Kalupahana argues that, in Nāgārjuna‘s times, the bodhisattva ideal and other specifically Mahāyāna doctrines had not arisen yet and therefore, he suggests that the early Mahāyāna was not a reaction to early Buddhism or the Pāli canon, nor to the bhidharma as a whole, but only to Sarvāstivādin metaphysics (1996, 25).