Buddhism: The Path of the Awakened One, from Ancient India to Today

A Prince Who Left the Palace

Buddhism traces its origins to a man named Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in northern India in the 6th or 5th century BCE. Historians still debate his exact dates, and many now think he died around 400 BCE. According to tradition, he was born in Lumbini, in what is today southern Nepal, into the Shakya clan, whose leaders ruled a small state in the foothills of the Himalayas. For this reason, he is also called Shakyamuni, meaning "sage of the Shakyas".

The traditional story, told in many Buddhist texts, says that Siddhartha grew up in luxury, protected from the hardships of the world. As a young man he left the palace and saw four things that changed his life: an old man, a sick man, a dead body and a wandering holy man. The first three showed him that ageing, illness and death come to everyone, while the fourth suggested that a person might search for a way beyond this suffering. At about the age of 29, he gave up his royal life to become a wandering seeker.

For several years Siddhartha practised extreme self-denial, eating so little that he almost starved. He concluded that this did not lead to wisdom any more than a life of pleasure did. Instead he chose a Middle Way between the two extremes. Seated in meditation under a fig tree at Bodh Gaya, in the present-day Indian state of Bihar, he is said to have reached enlightenment. From then on he was known as the Buddha, a title that means "the awakened one". The tree became known as the Bodhi tree, or "tree of awakening".

A Movement of Wandering Seekers

The Buddha did not appear out of nowhere. In his time, the eastern part of the Ganges plain was home to many śramaṇas, wandering ascetics who questioned the authority of the Vedic priests and looked for spiritual freedom through their own effort. Some of these groups gave rise to lasting traditions; Jainism, for example, also comes from this setting. Buddhism began as one of these śramaṇa movements in the 5th century BCE.

After his awakening, the Buddha gave his first teaching in a deer park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, to five former companions. Buddhists call this event "setting in motion the wheel of the Dharma". He then spent around 45 years walking from place to place, teaching people of every social background. Tradition says he died at Kushinagar at the age of 80. His death is called the parinirvana, the final release from the cycle of birth and death.

The Core Teachings

The Buddha's teaching is called the Dharma (in the Pali language, Dhamma). It is often summed up in a few key ideas that almost all Buddhist schools share.

The Four Noble Truths

The Buddha's first sermon is said to have set out the Four Noble Truths, which are often compared to a doctor's approach: name the illness, find its cause, state that a cure exists and prescribe the treatment.

1. Dukkha: life involves suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Even pleasant things do not last.
2. The origin of suffering: suffering arises from craving, or "thirst" (taṇhā), for pleasure, for existence and for things to be other than they are.
3. The end of suffering: when craving ends, suffering ends. This state is called nirvana (nibbāna in Pali), a word linked to the image of a flame being blown out.
4. The path: there is a practical way to reach this freedom, the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Noble Eightfold Path

The path has eight parts: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. They are not steps to be completed one after another, but qualities to be developed together. Buddhists often group them into three areas: wisdom (view and intention), ethical conduct (speech, action and livelihood) and meditation (effort, mindfulness and concentration). The symbol of the Dharma wheel, with its eight spokes, represents this path.

Three Marks of Existence

Buddhism teaches that everything we experience has three characteristics. It is impermanent (anicca): nothing stays the same. It is unsatisfactory (dukkha): clinging to changing things brings disappointment. And it is without a permanent self (anattā): a person is understood as a changing process of body, feelings, perceptions, mental activities and consciousness, rather than a fixed, unchanging soul.

Karma and Rebirth

Like other religions that arose in India, Buddhism accepts karma, the idea that intentional actions have consequences, and rebirth, the idea that beings pass through many lives. This repeating cycle is called samsara. In the Buddhist view, karma is not fate or punishment handed out by a god; it is closer to a natural law of cause and effect, in which the intention behind an action matters most. Reaching nirvana means breaking free of this cycle.

The Three Jewels and Daily Life

A person becomes a Buddhist by "taking refuge" in the Three Jewels: the Buddha (the teacher), the Dharma (the teaching) and the Sangha (the community of practitioners, especially monks and nuns).

Most lay Buddhists try to follow the Five Precepts, which are promises to avoid:

• killing or harming living beings;
• taking what is not given;
• sexual misconduct;
• false or harmful speech;
• intoxicants that cloud the mind.

Monks (bhikkhus) and nuns (bhikkhunīs) follow a much longer set of rules called the Vinaya, which covers everything from how to eat to how disputes in the community should be settled. In many countries, monks traditionally walk through towns in the morning collecting food from lay people, who see giving as a way of developing generosity.

Common practices include meditation, chanting texts, making offerings of flowers, light and incense at shrines, and going on pilgrimage. Meditation takes many forms. Some methods focus on calming the mind, for example by attending to the breath; others aim at insight, carefully observing how thoughts and sensations arise and pass away. Four places linked to the Buddha's life are especially important pilgrimage sites: Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar.

How Buddhism Spread Across Asia

The Emperor Ashoka

A turning point came in the 3rd century BCE with Ashoka, ruler of the Maurya Empire, which covered most of the Indian subcontinent. After a bloody war against the region of Kalinga, Ashoka expressed deep regret and turned to the Dharma. He had messages about non-violence, tolerance and good conduct carved on rocks and stone pillars across his empire; many of these edicts still survive. He also supported Buddhist missions to other lands. According to Buddhist tradition, his son Mahinda brought the teaching to Sri Lanka, which became one of its lasting centres.

