The Mahāyāna is most accurately contrasted with the so-called ‗Hīnayāna‘ in terms of a difference in motivation; that is, instead of having her personal liberation as an ltimate goal, the Mahāyāna practitioner‘s main concern is to reduce or eliminate the suffering of sentient beings.
45 Here, one must be careful about making disparaging insinuations; to suggest that non-Mahāyāna Buddhists are solely driven by a self-nterested desire for nirvana is a serious distortion of these traditions.
In the previous chapter, compassion was spoken of, along with loving-kindness and the other Sublime Attitudes, as one of the main virtues taught by the Buddha, and therefore, the desire for others‘ well-being was an important part of Buddhism right from the very start.
Yet, sometime during the second century C.E., new sūtras began to appear whose protagonists were portrayed as having postponed their own enlightenment until every single living being is liberated too, giving rise to a major Mahāyāna innovation, the ideal of the bodhisattva (e.g. SV 28).
Perhaps this was a response to a similar worry to that raised in chapter 1; namely, that the practice of loving-kindness and ompassion could not be genuinely altruistic if undertaken for the sake of one‘s own spiritual progression.