A history of Buddhism
Twenty-five centuries ago a wandering teacher gave his first sermon in a deer park near Varanasi. This is how that teaching travelled from the Ganges plain to every continent.
Chapter I · Origins
Buddhism arose in the north-east of the Indian subcontinent around the fifth century BCE, in the region of present-day Nepal and Bihar. It shares a long history with Hinduism, Jainism and the other traditions rooted in the same soil.
From about the seventh century BCE, groups of wandering ascetics called Sramanas spread across India. They turned away from the Vedic religion, the dominant priestly order of the time, and from conventional social life.
Society itself was changing. The Vedic faith had been shaped by nomadic peoples roughly a thousand years earlier, and had come to dominate the Ganges plain. By the fifth century BCE, nomad camps had given way to farming villages, then towns, then cities. In this new urban world many people were looking for answers the old rituals no longer gave them.
Siddhartha Gautama was one of many teachers who questioned the Vedic establishment. He led a band of Sramanas, and over time his community became known as the Sangha.
Three paths of renunciation · tap a card
Chapter II · The Buddha
Texts preserved in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese and Tibetan agree on four places. Today they are the four great sites of Buddhist pilgrimage. Select a site to walk the route.
At 29, Siddhartha realised that wealth and privilege offered no protection from old age, sickness and death. He left home to look for a way beyond suffering, studying under the teachers of his day and testing extreme forms of asceticism.
Neither luxury nor self-mortification brought an answer. The path he found lay between them, which is why it is called the Middle Way. The word Buddha comes from the root budh, "to know" or "to awaken."
Buddhists revere the Buddha but do not regard him as a god, and he never claimed to be one. Images of the Buddha in temples and homes are aids to meditation; people bow before them in gratitude for the teaching, not to ask for favours.
He appointed no successor. He told his monks to be lamps unto themselves and to take the Dharma as their guide, a choice that later allowed many schools to grow from one root.
The first sermon
Chapter III · Schools
The word yana means vehicle or raft: a boat to carry people across the river of suffering to the "other shore." As the Sangha grew, three great vehicles took shape.
The only surviving school of early Nikaya Buddhism. Its name joins the Pali words thera, elders, and vada, doctrine.
Emerged from Indian Buddhism around the turn of the Common Era, open to a wider following, especially lay people.
Grew from the Tantric traditions of north-east India and took its distinctive form on the Tibetan plateau from the seventh century.
The first split came early. At the Second Council at Vaishali, a dispute over monastic discipline divided the traditional Sthaviravada line from the Mahasanghika school, which some see as the seed of the later Mahayana. By about the first century CE the division between Mahayana and Nikaya Buddhism was clear.
Mahayana teachers held that the Buddha and all beings share a common source, called Buddha Nature, Buddha Mind or Emptiness depending on the school. Most Tibetan Buddhists regard Vajrayana as a third path in its own right, though a minority see it as part of the Mahayana.
Chapter IV · Expansion
Under the emperor Ashoka, missionaries carried the teaching out of India. Press play to watch fifteen centuries unfold, or drag the slider to any year.
Before Ashoka, archaeological evidence for Buddhism is scarce; after him it is abundant. The Mauryan emperor, who ruled from 268 to 232 BCE, made Buddhism a state religion, supported the Third Council at Pataliputra and sent missions abroad. His son Mahinda took the Theravada teaching to Sri Lanka.
Monks and merchants travelled the Silk Road through Central Asia into China, where Buddhism met Confucian and Daoist thought and, by the seventh century, had become a major force. From China and Korea it reached Japan in the sixth century, where it grew alongside Shinto. In Tibet it absorbed elements of the Bon religion and produced the Vajrayana.
In India itself the tradition faded. From the sixth and seventh centuries Hinduism revived in the south and invasions struck monasteries in the north. When Nalanda was destroyed around 1193, Buddhism in its homeland was nearly extinguished. By then it had put down deep roots across Asia.
Chapter V · Timeline
Key moments from the Buddha's life to the present. Choose an era or search for a place, person or school.
Chapter VI · The modern world
From the 1600s, European colonial power and Christian missions weakened Buddhism's place in many Asian states. War, communism and political upheaval added to the strain. The same contact also carried the teaching west.
In the nineteenth century, returning officials, missionaries and travellers brought word of Buddhism to Europe and North America. Scholars such as Hermann Oldenberg, T. W. Rhys Davids and F. Max Müller translated its texts, and Sir Edwin Arnold's long poem The Light of Asia (1879) reached a wide public.
In 1880 Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, founders of the Theosophical Society, formally became Buddhists in Sri Lanka, among the first Western converts of the modern era. Soon after, Westerners such as U Dhammaloka, Ananda Metteyya and Nyanatiloka Thera were ordained as monks.
Immigration did as much as scholarship. Chinese and Japanese communities brought their temples to North America in the late 1800s. After restrictive laws were eased in the 1970s, refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Tibet, Sri Lanka and elsewhere built new communities across the West.
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace laureate 1989
After 1959
The flight of the Dalai Lama and many teachers from Tibet spread all four major Tibetan schools to North America, Europe and beyond, and drew large numbers of Western students.
Post-war
Servicemen returning from East Asia brought interest in Zen and Nichiren Buddhism. Teachers such as D. T. Suzuki and Thích Nhất Hạnh made Zen influential among writers and artists from the 1950s onward.
Today
Research into the benefits of meditation has fuelled public interest, and meditation centres drawing on Buddhist schools are now found across Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia and South America.
Reference
Buddhist terms appear in both Sanskrit and Pali. Search the list, or switch on test mode to hide the meanings and reveal them one at a time.