Along the Silk Road and Beyond

Over the following centuries, monks and merchants carried Buddhism along trade routes, including the Silk Road through Central Asia. It reached China around the 1st century CE and later spread to Korea, Vietnam and, in the 6th century, Japan. Buddhism arrived in Tibet from the 7th century onwards and later spread to Mongolia. By sea, it travelled to Southeast Asia, where it eventually became the main religion of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

Chinese pilgrims such as Xuanzang, who travelled to India in the 7th century, walked thousands of kilometres to collect texts and study at great monastic centres like Nalanda. His detailed account of the journey is still used by historians and archaeologists today.

Decline in India and Arrival in the West

In India itself, Buddhism gradually declined and had largely disappeared from most of the subcontinent by around the 13th century, a process historians explain through several factors, including loss of royal support, the revival of Hindu traditions and the destruction of major monasteries. In the 20th century it saw a revival there: in 1956 the Indian social reformer B. R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism together with hundreds of thousands of his followers. Buddhism became known in Europe and North America in the 19th century, through translations of texts and through migration from Asia.

The Main Branches of Buddhism

As Buddhism spread, it developed into several major traditions. They share the core teachings but differ in their texts, practices and emphasis.

Theravada

Theravada, "the teaching of the elders", is the main form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. It bases itself on the Pali Canon, also called the Tipitaka or "three baskets": a basket of monastic rules, a basket of the Buddha's discourses and a basket of philosophical analysis. The ideal is the arahant, a person who has reached nirvana through their own practice.

Mahayana

Mahayana, "the great vehicle", has the largest number of followers and is widespread in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It stresses the ideal of the bodhisattva, a being who seeks enlightenment in order to help all living beings become free from suffering. Mahayana includes many schools, such as Zen (called Chan in China), which emphasises meditation and direct insight, and Pure Land Buddhism, which centres on devotion to the Buddha Amitabha.

Vajrayana

Vajrayana, sometimes called tantric Buddhism, developed within the Mahayana and is especially associated with Tibet, Bhutan and Mongolia. It uses rituals, visualisation, sacred sounds called mantras and the guidance of a teacher, or lama. Its best-known figure today is the Dalai Lama, a leading figure of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.

Sacred Texts, Art and Architecture

For several centuries the Buddha's teachings were passed on by memory and recitation. Monks met at councils to recite and agree on the texts together. The Pali Canon was written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE. Some of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, written on birch bark, come from the ancient region of Gandhara, in today's Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana text, found in a cave near Dunhuang, carries a date equivalent to 868 CE. It is the oldest known printed book that bears a date, and it is now kept in the British Library in London.

Early Buddhist art did not show the Buddha in human form. Instead, artists used symbols such as footprints, an empty throne, a wheel or the Bodhi tree. Human images of the Buddha appeared later, around the 1st century CE, in Gandhara, where the style shows Greek influence, and in Mathura in northern India.

The stupa, a dome-shaped monument that often holds relics, is one of the oldest forms of Buddhist architecture; the Great Stupa at Sanchi in India dates back in its earliest form to Ashoka's time. Over time stupas developed into new shapes, such as the pagodas of East Asia. On the island of Java in Indonesia, Borobudur, built in the 9th century, is the largest Buddhist temple in the world, decorated with more than 2,500 carved stone panels.

Buddhism Today

Buddhism is the world's fourth-largest religion, after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Estimates of its followers range from about 320 million to 540 million people, or roughly 4 to 7 percent of the world's population. The range is wide partly because in places such as China and Japan many people combine Buddhist practices with other traditions, which makes counting difficult. China has the largest Buddhist population in absolute numbers, while countries such as Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Laos and Mongolia have Buddhist majorities.

Many Buddhist festivals are celebrated around the world. The most important, known as Vesak in many countries, honours the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death; its date follows the lunar calendar and varies between traditions. Buddhist ideas have also influenced modern life outside Asia. Meditation techniques adapted from Buddhist practice form the basis of popular mindfulness programmes used in hospitals, schools and workplaces, often in a non-religious form.

Surprising Facts About Buddhism

• The Buddha is not a god. In most Buddhist traditions, he is honoured as a teacher who discovered the path to freedom, not as a creator or a being to be prayed to for help in the way gods are in some other religions.
• The "Laughing Buddha" is someone else. The cheerful, round-bellied figure often seen in shops and restaurants is usually Budai, a figure from Chinese folklore based on a monk, not Siddhartha Gautama.
• There are many Buddhas. Buddhist texts describe Buddhas of earlier ages, and many Buddhists expect a future Buddha named Maitreya.
• An ancient tree is still growing. The Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, is said to have grown from a cutting of the original Bodhi tree and was planted in the 3rd century BCE. It is often described as one of the oldest living trees planted by humans with a recorded planting date.
• Buddhist words are part of everyday English. Words such as karma, nirvana and zen are used in everyday conversation, though often with meanings far from their original ones.

From a single teacher seated beneath a tree, Buddhism grew into a tradition that has shaped the art, philosophy, languages and daily life of much of Asia for more than two thousand years, and it continues to change as it meets new cultures today.