There Are No Mahayana Monasteries

Introduction

It has become all too common to refer to Buddhist monasteries (by which I mean established communities of monks or nuns that maintain traditional Vinaya observance) by their cultural flavour or by the doctrinal views they follow. We call some monasteries “Tibetan” or “Zen”, and others “Mahāyāna” or even “Hīnayāna” (i.e. Śrāvakayāna). These labels may seem sensible, but they put up unnecessary barriers between monastics who are much closer spiritual siblings than they appear. They also hide an underlying truth about how so-called Mahāyāna monasteries actually function.

One common misconception is that monastics who follow Mahāyāna today have their own “Mahāyāna” Vinaya, adapted to that tradition. This is not surprising, given how differently many Mahāyāna monastics behave from their Theravāda counterparts (the reasons for those differences will become clear later on). The idea extends to individual Mahāyāna traditions too, leading to mistaken beliefs such as Tibetans having a Vinaya lineage of their own.

Now, I am not saying that Tibetan monasteries are not Mahāyāna. Doctrinally speaking, they certainly are. But when we look closely at what we call “Mahāyāna” monasteries, we find something that surprises many people: institutionally speaking, they are Śrāvaka communities that happen to study and practise according to Mahāyāna literature. The daily routine, the ethical rules and the community structures that define monastic life remain Śrāvaka, whichever sūtras are studied and whichever philosophical positions are emphasised.

For these communities, though, it is the doctrinal elements that make them Mahāyāna, while their institutional affiliation goes largely unrecognised or is treated as secondary. This distinction between the institutional and doctrinal layers is the focus of this article. Once we draw it, the question of whether Mahāyāna monasteries exist comes down to which layer we are talking about.

The distinction matters well beyond academic categorisation. Living within this tradition as a bhikshu, I’ve seen first-hand how these confused categories divide communities that share the same basic structures and practices. The sharpest of these divisions is between Tibetan and Theravāda monastics, despite their remarkably similar institutional foundations.

This article therefore has two aims. The first is to challenge misconceptions about monasticism that I have come across throughout my time in Buddhist circles. The second is to show why the remaining Vinaya lineages should cooperate and support each other far more than they currently do, not only for practical benefit but for the survival of Buddhism itself. Many sectarian divides exist because of misunderstanding rather than genuine incompatibility. In the sections that follow, I look at what this means for ordination, for institutional cooperation, and for the survival of both Mahāyāna and Buddhism as a whole in the modern world.

Why Tibetan Monastics Are Śrāvaka

First, what do we mean by “Śrāvaka”? The term literally means “hearers” or “listeners”: those who received the Buddha’s teachings directly and sought to put them into practice for their own liberation. The Śrāvakayāna, or “Vehicle of the Listeners”, is the Buddha’s foundational teaching for practitioners who wish to escape saṃsāra as swiftly as possible through their own effort. Its central understanding is that desire, craving and attachment are the root causes of cyclic existence and suffering. By eliminating these afflictions through ethical conduct, mental absorption and wisdom, one attains nirvāṇa, the cessation of suffering.

The Śrāvaka path emphasises personal liberation through the Prātimokṣa vows (prāti meaning individual, and mokṣa meaning liberation), which are set out in the Vinaya Piṭaka. The entire Vinaya system (the monastic code, ordination procedures, community governance and disciplinary procedures) was established for this path of individual liberation. It is the foundation on which every Buddhist monastic community is built, whatever its later doctrinal developments or philosophical orientation.

Now consider a typical day in what most people would call a “Mahāyāna monastery” in the Tibetan tradition. The monastics wake before dawn, wash, and gather for prayers before breakfast. Some eat their final meal before noon, following the Prātimokṣa rule against eating after midday. Every full moon and new moon they perform the poṣadha ceremony (uposatha in Pali, sojong in Tibetan), in which they confess their transgressions and renew their vows.

The poṣadha has the same essential structure as in Theravāda monasteries, though the practice varies. In some Theravāda communities, a monk must confess any disciplinary violation to another monk or to the Saṅgha before the Pāṭimokkha is recited, keeping the Buddha’s original emphasis on purification before the ceremony.¹ Tibetan monastics follow the same confession procedure, but they do it as a group rather than individually.

