Buddhism

Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition that emerged in northern India in the 5th century BCE around the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or "the Awakened One." Centred on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, it holds that suffering (dukkha) arises from craving and attachment and can be brought to an end through ethical conduct, meditation, and insight. From its origins in the Gangetic plain, Buddhism spread across Asia over two millennia, diversifying into the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana traditions, and today counts several hundred million adherents worldwide.

Background and the Life of the Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama was born into the Shakya clan, the son of Suddhodana, chief of Kapilavastu, traditionally at Lumbini in the Nepalese terai. His traditional dates, c. 563–483 BCE, rest on later Buddhist chronologies and remain disputed; a revised chronology tied to the reign of Ashoka places his death closer to 400 BCE. Accounts describe a sheltered early life followed by a crisis of conscience on encountering old age, sickness, and death — the traditional "Four Sights" — after which, at around age twenty-nine, he renounced his household life in search of an end to suffering.

He spent roughly six years practising extreme asceticism alongside five companions before rejecting self-mortification in favour of a "Middle Way." Seated beneath a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya, he attained enlightenment at around age thirty-five, becoming the Buddha. He delivered his first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, at the Deer Park in Sarnath, setting out the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Over the following four and a half decades he taught across Magadha and Kosala and founded the Sangha, a monastic order that admitted women as well as men — his aunt and foster mother, Mahaprajapati Gautami, is traditionally recorded as the first bhikkhuni. He died, or attained parinirvana, at Kushinagar, traditionally at the age of eighty.

Core Doctrines

Buddhist teaching rests on three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and non-self (anatta). The Four Noble Truths hold that suffering is inherent to existence, that it originates in craving and attachment, that its cessation is attainable, and that the Eightfold Path — Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration — is the means to that cessation. Karma, the law of causation governing intentional action, drives the cycle of rebirth (samsara), from which nirvana represents release.

Buddhist Councils and the Formation of the Canon

Buddhism was transmitted orally in its first centuries, and successive councils were convened to fix and defend its teachings. The First Council, traditionally dated to shortly after the Buddha's death (c. 483 BCE), was held at Rajgir under the patronage of King Ajatashatru and led by the elder Mahakasyapa, compiling the monastic Vinaya and the Buddha's discourses into the Sutta Pitaka. A Second Council, held at Vaishali roughly a century later, addressed disputes over monastic discipline and produced an early split between stricter and more liberal factions.

A Third Council, said to have been convened at Pataliputra under Ashoka's patronage around 250 BCE, is recorded in Theravada Pali sources as purging the Sangha of dissenting elements and dispatching missionaries abroad, though its historicity is not corroborated in the Sanskrit textual traditions of other schools and is treated with some caution by modern historians. A further council, held in Kashmir under the Kushan emperor Kanishka in roughly the 1st or 2nd century CE, is associated in Sarvastivada and Mahayana tradition with the systematization of doctrine and translation of texts into Sanskrit; Theravada Buddhism does not recognize this council and instead regards the committing of the Pali Canon to writing at Aluvihare in Sri Lanka, under King Vattagamani in the 1st century BCE, as its own decisive textual event. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, birch-bark scrolls in the Gandhari language and Kharosthi script recovered from the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands and dated to around the 1st century BCE–CE, offer independent evidence of how early these textual traditions had already diverged.

Divergence of Buddhist Traditions

Theravada ("Teaching of the Elders"), tracing its establishment in Sri Lanka to the 3rd century BCE, follows the Pali Canon and emphasizes monastic discipline and meditative insight; it predominates in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. Mahayana ("The Great Vehicle"), emerging from around the 1st century BCE–CE with the Prajnaparamita literature, centres on the bodhisattva ideal — postponing personal liberation to work for the liberation of all beings — and gave rise to sub-traditions including Chan/Zen, Pure Land, and Tiantai across China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Vajrayana ("The Diamond Vehicle"), a tantric development of Mahayana from roughly the 6th to 8th centuries CE, incorporates esoteric ritual, deity visualization, and initiatory lineages; it is dominant in Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan, and parts of the Himalaya, with the Dalai Lamas as its most visible modern representatives.

