Greater Road

• Mahayana Buddhism; progressive doctrine

94:9.4In the south the fun­da­men­tal­ist stereo­type of the teach­ings of Sid­dhartha per­sisted in Cey­lon, Burma, and the Indo-China penin­sula. This is the Hi­nayana di­vi­sion of Bud­dhism which clings to the early or aso­cial doc­trine.

94:9.5But even be­fore the col­lapse in In­dia, the Chi­nese and north In­dian groups of Gau­tama’s fol­low­ers had be­gun the de­vel­op­ment of the Ma­hayana teach­ing of the “Great Road” to sal­va­tion in con­trast with the purists of the south who held to the Hi­nayana, or “Lesser Road.” And these Ma­hayanists cast loose from the so­cial lim­i­ta­tions in­her­ent in the Bud­dhist doc­trine, and ever since has this north­ern di­vi­sion of Bud­dhism con­tin­ued to evolve in China and Japan.

• dual Buddhist concept of God and the Absolute

94:12.2Grad­u­ally the con­cept of God, as con­trasted with the Ab­so­lute, be­gan to ap­pear in Bud­dhism. Its sources are back in the early days of this dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of the fol­low­ers of the Lesser Road and the Greater Road. It was among the lat­ter di­vi­sion of Bud­dhism that the dual con­cep­tion of God and the Ab­so­lute fi­nally ma­tured. Step by step, cen­tury by cen­tury, the God con­cept has evolved un­til, with the teach­ings of Ry­onin, Ho­nen Shonin, and Shin­ran in Japan, this con­cept fi­nally came to fruit in the be­lief in Amida Bud­dha.