Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Amy Miller introduces the three Buddhist vehicles in this foundational teaching. She begins by explaining the Sanskrit terms: Hīnayāna or individual vehicle focuses on personal liberation from saṃsāra through understanding suffering’s nature, while Mahāyāna extends that motivation to include all sentient beings, committing to full Buddhahood to help others. Vajrayāna, the tantric path, represents the diamond-hard indestructibility of compassion and skillful means needed for enlightenment. Miller grounds the teaching in concrete examples: a car breakdown, a burning, a relationship ending, all instances of saṃsāra’s inherent suffering. She clarifies that these distinctions are not rigid hierarchies but often interconnected paths, each containing valuable practices. Suitable for beginners and practitioners exploring Buddhist philosophy.
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File: 1.19 Hinayana_Mahayana_Vajrayana – Copy.mp3
UUID: cfaafb42-ffbb-4885-90f4-1e5ef0e3219b
Teacher: Amy Miller
Collection: Nutshell no details (Amy Miller)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~569
There are basically three what are called vehicles Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and vajrayana. Yana means vehicle in Sanskrit. So hina literally is lesser, but a nicer term is individual vehicle, hinayana. Maha means greater or universal. Mahāyāna, universal vehicle.
Vajrayāna refers to the tantric path. A vajra or dorje in Tibetan is often represented as a tiny thunderbolt that people use in ritual practices. A thunderbolt represents the diamond hard or indestructible nature of skillful means and compassion that you need to get enlightened. So the vajra is used throughout our path to represent things such as that. So the individual vehicle, the hinayana, focuses on a determination to achieve liberation from cyclic existence.
cyclic existence is the nature of life for ordinary beings. We exist in a condition that is called saṃsāra. This is a Sanskrit word that means to turn, to cycle. So in saṃsāra, what we are cycling through is birth, old age, sickness and death. So birth, we certainly understand, is not without suffering.
And although it can seem like quite a miracle and people may say it was such a beautiful birth and things like that, when you see often the mother photos of the baby, you can see there is a tremendous amount of suffering involved. Sickness, old age, we see the suffering in that quite easily. And death, the leaving of this body, is incredibly torturous for most people. So saṃsāra’s very nature is suffering. It’s no huge surprise to us.
So when the car breaks down, when you have a heart attack, when you rip your jacket, when you lose a bag when you are flying around the country, when you burn yourself, when your relationship breaks up. We resist all of these things and are surprised. But this is their nature. This is the nature of saṃsāra, problems. So if you are in the middle of a swimming pool that is filled with water, you don’t start yelling and flailing your arms and legs and yelling to people around you.
It’s wet in here because that is the nature of water, moisture. So the nature of saṃsāra is suffering. So the more we can accept that and get used to that and understand how it works, we begin to explore our suffering and begin to want to put an end to it. So the Hīnayāna path determines to end the suffering and cyclic existence, to get myself out of the suffering and reach nirvana or liberation. The Mahāyāna path takes it a step further to say, I must end my suffering.
However, there are all these other beings that are still suffering. Can you really sleep at night well, night after night, knowing all these other beings are still suffering, once having attained nirvana. Can you relax in that, in the bliss of nirvana? So a Mahāyāna practitioner would say that’s not enough. But I devote myself to becoming a Buddha, a fully awakened being.
I commit myself to becoming enlightened so I can then show others how to end their suffering too. That’s one of the main distinctions between the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna paths. It is not a rigid distinction. It is not that one path is better than the other path and our teachers are better than your teachers. Not at all.
One path often leads you to the other path. There are fantastic practices in all the traditions.