During the summer they observe the three-month rains retreat (varṣā in Sanskrit, vassa in Pali, yarne in Tibetan). They take the varṣā vows in an opening ritual, give the period that follows to intensive study and meditation, and release the vows at the end. Theravādins keep the full three months everywhere, but many Tibetan monasteries have halved it, since Tibet has no heavy rainy season.

Tibetan monasteries also have disciplinarians (vinayadhara) who enforce the rules, abbots (mahācārya) who lead and manage the monastery, and chant masters who lead the liturgy. In short, their whole daily and yearly schedule runs on a Vinaya structure inherited from India, one that has remained essentially unchanged for over two millennia. The name of this lineage is the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya.

For those not acquainted with it, the Mūlasarvāstivāda is an offshoot of the Sthavira Vinaya, one of the first distinct Vinaya lineages to emerge from the Second Buddhist Council. The Theravāda derives from the same Vinaya, which makes the two close cousins, and so does the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya followed in East Asia. The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya reached Tibet at various times, brought by various monastics from North India during the translation period.

Because of this common root, these traditions share the same fundamental Vinaya framework: the core structure of vows and precepts, community governance and ceremonial observance. How that framework is expressed varies between cultures. Theravāda communities keep more strictly to practices like piṇḍapāta (alms rounds) and other observances, while Tibetan monastics have adapted to different cultural and geographical conditions. Both, however, operate within recognisably Śrāvaka institutional structures.

In other words, their institutional backbone is unmistakably Śrāvaka. Yet many monastics are not aware of this, or have never been taught the historical distinction between institutional affiliation (sect) and doctrinal orientation (school),² and the result is understandable confusion about their identity. Some don’t know they follow Śrāvaka institutional structures. Others resist being called “Śrāvaka” because they want to be seen as Mahāyāna, not realising that these categories work on entirely different dimensions.

This misunderstanding has real, and sometimes harmful, consequences. When Tibetan monastics encounter Theravāda communities, they are often treated as institutional foreigners, even though both lineages grew out of the Sthavira Vinaya and share far more institutional DNA than their modern separation suggests. If anything, the Mūlasarvāstivāda is slightly stricter: it contains mostly the same vows as the Theravāda Vinaya (give or take a handful), plus 26 more.³

Yet the barriers persist. Some Theravāda monks refuse to share activities or food with their Tibetan counterparts, treating them as followers of an alien tradition. The irony is that Theravāda communities can differ sharply from one another in doctrinal emphasis and still remain institutionally united. Some study Abhidhamma literature extensively, for instance, while the Thai Forest Tradition gives it minimal importance.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese communities like those inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh follow their Dharmaguptaka Vinaya so carefully that Theravāda monks may readily share food and even robes with them, even though they are doctrinally Mahāyāna. Since the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya is historically just as close to the Theravāda as the Dharmaguptaka is, we would expect more institutional cooperation between these lineages too. So how did some Vinaya lineages come to be linked with Mahāyāna, and others not? To answer that, we first need to ask what exactly Mahāyāna is.

What, If Anything, Is Mahāyāna?

The question borrows the title of Jonathan Silk’s influential study, and it goes to the heart of our categorical conundrum.⁴ Silk and other scholars explain that Mahāyāna was never an institutional category in ancient India. It was a doctrinal, literary and practice-based movement that spread across the existing monastic sects, much like a religious revival that influences many kinds of institution without creating new ones. (Tibetans claim that a purely Mahāyāna Vinaya once existed, but no scripture or other evidence of it has surfaced to date.)

The distinction was first clearly articulated by Louis de La Vallée Poussin nearly a century ago. Buddhist sects (nikāya) were defined by their Vinaya: their monastic rules, ordination lineages and institutional procedures. Schools (vāda) were defined by doctrine, philosophical position and their approach to interpreting the Buddha’s teachings.⁵ A monastery’s sectarian identity depended on which Vinaya its monks followed and from whom they received ordination, not on which sūtras they studied, which philosophical positions they held or which meditation practices they emphasised.

