This page groups figures by whether scholars consider them to have actually existed. Wikipedia notes that "the historicity of a claim about the past is its factual status." Browsing by historicity lets a visitor separate a documented historical person from one known only through legend.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingA category internal to Buddhism, and it means different things within it. In Mahayana a bodhisattva is a being who has vowed to attain buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings and defers final liberation out of compassion; in the mainstream schools the word names the Buddha in the lives before his awakening. 2 Learn More
The Bodhisattvas
This group holds bodhisattvas, in Mahayana Buddhism, beings who have vowed to attain full enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings and who postpone their own final liberation out of compassion. They are central objects of Mahayana devotion.
The browser will find the bodhisattva figures the atlas classes here as characters of sacred narrative. Several great bodhisattvas are also venerated as celestial figures and appear among the Buddhist deities elsewhere in the atlas.
Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being
Filter Results3 entries
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014on the arhat and the goal of the pathView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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