From roughly the first century BCE, Mahayana sutra literature began contrasting the arhat's path with the bodhisattva's, using the term Hinayana, the lesser vehicle, for the aim of individual liberation the arhat represents. The Lotus Sutra's parable of the burning house has a father lure his children from a fire with the promise of three different carts, a goat cart, a deer cart and an ox cart, standing for the paths of the disciple, the solitary realizer and the bodhisattva, only to give every child the same great ox cart once they are safe, its narrator explaining that the three paths were always skillful means toward the single buddha vehicle. Read plainly, the parable frames arhatship as a real but provisional and ultimately superseded goal.
Theravada Buddhism has never accepted this framing of its own tradition. Its position, consistent from the Pali canon onward, is that the arhat and the Buddha reach the identical nirvana, differing only in that a Buddha discovers the path unaided and teaches it to others, while an arhat reaches the same cessation by following a Buddha's teaching; nothing in the Pali sources treats the goal as lesser or the path as merely preparatory to something further. Modern Theravada scholarship and teaching bodies continue to reject the term Hinayana as a polemical label imposed from outside the tradition rather than a description it recognizes of itself.