La Vallée Poussin observed that one enters a sect through a formal ecclesiastical act of ordination (upasampadā karmavācanā), and that this identity cannot be changed without re-ordination. A school, by contrast, is an intellectual and spiritual affiliation that can evolve over a monastic’s career. A monk might study Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma in his youth, encounter Madhyamaka philosophy in middle age and practise Pure Land devotion in old age, all while belonging to the same sect.

The historical evidence supports this reading. The Chinese pilgrim Yijing, who spent over two decades travelling through India and Southeast Asia, wrote what may be our clearest ancient definition of the Mahāyāna–Hīnayāna distinction in 691 CE: “Those who worship the Bodhisattvas and read the Mahāyāna Sūtras are called the Mahāyānists, while those who do not perform these are called the Hīnayānists.”⁶ In the same passage, Yijing notes that individual sects could belong to either vehicle, so a single monastic community might have Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna practitioners under the same roof.

Junjirō Takakusu drew the same conclusion in his translation of Yijing’s work: “I-Tsing’s statement seems to imply that one and the same school adheres to the Hīnayāna in one place and to the Mahāyāna in another; a school does not exclusively belong to the one or the other.”⁷

Auguste Barth, analysing Yijing’s observations in detail, concluded that “there were Mahāyānists and Hīnayānists in all or in almost all the schools.”⁸ He described Mahāyāna as “a religious movement with rather vague limits, at the same time an internal modification of primitive Buddhism and a series of additions to this same Buddhism, alongside of which the old foundations were able to subsist more or less intact.”

Jean Przyluski took this further, arguing that Mahāyāna was not a single institutional development but several concurrent movements: “One can also speak, up to a certain point, of a Sarvāstivādin Mahāyāna, a Mahāsāṅghika Mahāyāna, and so on.”⁹

What Kenneth Bailey calls “polythetic classification” helps here. It groups objects by shared characteristics without requiring any single feature to be present in every member of the group.¹⁰ Rather than forcing Buddhist communities into rigid either/or categories, we can recognise that they take part in several overlapping traditions at once.

Taken together, this scholarship suggests that terms like “Mahāyāna monastery” are category errors. What we are actually describing are Sarvāstivāda monasteries that study Mahāyāna literature, Dharmaguptaka monasteries that practise bodhisattva ideals, or Mūlasarvāstivāda monasteries that emphasise Madhyamaka philosophy.

How Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna Coexist

The Buddha himself anticipated this flexibility. In the Ārya Vinaya Viniścayopāli Paripṛcchā Nāma Mahāyāna Sūtra (The Noble Mahāyāna Sūtra “Determining the Vinaya: Upāli’s Questions”), he explains how bodhisattva training differs from, yet builds upon, śrāvaka training:

Upāli, […] followers of the Śrāvakayāna do not even have the fleeting desire to take rebirth in the world. [Yet,] bodhisattvas who follow the Mahāyāna take rebirth in saṃsāra for countless eons without aversion or weariness. […] Upāli, bodhisattvas who follow the Mahāyāna should work with the minds of other beings and other people, while the followers of the Śrāvakayāna do not need to. Upāli, that is why the training of bodhisattvas who follow the Mahāyāna guards, while the training of the followers of the Śrāvakayāna does not guard.

The sūtra shows that while the Śrāvakayāna places particular importance on extinguishing desire, which it sees as the cause of suffering, the Bodhisattvayāna places the greatest importance on extinguishing anger. The reason, as the Buddha explains, is that “anger forsakes beings, whereas desire brings beings together”. This isn’t about changing the monastic rules. It is about understanding them through a different soteriological lens, within the same institutional framework. In fact, the Mahāyāna sūtras give the Vinaya great weight precisely because it offers a systematic way of accumulating merit, which becomes the bodhisattva’s resource for benefiting beings across lifetimes.

