Kinds of enlightenment: Disciples vs. Buddhas

Bhikkhu Bodhi, "Arahants, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas"; Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

Competing Buddhist Ideals

Enlightened disciple Ven. Sariputra

The arahant (enlightened disciple) ideal and the bodhisattva (being-bent-on-buddhahood) ideal are often considered the respective guiding ideals of Theravāda Buddhism and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

This assumption is not entirely correct, because the earlier Theravāda tradition has absorbed the bodhisattva ideal into its framework and therefore recognizes the validity of both arahantship and buddhahood as objects of spiritual aspiration.

Kwan Yin (Avalokitateshvara) Bodhisattva

It would thus be more accurate to say that the arahant ideal and the bodhisattva ideal are the respective guiding ideals of Early Buddhism and [later] Mahāyāna Buddhism.

It is important to recognize that these ideals, as they have come down to us, originate from different bodies of literature, stemming from different periods in the historical development of Buddhism.

If we don’t take this fact into account and simply compare these two ideals as described in Buddhist canonical texts, we might assume that the two were originally expounded by the historical Buddha.

And we might then suppose that the Buddha — living and teaching in the Ganges plain in the 5th century B.C.E. — offered his followers a choice between them, as if to say:

“This is the arahant ideal, which has such and such features, and that is the bodhisattva ideal, which has such and such features. Choose whichever one you like” [2].

The Mahāyāna sūtras, such as the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (the Great Perfection of Wisdom Discourse) and the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (the Lotus Sūtra), give the impression that the Buddha did teach both ideals.

Such "sūtras," however, certainly are not ancient [but are more recent inventions]. To the contrary, they are relatively late attempts to schematize the different types of Buddhist practice that had evolved over a period of roughly 400 years after the Buddha’s final nirvāna.

The oldest Buddhist texts — the Pāli Nikāyas and their counterparts from other early schools (preserved most fully in the Chinese Āgamas) — depict the ideal for the Buddhist disciple as the arahant (fully enlightened person).

Zen is Japanese Mahayana

The Mahāyāna sūtras, composed a few centuries later in a distinctly Buddhist form of Sanskrit, depict the ideal for the Mahāyāna follower as the bodhisattva.

Now some people argue that because the arahant is the ideal of Early Buddhism, while the bodhisattva is the ideal of later Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Mahāyāna must be a more advanced or highly developed type of Buddhism, a more ultimate teaching compared to the simpler, more fundamental (basic) teaching of the historical Nikāyas.

That is indeed an attitude common among Mahāyānists, which I will call “Mahāyāna elitism.”

There is an opposing attitude common among conservative advocates of the Nikāyas, an attitude that I will call “Nikāya purism,” which rejects all later developments in the history of Buddhist thought as deviation and distortion, a fall away from the pristine “purity” of the ancient teaching.

Taking the arahant ideal alone as valid, Nikāya purists reject the bodhisattva ideal, sometimes forcefully. More