Immediately after the Buddha’s death, differences arose among his followers as to the interpretation of the Master’s teachings. After the Second Council, held 100 years after the Buddha, at Vaishali, two great schools -the Sthaviravadins and Mahasanghikas – came into being. By the time of Asoka, there were eighteen different schools, each with its own interpretation of canonical teachings.
Asoka convoked the Third Council to stem the tide. In the ultimate, the Mahasanghikas paved the way for the emergence of Mahayana in the first century A.D. at the Fourth Council held during the reign of Kanishka. The Mahayanists gave prominence to the Bud- dhisattva ideal, and laid emphasis on liberating all the sentient beings rather than salvation of an individual, the ideal of arhatship in Theravada.
The Mahayanists believed that all things were of non-essential and indefinable character, and void at the bottom. Everything, being void, there is in reality no process and no cessations. They further gave prominence to the Eternal Buddhas, who look like the God of theistic religions. The Mahayanists’ emphasis on the Bodhisattva theory led to the emergence of another school called Yogacara, in which not only imaginary beings but exponents or leaders of various sects were also deified as Bodhisattvas.
As a result of intermingling of Buddhistic and Brahmanical speculations, the Yogacara School paved way for Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. Even today, there are three major types of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana. Regionally speaking, contemporary Theravada Buddhist Asia includes Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, and Southern Vietnam.
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Mahayana Buddhist Asia now includes China (to some extent), Hong Kong-Macao, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and certain communities in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal, and Singapore. The present Vajrayana Buddhist Asia includes Bhutan, Mongolia (to some extent), Tibet, and certain communities in India and Nepal.
In the modern world differences between the three schools of Buddhism have been narrowed down. All are now working in the cause of the dhamma in cooperation with each other as members of the World Fellowship of Buddhists founded in Sri Lanka in 1950. Thus now the emphasis is on Buddhayana, the universal teachings of the Buddha.