What the Buddha means by “the training of bodhisattvas who follow the Mahāyāna guards” becomes clearer later in the sūtra, where he describes the bodhisattva precepts as a “remedy” that works alongside traditional monastic discipline, not instead of it:

If a bodhisattva who follows the Mahāyāna commits a fault in the morning and does not part from [bodhicitta] the omniscient mind at midday, then the complement of ethical discipline of the bodhisattva who follows the Mahāyāna is not at all inhibited… Therefore, Upāli, the training of bodhisattvas who follow the Mahāyāna serves as a remedy. […] When the followers of the Śrāvakayāna commit a fault repeatedly, the complement of ethical discipline of those followers of the Śrāvakayāna deteriorates, degenerates, and is exhausted.

So a bodhisattva who maintains bodhicitta can recover quickly from ethical lapses, whereas śrāvaka training becomes ’exhausted’ through repeated faults. Cultivating bodhicitta protects a Mahāyāna monastic’s conduct and keeps their precepts intact. This teaching, later expanded upon by Sakya Pandita in A Clear Differentiation of the Three Codes, is one of the main reasons Tibetan monastics behave differently from their Theravāda cousins. It does require careful interpretation, though, or it can undermine the foundational importance of Vinaya discipline.

It also shows that what we call “Mahāyāna monastics” are actually śrāvaka monastics who have taken additional bodhisattva vows. They remain structurally Śrāvaka (following the Prātimokṣa, living by the Vinaya, taking part in poṣadha and maintaining ordination lineages) while aspiring to the Mahāyāna ideal of universal liberation.

La Vallée Poussin captured this relationship precisely: “From the disciplinary point of view, the Mahāyāna is not autonomous. The adherents of the Mahāyāna are monks of the Mahāsāṅghika, Dharmaguptaka, Sarvāstivādin and other traditions, who undertake the vows and rules of the bodhisattvas without abandoning the monastic vows and rules fixed by the tradition with which they are associated on the day of their Upasampadā.”¹¹

He went on: “All the Mahāyānists who are pravrajita [renunciants] renounced the world entering into one of the ancient sects.—A monk, submitting to the disciplinary code (Vinaya) of the sect into which he was received, is ’touched by grace’ and undertakes the resolution to become a buddha. Will he reject his Vinaya?—‘If he thinks or says “A future buddha has nothing to do with learning or observing the law of the Vehicle of Śrāvakas,” he commits a fault of pollution (kliṣṭa āpatti).’”¹²

Think of it this way: if institutional structure is the skeleton of a body, the Śrāvaka Vinaya provides the bones that give monastic life its shape. Whether that body has “Mahāyāna skin” or “Abhidhamma skin” is, in a sense, surface detail. The underlying architecture (the daily rhythms, ethical framework, community structures and ordination lineages) remains recognisably, and necessarily, Śrāvaka.

The ancient University of Nālandā is a good example. Mahāyāna philosophy flourished there within a rigorous Vinaya environment. The archaeological remains show dormitories arranged according to traditional Vinaya requirements, assembly halls for poṣadha, and the same institutional rhythms that governed any śrāvaka monastery. When scholars like Virūpa (9th century CE) and Maitripa (11th century CE) began incorporating tantric practices that violated Vinaya standards, they were expelled. Their Mahāyāna philosophy was not the problem; institutional discipline simply remained the highest priority. Nālandā could accommodate diverse doctrinal orientations, but not violations of its Śrāvaka foundation.

This helps explain why contemporary “Mahāyāna” monastics can struggle with questions of identity. They practise śamatha meditation as described in both Śrāvaka and Mahāyāna texts, and they follow Vinaya rules and live within institutional structures that predate the Mahāyāna literature by centuries. Yet they also study the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, cultivate bodhicitta and aspire to Buddhahood for the benefit of all beings. These are not contradictory affiliations. They reflect the historical norm.

Theravādin Mahāyāna in Sri Lanka

Our contemporary categories look even more artificial when we turn to one of the most remarkable and least appreciated chapters in Buddhist history: the eight centuries during which Theravādin Mahāyāna was the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.^{13 14} What I am arguing for was once the lived reality of thousands, perhaps millions, of practitioners.

