eighteen schools #

Traditional lists enumerate eighteen. The lists do not agree with each other, the total is often reached by adjusting the sub-divisions, and inscriptions name schools that appear in no list. Eighteen is best treated as a conventional number, like the eighty-four thousand teachings.

The schools that matter most for the later tradition:

Sarvastivada. Dominant in Gandhara, Kashmir, and Central Asia, and the most intellectually productive of the early schools. Its name states its distinctive thesis: sarvam asti, “everything exists” — meaning that dharmas, the momentary constituents of experience, exist in the past and future as well as the present. The argument was partly about how karma can produce a result long after the act, and partly about how a present mind can take a past object. Its enormous Abhidharma literature, crowned by the Mahavibhasa, is the foundation of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha, which remains a core curriculum text in Tibetan monasteries. See What Is the Abhidharma?

Vibhajyavada. “Those who distinguish” — the position that only present dharmas and past karma not yet ripened exist. The Theravada belongs to this line.

Theravada. Established in Sri Lanka, traditionally by Ashoka’s son Mahinda, and the sole surviving early school. Its canon in Pali is the only early canon preserved complete in an Indian language. Its position on the question at issue with the Sarvastivada is that only the present exists.

Pudgalavada (also Vatsiputriya, Sammitiya). The most notorious. They held that there is a “person” (pudgala) that is neither identical with the five aggregates nor different from them, neither the same across lives nor different. Every other school attacked this as a smuggled self and a violation of anatta; the Pudgalavadins replied that without it, rebirth, memory, and moral responsibility become unintelligible, and that their position was precisely the middle one the Buddha had indicated by refusing both eternalism and annihilationism.

The interesting fact, recovered by inscriptional work, is that the Sammitiya were for centuries one of the largest schools in India by number of monasteries — despite being, in the doctrinal literature, everyone’s example of heresy. Xuanzang counted more Sammitiya monks than any other kind. It is a good reminder that the textual record’s judgements and the ground truth can diverge sharply.

Dharmaguptaka. Significant far out of proportion to its doctrinal profile, because its Vinaya became the ordination code of Chinese Buddhism and, through China, of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Any discussion of bhikkhuni ordination in East Asia is a discussion of the Dharmaguptaka lineage.

Mahisasaka, Kasyapiya, Bahusrutiya, Lokottaravada and others are known mainly from fragments, Chinese translations, and doxographies.

What they argued about #

The disputes were technical and, from a distance, can look trivial. They were not. Each concerned something the doctrinal system needed and did not obviously have.

  • How karma persists. If only the present moment exists, what carries the moral force of an act across years or lifetimes until it ripens? The Sarvastivada answered by giving past dharmas a kind of existence; the Theravada by positing a series of conditioned moments; others by inventing mechanisms such as “acquisition” (prapti) or a store of seeds.
  • What holds a person together. Without a self, what accounts for continuity, memory, and responsibility? Hence the Pudgalavada, and hence also the later Yogacara store-consciousness.
  • What an arahant is. Are the awakened fully perfected in all respects, or liberated from defilement while remaining ordinary in other ways? The answer determines whether arahantship is a satisfactory goal.
  • What the Buddha is. A human teacher who died, or a transcendent reality of which the historical life was an appearance? The Mahasamghika leaned decisively towards the second.
  • How many moments a mind-instant lasts, and whether time is real. Genuinely technical, and the engine of a great deal of Abhidharma.

Why only Theravada survived #

Not because it won the argument. The Sarvastivada was the more influential school in India for centuries, and Sarvastivada Abhidharma remains a living curriculum in Tibet through Vasubandhu.

The Theravada survived because of geography and politics. It was established early on an island outside the Indian mainland’s cycles of conquest and dynastic reorientation; it secured a durable relationship with Sinhalese kingship; it wrote its canon down early; and it later established itself across Southeast Asia in polities where it became the state religion. The mainland schools disappeared with Indian Buddhism itself in the long decline.

The others are not entirely gone. Their Vinayas survive and are in daily use: Dharmaguptaka in East Asia, Mulasarvastivada in Tibet. Their Abhidharma survives in Tibetan and Chinese curricula. Their versions of the discourses survive as the Chinese Agamas, whose comparison with the Pali Nikayas is now one of the most productive methods in early Buddhist studies.

Common questions #

Were the schools hostile to each other? Mostly not, by the standards of religious division elsewhere. They wrote sharp polemics — the Theravada Kathavatthu is an entire book of them — but they recognised each other as Buddhist, ordained under comparable Vinayas, and often shared monasteries. There is no Buddhist equivalent of a war of religion between nikayas.

Is Theravada the same as Hinayana? No, and the term should be avoided. Hinayana, “inferior vehicle,” is a Mahayana polemical coinage for the non-Mahayana schools collectively, principally targeting the Sarvastivada, which was the dominant school where the polemic was written. Applying it to the modern Theravada is both inaccurate and offensive. See Mahayana: The Great Vehicle.

Do the early schools’ canons agree? In broad structure and in a great deal of detail, yes — which is the point of comparing them. The Chinese Agamas, translated from Sanskrit or Prakrit originals of schools other than the Theravada, contain versions of a large proportion of the Pali discourses. Agreements between independently transmitted recensions push material back before the schools split, which is the strongest tool available for identifying early doctrine.

Where can I read their texts? In translation, the main access points are the Chinese Agamas (increasingly available in English), Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakosha for the Sarvastivada system, and the substantial Sanskrit fragment finds from Central Asia and Gandhara. The Gandharan birch-bark manuscripts, first published in the late 1990s, are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts known.

Sources & further reading #

Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism (Peeters, 1988), ch. 6 — the standard survey of the schools and the sources for them. Andre Bareau, Les sectes bouddhiques du Petit Véhicule (EFEO, 1955) — the foundational comparative study of the doxographic lists. Janice J. Nattier & Charles S. Prebish, “Mahāsāṃghika Origins,” History of Religions 16 (1977) — on the first schism. Collett Cox, Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence (International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1995) — on the Sarvastivada thesis and its critics. Bhikkhu Analayo, A Comparative Study of the Majjhima-nikāya (Dharma Drum, 2011) — the method of comparing Pali and Chinese recensions, in practice.