Bodhisattva

In the early tradition

In the earlier texts the term refers chiefly to the Buddha before his awakening — in his final life, and in the previous lives narrated in the Jataka stories, where he accumulates the perfections over incalculable time. Maitreya, the buddha to come, is the other principal instance.

The path was accordingly understood as exceptional: most practitioners aimed at arahantship, the extinction of defilements, not at buddhahood.

In Mahayana

Mahayana made it the standard aspiration. The bodhisattva takes a vow to attain buddhahood for the sake of all beings and to work for their liberation for as long as it takes, generating bodhicitta, the mind set on awakening. The career is described through ten stages and six perfections — generosity, ethics, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom.

The two motives of the path are wisdom, understanding emptiness, and compassion, which without wisdom is ineffective and which wisdom without it would leave inert.

Celestial bodhisattvas

Mahayana devotion is directed to great bodhisattvas understood as advanced beings capable of responding to those who call on them: Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion, who becomes Guanyin in China and is connected in Tibet with the Dalai Lamas; Manjushri, of wisdom, with sword and book; Tara, born of Avalokiteshvara's tears; Kshitigarbha, who works in the hells; Samantabhadra and Vajrapani.

These figures are among the most widely represented in Buddhist art across Asia.

The formulation

The popular statement that a bodhisattva refuses nirvana until all beings are saved is a simplification of a position the tradition states more carefully — the goal is buddhahood, which is not a lesser state, and the non-abiding nirvana of a buddha is described as established in neither samsara nor withdrawn cessation. The vow's force is real; the framing as self-denial is not quite what the texts say.