Few Buddhists today realise that for most of Sri Lankan history the Theravāda comprised three distinct traditions: the Mahāvihāra, the Abhayagiri and the Jetavana.¹⁵ All three were based in Anuradhapura, the ancient capital, and all three followed the Theravāda Vinaya and kept Theravāda ordination lineages. The Abhayagiri and Jetavana, however, embraced Mahāyāna. They most probably kept the same Pali piṭakas as the Mahāvihāra and added Mahāyāna and later tantric texts to them.¹⁶ The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang called such monks “Mahāyāna Sthaviras”, and contrasted the Abhayagiri, which studied both vehicles, with the Mahāvihāra, which rejected the Mahāyāna. As Peter Skilling puts it, “there is no such thing as a Mahāyāna bhikṣu ordination”.¹⁷

The Mahāvihāra, which modern Theravāda considers its main ancestor, regarded Mahāyāna doctrines such as Lokottaravāda (“transcendentalism”) as heretical and the Mahāyāna sūtras as counterfeit (a view which still persists until today).¹⁸ Yet for much of the Anuradhapura period the Abhayagiri had the larger following. Even the Tooth Relic, later essential to Sri Lankan kingship, was first housed there because the Mahāvihāra would have nothing to do with it.¹⁹ King Mahasena (277-304 CE) even had the Mahāvihāra repressed and its buildings torn down to build up the Abhayagiri and his new Jetavana.²⁰ The Mahāvihāra only regained its dominance in 1055 CE. Visiting in the early 5th century, Faxian recorded 5,000 monks at Abhayagiri and 3,000 at the Mahāvihāra, with Mahāyāna and Śrāvakayāna monastics living side by side.²⁰

By the 8th century Vajrayāna was also practised openly in these Theravāda institutions too, and part of Japanese Shingon traces back to the island. Vajrabodhi, who received his tantras in South India, spent half a year venerating the Tooth Relic at the Abhayagiri and later sailed from Sri Lanka to China, losing the full 100,000-verse text of his central scripture to a typhoon on the way. After his death in 741, his disciple Amoghavajra went to Sri Lanka as an imperial envoy to find it. There an ācārya named Samantabhadra gave him abhiṣeka and the eighteen-assembly Vajraśekhara corpus, and he returned in 746 with more than 500 Sanskrit texts.²¹

His translation of the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha was “seemingly gathered from his Śrī Laṅkān expedition”.²¹ Through his student Huiguo it reached Kūkai in 805, and the Vajradhātu (Diamond Realm) side of Shingon still traces its lineage to Samantabhadra. The island kept its own record: dhāraṇī stones at the Abhayagiri carry a dhāraṇī that Amoghavajra translated and Kūkai took to Japan.²²

These were not “Mahāyāna monks” who happened to be in Sri Lanka, but Theravāda monks who practised Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna under the same Vinaya as their Mahāvihāra colleagues. Their line ended in the twelfth century,¹⁹ and the Theravāda that survives today is the Mahāvihāra’s.¹⁶

Contemporary Implications

This history overturns several contemporary assumptions. First, Mahāyāna practice is not inherently incompatible with Theravāda institutional structures; on the contrary, it flourished within them for centuries. Second, those institutional foundations were strong enough to support remarkable doctrinal diversity without fragmenting into separate Vinaya institutions. Third, what we now consider “traditional Theravāda” (the Mahāvihāra line) is only one strand of a historically much more diverse tradition.

From my own experience in a Tibetan monastery that follows the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya while identifying as Mahāyāna, I can attest that this institutional unity continues today. As the previous sections showed, we follow the same basic institutional patterns as Theravāda communities, even where our daily practices differ. The main difference lies not in our discipline but in our motivation: we embrace what the Upāli Sūtra calls the “long duration” training, which allows us to remain in saṃsāra for the benefit of beings rather than seeking only individual liberation. It is a delicate balance, in which the doctrinal layer of Mahāyāna guards the institutional layer, so that rules the cultural context makes impractical to keep are still protected.

Now that the Tibetan tradition has emerged from Tibet and established communities in India and the West, it may be time to re-incorporate practices that were lost during the plateau’s long cultural isolation, such as piṇḍapāta and daily group meditation. Given their shared Vinaya heritage, Theravāda communities are well placed to support such restoration. Theravāda monastics have also pioneered sustainable monastic institutions in the West, keeping rigorous standards while adapting to a new culture, and followers of the Mūlasarvāstivāda could benefit a great deal from their collaboration and guidance.