Spread Across Asia

Buddhism's expansion beyond its homeland owed much to royal patronage. Emperor Ashoka, after the Kalinga War of the mid-3rd century BCE, embraced Buddhism and promoted it through rock and pillar edicts, stupa construction, and missions recorded in his own inscriptions — his son Mahinda is credited with introducing Buddhism to Sri Lanka, and his daughter Sanghamitta with establishing its order of nuns there and bringing a sapling of the Bodhi tree. The Kushan emperor Kanishka, ruling from Gandhara and Central Asia in the 1st–2nd centuries CE, was a major patron of Mahayana Buddhism, and Gandharan art of this period fused Hellenistic sculptural technique with Buddhist iconography, producing some of the earliest anthropomorphic images of the Buddha.

Buddhism travelled the Silk Road into China from around the 1st–2nd centuries CE, where it assimilated with Daoist and Confucian thought. The monk Kumarajiva (344–413 CE), brought from Kucha to the Chinese court, translated a vast body of Mahayana texts, while the pilgrims Faxian (travelling c. 399–412 CE) and Xuanzang (travelling 629–645 CE, author of the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions) journeyed to India to collect scriptures and study at centres such as Nalanda. Chan Buddhism, traditionally traced to the semi-legendary Indian monk Bodhidharma, emphasized direct meditative experience over doctrinal study and developed into Zen in Japan, Seon in Korea, and Thien in Vietnam. In Tibet, King Songtsen Gampo introduced Buddhism in the 7th century, and the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava, invited by King Trisong Detsen, helped found Samye Monastery in the 8th century and is credited with establishing Vajrayana practice there; the Bengali scholar Atisha Dipankara led a further reform of Tibetan Buddhism in the 11th century. Elsewhere, Theravada took root in Sri Lanka under King Devanampiya Tissa in the 3rd century BCE, in Myanmar under King Anawrahta of Bagan in the 11th century, and in Cambodia under the Khmer king Jayavarman VII, while the Srivijaya empire of Sumatra became a major centre of Mahayana and Vajrayana learning linked to Nalanda.

Art and Architecture

Buddhist patronage produced some of India's most enduring monuments. Ashoka's Great Stupa at Sanchi, later enlarged under the Shungas, remains among the best-preserved early Buddhist structures, its carved gateways (toranas) depicting scenes from the Buddha's life and previous incarnations (Jataka tales) without direct human representation of the Buddha himself, in keeping with early aniconic convention. The rock-cut caves at Ajanta, excavated over several centuries into the 5th century CE under Vakataka patronage, and the adjoining multi-faith caves at Ellora, preserve extensive Buddhist mural painting and sculpture. Sarnath's Ashokan lion capital, marking the site of the Buddha's first sermon, was adopted in the 20th century as independent India's national emblem.

Decline in India and Modern Revival

Buddhism's decline in the land of its origin was gradual and multi-causal: the absorption of Buddhist ethics and even the Buddha himself into Puranic Hinduism, which came to list him as an avatar of Vishnu; the loss of royal patronage as regional dynasties increasingly favoured Brahmanical and bhakti traditions; and the destruction of major monastic universities such as Nalanda and Vikramashila during Turkic campaigns in northern India in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, an episode often cited as marking Buddhism's near-disappearance from the Indian heartland, though its causes were already well under way before this. Buddhism nonetheless persisted at the margins, in the Himalayan belt and in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Western scholarship — notably the founding of the Pali Text Society by T.W. Rhys Davids in 1881 — and later waves of migration and interest in meditation brought Buddhism a global academic and popular audience, feeding into contemporary mindfulness practice. In India itself, the jurist and reformer B.R. Ambedkar led a mass conversion movement at Nagpur in 1956, founding a modern Dalit Buddhist movement sometimes termed Navayana Buddhism, which restored Buddhism as a living tradition among millions of Indians. The exile of the 14th Dalai Lama following the 1959 Tibetan uprising further carried Tibetan Buddhism to a worldwide audience.