Within the Mahāyāna world, universal salvation is less a single doctrine than a shared horizon interpreted through many lenses. All the schools agree that no being is finally excluded from awakening, yet they imagine the path toward that awakening in strikingly different ways. Some emphasize faith and other-power, others direct meditative insight, and still others a vast cosmic vision in which every phenomenon is implicated in every other. What unites them is the conviction that Buddhahood is, at least in principle, open to all beings and that the bodhisattva’s vow extends without limit.

Pure Land traditions express this universality through the vows of Amitābha Buddha, especially the promise that those who entrust themselves to him and recite his name will be reborn in the Pure Land. In that purified realm, even beings burdened by heavy karma can readily progress toward enlightenment, so universal salvation is imagined as the widest possible embrace of beings through other-power. Nichiren schools, drawing on the Lotus Sūtra, likewise affirm that all can attain Buddhahood, but they locate the decisive practice in chanting the title of the sūtra. Here, universal salvation takes the form of encouraging all people, regardless of status or capacity, to manifest inherent Buddhahood through devotion to the Lotus teaching.

Other schools ground universal salvation in the claim that all beings already possess Buddha-nature. Tiantai, reading the Lotus Sūtra as the highest expression of the “one vehicle,” teaches that all paths and all beings ultimately converge on Buddhahood, and elaborates this in a systematic vision of interconnected phenomena. Huayan develops a similarly expansive picture, portraying reality as a net of interpenetrating phenomena in which “one is all and all is one,” so that the liberation of any being is deeply bound up with the liberation of all. Zen, drawing on such Buddha-nature teachings, emphasizes direct realization: through meditation and insight, practitioners awaken to the fact that their own ordinary mind is not separate from Buddhahood, and the bodhisattva vow to save numberless beings is recited as a living expression of this universal scope.

Philosophical schools such as Yogācāra and Madhyamaka approach the same theme from the side of mind and emptiness. Yogācāra describes how all experience arises from consciousness and its latent seeds, and speaks of liberation as the purification and transformation of these consciousnesses, with debate in some strands about whether any beings are ultimately incapable of awakening. Madhyamaka, by contrast, stresses that because all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, no being is intrinsically defiled or cut off from liberation, and the bodhisattva path of wisdom and compassion can apply universally. Esoteric and Vajrayāna forms of Mahāyāna, including traditions such as Shingon and Tibetan Buddhism, present a cosmological vision in which all beings are manifestations of a primordial Buddha; universal salvation is then seen as the gradual recognition of this already-present awakening, aided by powerful tantric methods even though not all beings presently have access to them.