The shared lineage and the historical evidence also open the door to something new: introducing Mahāyāna to Theravāda communities who wish to study and practise it alongside their existing commitments. As things stand, a Theravāda monastic who develops a genuine interest in Mahāyāna teaching and practice faces an unfortunate choice. They can suppress that interest to keep their Theravāda identity, or abandon their ordination lineage entirely and re-ordain in the Mūlasarvāstivāda or Dharmaguptaka tradition.

But if the Theravāda Vinaya could once provide the framework for Mahāyāna and even Vajrayāna practice, the compatibility exists in principle, and the Sri Lankan precedent shows that it worked in practice for centuries. A Theravāda monk interested in cultivating bodhicitta or studying the Prajñāpāramitā should be able to pursue these interests within their existing institution, just as their Sri Lankan predecessors did. Normalising this would enrich both traditions and spare monastics the disruption and spiritual cost of unnecessary re-ordination.

This is particularly relevant for Western Buddhist communities. Rather than treating “Theravāda” and “Mahāyāna” as separate institutional tracks, each with its own organisations, training programmes and teacher authorisations, we might explore how strong Śrāvaka foundations could support diverse doctrinal orientations within the same monastery. A Western monastery that kept strict Vinaya discipline while welcoming both vipassanā-oriented and bodhicitta-oriented practitioners would not be an artificial hybrid. It would be recovering Buddhism’s historical norm.

Why the Śrāvakayāna Is Vital

Highlighting this coexistence, and the institutional foundation beneath it, is not just a matter of historical curiosity. It may be essential to the survival and transmission of Mahāyāna, and of Buddhism as a whole. The topic deserves its own article, but it bears directly on why the surviving monastic traditions need good relations with one another.

The Buddha himself was explicit about the importance of monasticism. In the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta, he declares that he will not pass away until he has established “wise, well-trained, and self-confident” members of all four assemblies: bhikshus, bhikshunīs, male lay disciples and female lay disciples.²³ The text is unambiguous that having these four assemblies is what distinguishes a Buddhist tradition from other religious systems.

The Aṅguttara-nikāya reinforces this when it describes the misfortune of being reborn in a “border country”, defined specifically as a place where the four-fold sangha of Buddhist disciples cannot be found.²⁴ The implication is that without proper monastic communities, a region is spiritually impoverished, whatever other religious activity takes place there.

History bears out what the Buddha said. Buddhism disappeared entirely from vast regions where it once flourished: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, India and Indonesia. These were once great Buddhist countries, and the archaeological evidence shows that Mahāyāna in particular thrived there. Yet after supporting Buddhist cultures for centuries, they lost Buddhism, while other traditions in the same regions survived: Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Islam, and local beliefs that predate Buddhism.

Look at how the disappearance happened and a clear pattern emerges: Buddhism’s decline invariably coincided with the collapse of its monastic institutions. In India, the end began with the invasions of the Ghurids and the Delhi Sultanate, which destroyed hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and slaughtered their monastics.²⁵ It was hastened by the loss of local patronage,²⁶ and by Brahmins who had accepted Muslim rule in exchange for the extinction of Buddhism appropriating and transforming the monasteries.²⁷ With the monastics gone, these Brahmins got their wish.

The institutional framework was not just important; it was the means of transmission. Without ordained communities to maintain the textual traditions, perform the rituals and train new generations, the whole edifice collapsed, however many lay practitioners remained. Where lay communities did persist for a time after the monasteries declined, they gradually lost access to proper teaching, ordination lineages and institutional memory. The pattern repeats across geography and time: when the institutions collapse, the religion disappears.

The exception that proves the rule is Newar Buddhism in Nepal, which has kept certain Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practices alive without a monastic sangha. But the Newar communities lived close to Tibet, where the monastic sangha flourished, and could draw on its institutional resources when needed. Remove that proximity, and even the Newar tradition might follow the same pattern of gradual decline.

Conversely, Buddhism has proved remarkably resilient wherever monastic institutions kept deep social roots: Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China and Japan. Even under severe persecution, these traditions survived because their institutions were strong enough to keep transmission going from one generation to the next. The Śrāvaka framework was the skeleton that endured political upheaval, foreign invasion and cultural change.

