 Mahayana tradition appears to have arisen when, around the beginning of the common era, groups of Buddhists emerged who, reflecting on their own experience in practice, assumed a critical stance toward the immediately preceding tradition. They viewed the existing institutions as having declined, during five centuries of transmission since the time of the Buddha, into monastic formalism and scholasticism, sectarian disputation, and an erroneous notion of the nature of the wisdom that was the aim of Buddhist practice. They declared that the established view of training, directed to merely personal emancipation from painful existence, was narrow and finally inadequate, and that in their aspiration to attain the actual realization Śākyamuni had transmitted, they had sought and discovered a method by which genuine attainment was possible. They called this new path the “great vehicle” (Mahayana), because it holds as its goal the attainment of authentic enlightenment by all beings, and asserted that it was superior to the existing institutions, which they labeled the “lesser vehicle” (Hinayana).