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Madhyamaka

A school of thought in Indian Buddhism for which Nāgārjuna’s philosophy of emptiness is central.

Maitreya Buddha:

The next Buddha, expected to come in the future as the fifth and last of the earthly Buddhas.

Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra

The Great Sutra of Perfect Wisdom, comprising forty or so sutras of the Mahayana having as a unifying theme the realization of prajna, or wisdom.

Mahayana

Forms of Buddhism in which the ultimate goal is the attainment of Buddhahood and which are characterized by the worship of great bodhisattvas who are not present in non-Mahāyāna Buddhist worship. The origins of the Mahāyāna are the subject of studies and theories too numerous to outline here. It was the Mahāyāna schools of Buddhism that were transmitted most successfully to East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) and to northern South Asia and Inner Asia (Tibet, Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, parts of Russia and northern India).

Mahesvara

In Buddhist texts, a deity who is the ruler of a billion-world universe; another name for Śiva. mount sumeru (xūmí shān 須彌山) In traditional Buddhist cosmology, a massive mountain in the middle of a world-disk. One world is conceived of as an immense disk with Mt. Sumeru in the center, surrounded by seven mountain ranges interspersed with seven seas. Outside the seventh mountain range is the outermost sea, in which four large island-continents are located, one in each of the cardinal directions. Humans like us live on the southern island-continent of Jambudvīpa. According to the Treasury of Abhidharma, Mt. Sumeru lies in the middle of a deep ocean and is a giant rectangular solid. The top half of the mountain that emerges from the ocean is cube-shaped and each side of this cube is 80,000 yojanas (or about 1.12 million kilometers) long.

Milarepa:

Great eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist yogi, poet, and saint, noted for his poems, collected as "The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa." To eradicate Milarepa's bad karma, his guru, Marpa, ordered him repeatedly to build a house single-handedly, and then tear it down again and again.