Mahayana
surname · Latin script
Meaning: A school of Buddhism widely practised in East Asia and Vietnam which accepts non-Pali canon scriptures, recognizes a broader array of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and whose spiritual objective is to achi
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Mahayana is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Brazil.
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
A school of Buddhism widely practised in East Asia and Vietnam which accepts non-Pali canon scriptures, recognizes a broader array of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and whose spiritual objective is to achieve Buddhahood and liberate other beings, rather than simply to achieve personal enlightenment, as in Theravada Buddhism.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where in the world(measured from records)
Mahayana counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Mahayana is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, branch of Buddhism
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 3 sources across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 16 | #90,353 |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Mahayana mean, and where does it come from?
- A school of Buddhism widely practised in East Asia and Vietnam which accepts non-Pali canon scriptures, recognizes a broader array of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and whose spiritual objective is to achi… Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Mahayana have the most bearers?
- Mahayana is most frequently recorded in Brazil.
What do you want to know about Mahayana?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mahayanaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Mahayana”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.