Bhikkhu Analayo received his PhD in the year 2000, and became a professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He now directs the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Massachusetts, USA. 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 new idea in some traditions about 500 years after the Buddha’s passing.

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

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

Bhikkhu Analāyo is a scholar-monk at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and the author of numerous books on meditation and early Buddhism. He is the co-founder of the Āgama Research Group (Taiwan) and a retired professor at the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Hamburg (Germany). His main area of academic research is early Buddhism, with a special interest in the topics of meditation and women in Buddhism. He regularly teaches practice courses on Buddhist meditation. Bhikkhu Anālayo lives a secluded lifestyle and devotes most of his time to meditation practice.