Twenty Hinayana schools
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twenty Hinayana schools
二十部・小乗二十部 (Jpn niju-bu or shojo- niju-bu )
Also, twenty schools. A term applied in the Mahayana tradition to the schools formed by schisms in the Buddhist Order in India resulting from divergent interpretations of Shakyamuni Buddha's teachings after his death. According to The Doctrines of the Different Schools, the first schism occurred about one hundred years after Shakyamuni's death in the wake of controversy over five modifications advanced by a monk named Mahadeva. At that point, the Buddhist community split into two schools: the Sthaviravada (Pali Theravada) school, which rejected Mahadeva's views, and the Mahasamghika school, which supported them. A Correct Commentary on the Rules of Discipline does not attribute this first schism to Mahadeva's five modifications, however. Instead, it ascribes the division to a dispute over the "ten unlawful revisions"—ten new interpretations of monastic discipline set forth by the monks of the Vriji tribe in Vaishali.
According to The Doctrines of the Different Schools , a split within the Mahasamghika occurred in the second one-hundred-year period after the Buddha's death. Eventually eight schools derived from the Mahasamghika, forming nine Mahasamghika schools:
Ekavyavaharika,
Lokottaravada,
Kaukkutika,
Bahushrutiya,
Prajnaptivadin (also Prajnaptivadin),
Chaityavadin,
Aparashaila,
Uttarashaila, and
Mahasamghika.
The Sthaviravada school divided during the third one-hundred-year period after the Buddha's death; first the Sarvastivada school broke away, while the original Sthaviravada school called itself the Haimavata school.
Thereafter the Sarvastivada school gave rise to four more schools:
Vatsiputriya,
Mahishasaka,
Kashyapiya, and
Sautrantika.
The Vatsiputriya school further divided into the
Dharmottara,
Bhadrayaniya,
Sammatiya, and
Shannagarika schools,
and the Mahishasaka split to form the
Dharmagupta school.
Thus there were a total of eleven Sthaviravada schools. Along with the nine Mahasamghika schools, they form the twenty Hinayana schools. The schools arising from these schisms are sometimes referred to as the eighteen Hinayana schools, a designation that does not include the two original schools, Sthaviravada and Mahasamghika.