This matters for Buddhism’s expansion into new cultural settings like the contemporary West. History shows a clear sequence: wherever Buddhism established itself successfully, strong institutions came first and doctrinal diversity flourished afterwards. Mahāyāna gained wide influence only after Śrāvaka monasteries had become well established across the Indian subcontinent.

We see the same pattern in the West today. Buddhist communities that have established genuine monastic institutions, whether Theravāda forest monasteries, Vietnamese monasteries like Plum Village or Tibetan monastic centres, show greater long-term stability than purely lay movements. Even in my short lifetime I have seen several Dharma centres for lay practitioners close, and individual monastics disrobe for lack of a monastic community to belong to.

Śrāvaka institutional frameworks, then, are not obstacles to Mahāyāna flourishing; they are prerequisites for it. The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya does not stop Tibetan monastics from studying Madhyamaka or Vajrayāna philosophy. It provides the stable foundation that has made such study possible across the centuries. If Buddhism in the West is to last, it probably needs strong Śrāvaka institutions first, with doctrinal diversity emerging naturally within them.

Conclusion

So, to return to the title: are there any Mahāyāna monasteries? Doctrinally, yes. Institutionally, no, and that is the main point. Seen through the institutional lens, a “Mahāyāna monastery” is a community of Śrāvaka monastics studying Mahāyāna literature and cultivating bodhicitta. Far from being a compromise, this is one of Buddhism’s most successful institutional innovations: stable Śrāvaka foundations supporting diverse spiritual aspirations.

For too long, Buddhist communities have let superficial categorical differences obscure fundamental institutional similarities. The Mūlasarvāstivāda, Theravāda and Dharmaguptaka lineages all trace back to the same Sthavira school, and we share remarkably similar vows, institutional frameworks, ethical foundations and community governance. The walls we have built between “Theravāda” and “Mahāyāna” monasteries stand in the way of real collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and practice. Tibetan monastics could re-establish lost practices with the support of Theravāda cousins who maintain them expertly. Theravāda monastics drawn to bodhicitta face re-ordination when they could simply widen their studies within their existing Vinaya lineage. These barriers are wasteful: we are all working from the same institutional playbook.

This offers particular hope for Buddhism in the West, where traditional institutional transmission faces unprecedented challenges. The Buddha warned that regions without proper monastic communities cannot sustain the Buddhadharma in the long term, and history backs him up. Buddhism has vanished from every region where its monastic institutions collapsed, however sophisticated its philosophy or devoted its laity. Among those of us trying to establish Buddhism in new contexts, Theravāda communities are having more success at maintaining rigorous Vinaya discipline while adapting to Western culture. The other lineages could learn enormously from that experience, and in return share the philosophical and contemplative resources they have developed over centuries.

The precedent for such cooperation is not speculative. For eight centuries, Sri Lankan Theravāda held both Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna practitioners within the same institutional frameworks, and the Abhayagiri and Jetavana traditions were fully Theravāda institutionally while embracing Mahāyāna doctrinally. What was once normal could become normal again, particularly where historical sectarian divisions carry less emotional weight.

None of this diminishes anyone’s spiritual aspirations. A Theravāda monk committed to vipassanā meditation remains fully Theravāda. A practitioner devoted to Madhyamaka philosophy and the bodhisattva ideal remains fully committed to the Mahāyāna path. Both can recognise that they share an institutional heritage deeper than their particular doctrinal emphases. Buddhist diversity is not evidence of incompatibility but of how flexible the Śrāvaka foundations have always been: the same structures that supported Abhidharma philosophy, Madhyamaka dialectics, Pure Land devotion and Zen meditation can support contemporary adaptation too.

The monastery exists. The Dharma exists. The Saṅgha exists. In recognising that there are no Mahāyāna monasteries as such, only Śrāvaka monasteries where Mahāyāna is studied and practised, we rediscover an institutional unity that could bridge our present divisions. We are all institutional siblings, following variations of the same Vinaya and trying to preserve the Buddha’s teachings for future generations. It’s time we started acting like the extended family we actually are.