Bhikkhu Analayo is a professor at the University of Hamburg, and received his doctorate in the year 2000 when he wrote his thesis on Satipatthana. He is one of our foremost scholars of the Buddha's teachings, and has written the book "The Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal", in which he describes how an ideal that is not found in early Buddhism became an important idea in some traditions about 500 years after the Buddha's passing.

He went back to the early texts of Buddhism, and found the seeds of such an ideal, and saw how these sprouts grew in some later texts, until this ideal actually became more important than the original teachings of the Buddha in some traditions.

So if you are curious about how this idea came about, then download and read this little book − either as a PDF or EPUB:

EPUB: https://dnbf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/The-Genesis-of-the-Budhisattva-Ideal-Bhikkhu-Analayo.epub
PDF: https://buddhistuniversity.net/content/monographs/genesis-of-bodhisattva_analayo