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Buddhist Philosophy
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us the reason why one school was called Hinayana whereas the other, which he professed, was called Mahāyāna. He says that, considered from the point of view of the ultimate goal of religion, the instructions, attempts, realization, and time, the Hinayana occupies a lower and smaller place than the other called Mahā (great) Yana, and hence it is branded as Hina (small, or low). This brings us to one of the fundamental points of distinction between Hinayana and Mahāyāna. The ultimate good of an adherent of the Hīnayāna is to attain his own nirvāņa or salvation, whereas the ultimate goal of those who professed the Mahāyāna creed was not to seek their own salvation but to seek the salvation of all beings. So the Hinayana goal was lower, and in consequence of that the instructions that its followers received, the attempts they undertook, and the results they achieved were narrower than that of the Mahāyāna adherents. A Hinayana man had only a short business in attaining his own salvation, and this could be done in three lives, whereas a Mahāyāna adherent was prepared to work for infinite time in helping all beings to attain salvation. So the Hinayana adherents required only a short period of work and may from that point of view also be called hina, or lower.
This point, though important from the point of view of the difference in the creed of the two schools, is not so from the point of view of philosophy. But there is another trait of the Mahayānists which distinguishes them from the Hinayānists from the philosophical point of view. The Mahāyānists believed that all things were of a non-essential and indefinable character and void at bottom, whereas the Hinayānists only believed in the impermanence of all things, but did not proceed further than
that.
It is sometimes erroneously thought that Nāgārjuna first preached the doctrine of Śūnyavāda (essencelessness or voidness of all appearance), but in reality almost all the Mahāyāna sūtras either definitely preach this doctrine or allude to it. Thus if we take some of those sutras which were in all probability earlier than Nāgarjuna, we find that the doctrine which Nāgārjuna expounded
Brahmayana (career of becoming a Brahma), Tathāgatayāna (career of a Tathāgata). In one place Lankavatāra says that ordinarily distinction is made between the three careers and one career and no career, but these distinctions are only for the ignorant (Lankavatāra, p. 68).
