Buddhism

Buddhism begins with a man born in the foothills of the Himalaya, at Lumbini in what is now Nepal. Siddhartha Gautama was the son of a ruling family of the Shakya clan. Tradition says he grew up in comfort, then left home at twenty-nine after seeing old age, sickness and death for the first time.

For six years he studied with teachers and tried harsh fasting. Neither brought the freedom he was looking for. He then chose a “middle way” between indulgence and self-denial, sat beneath a fig tree at Bodh Gaya and meditated until, Buddhists believe, he awoke to the truth about suffering and its end. From then on he was called the Buddha, “the awakened one”.

He gave his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and spent the next forty-five years teaching across the Ganges plain. He died at about eighty at Kushinagar. Historians place his life somewhere between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE; many now put his death around 400 BCE.

In the 3rd century BCE the Indian emperor Ashoka supported the teaching and sent envoys beyond his empire. From there it travelled south to Sri Lanka, north-west to Gandhara and, along the Silk Roads, to China, Korea, Japan and Tibet. In India itself Buddhism faded after the 12th century, while it flourished elsewhere in Asia.

After the Buddha’s death, tradition says, his disciples met at Rajagriha to recite his teaching and the monastic rules, and a second council met at Vaishali about a century later. Disputes over discipline led to the first great division of the Sangha, between the Sthaviras, “elders”, and the Mahasanghikas, “great community”. These split further into what Buddhist sources count as eighteen early schools, of which only the Theravada survives today.

Ashoka’s support in the 3rd century BCE made Buddhism an imperial religion for the first time. His edicts, carved on rocks and pillars, promote the Dharma as ethics and tolerance, and tradition credits his son Mahinda with bringing the teaching to Sri Lanka. In the first centuries CE the Kushan rulers of the north-west, above all Kanishka, endowed monasteries in Gandhara, where some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form were made. Great monastic universities such as Nalanda, founded in about the 5th century, drew students from across Asia.

Merchants and monks carried the teaching along the Silk Roads, and it reached China by the 1st century CE. Translators such as Kumarajiva, around 400, made Indian texts readable in Chinese, and under the Tang dynasty Chinese schools such as Chan and Pure Land took shape. Buddhism passed to Korea in the 4th century and from Korea to Japan in the 6th. Its fortunes in China were not always secure: in 845 Emperor Wuzong ordered thousands of monasteries closed and sent hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns back to lay life. In Tibet, where kings invited Indian teachers, the monastery of Samye was founded in about 779, and in Java the Shailendra kings built Borobudur around 800.

In India itself Buddhism slowly lost ground. Historians point to several causes: the revival of Hindu devotion, dependence on royal patronage, and finally the destruction of great monasteries, including Nalanda, in Turkic raids around 1200. Theravada, meanwhile, grew stronger in the south. Kings such as Anawrahta of Pagan in the 11th century and Parakramabahu I of Sri Lanka in the 12th reformed and unified the Sangha, and Theravada became the main religion of Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

Elsewhere new schools arose. In Japan the Kamakura period (1185–1333) saw movements founded by Honen, Shinran, Dogen and Nichiren, which still shape Japanese Buddhism. In Tibet, Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) inspired the Gelug school, whose leading lama received the title Dalai Lama from the Mongol ruler Altan Khan in 1578; in 1642 the fifth Dalai Lama became ruler of Tibet with Mongol support.

Colonial rule and modern ideas brought both pressure and revival. Christian missions challenged Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Burma, and reformers such as Anagarika Dharmapala, who founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891, answered with a modern Buddhism that stressed reason, meditation and ethics; the American Henry Steel Olcott helped found Buddhist schools in Sri Lanka. In Japan the Meiji government separated Buddhism from Shinto after 1868, and many temples were closed. Western scholars translated the Pali texts, and Buddhism became known to readers in Europe and America.

The 20th century brought both loss and new beginnings. Communist governments suppressed Buddhism in Mongolia, China and, under the Khmer Rouge (1975–79), Cambodia. After Chinese forces entered Tibet in 1950, the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. In 1956 B. R. Ambedkar led hundreds of thousands of Dalits to convert at Nagpur, reviving Buddhism in the land of its birth, and the Sixth Council met in Rangoon from 1954 to 1956. Asian teachers and Western converts have since carried meditation to Europe and the Americas, and socially engaged movements, such as that of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, link practice to peace and social work.

Tradition holds that the first sermon set out the Four Noble Truths. Life involves dukkha, a word that covers suffering, stress and the unsatisfying nature of things that do not last. Dukkha arises from craving. It can cease completely: that cessation is nirvananirvana Literally “blowing out”: the end of craving and suffering, and release from rebirth, in Buddhism. Glossary. And there is a path that leads to it.

That path is the Noble Eightfold Path, often grouped in three parts: wisdom (right view and intention), ethics (right speech, action and livelihood) and meditation (right effort, mindfulness and concentration). The eight are practised together, like the spokes of a wheel, not one after another.

Two further ideas shape Buddhist thought. Karmakarma Action and its consequences. Good and bad deeds shape a person’s future, in this life and in lives to come. Glossary is the teaching that intentional actions shape future experience, within this life and beyond it. Rebirth follows from karma: beings pass from life to life until craving ends. Buddhism also teaches anatta, “not-self”: nothing in a person is a fixed, unchanging self.

The Buddha is honoured as a teacher who found the way, not as a creator god. Many traditions recognise gods and spirits, but as beings who are themselves still in the cycle of rebirth.

At the heart of Buddhist life stand the Three Jewels: the Buddha, his teaching (the Dharma) and the community (the Sangha). A person becomes Buddhist by “taking refuge” in the three.

The Sangha in its narrow sense is the order of monks and nuns, who live by detailed monastic rules. Lay followers support them with food, robes and gifts, and in return receive teaching. In Theravada countries many young men spend a period as novices.

Practice looks very different from one country to another. A Thai villager may offer food to monks at dawn, a Japanese family may chant the name of Amitabha Buddha at a home altar, a Tibetan pilgrim may walk around a sacred mountain, and a meditator in Europe may sit in silence for a week. What they share is the aim of reducing craving and cultivating wisdom and compassion.

For the first centuries the Buddha’s words were passed on by memory and chanted recitation. The oldest complete collection to survive is the Pali Canon, written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE.

From around the same time, new texts called sutrassutra A scripture or discourse; in Buddhism, a teaching attributed to the Buddha. Glossary appeared in India, presenting themselves as further teachings of the Buddha. They became the basis of Mahayana Buddhism. Translated into Chinese and Tibetan, they grew into canons of thousands of works. There is no single Buddhist Bible: each tradition gives authority to its own collection.