Early Buddhist schools

Early Buddhist schools were distinct monastic lineages that developed after the Buddha’s death, preserving different disciplinary traditions and interpretations of Buddhist teachings before Mahayana Buddhism emerged.

First Buddhist council: A traditional gathering of senior monks said to have recited the Buddha’s teachings soon after his death. Its account links the earliest community’s efforts to preserve teachings with later lineage histories.
Sangha: The Buddhist community, especially the community of ordained monks and nuns. The schools emerged as lineages within the wider monastic community.
Theravāda: A Buddhist tradition grounded in the Pali canon and the lineage of the Theravāda monastic community. It is the surviving tradition most directly associated with the Sthavira lineage, though not identical to every early school.
Mahayana: A broad Buddhist movement centered on the bodhisattva path and texts claiming authority beyond earlier collections. It emerged within the wider Buddhist world after the period associated with the early schools.
Second Buddhist council: A traditional assembly at Vaishali, associated with disputes over monastic discipline and an early division in the community. Its disciplinary dispute is often treated as a formative setting for school differentiation.
Vinaya: The body of Buddhist rules and procedures governing monastic conduct and community life. Different Vinaya traditions became a defining inheritance of several early schools.
Sarvāstivāda: An influential early Buddhist school whose Abhidharma doctrine held that dharmas exist across past, present, and future. Its distinctive account of time became one of the clearest examples of scholastic disagreement.
Eighteen schools of Buddhism: A traditional classification of early Buddhist schools that varies across historical and textual sources. The changing school counts caution against treating one fixed list as an uncontested history.
Sthavira Nikaya: An early Buddhist lineage associated with stricter interpretations of monastic discipline and later school traditions. It is one of the two lineages commonly connected with the earliest schism.
Abhidharma: Systematic Buddhist analyses of mental and physical phenomena, developed in distinct scholastic traditions. School-specific Abhidharma systems made doctrinal differences explicit and technically detailed.

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