[German Version]

(Sanskrit) literally means “great vehicle” (equivalents in other languages are dasheng in Chinese, daijō in Japanese, taesuˇng in Korean, theg-pa chen-po ¶ in Tibetan). The “great vehicle” is, alongside the Hīnayāna, the “small vehicle” or the Śrāvakayāna, the “vehicle of those who listen,” the second major school within Buddhism, which represents contemporary Buddhism in East Asia (People's Republic of China, Korea, Japan), Central Asia (Mongolia, Tibet) and, in part, Southeast Asia (Vietnam). Mahāyāna is a delimitative, self-referential d…