Buddhism: The Path of Awakening, From the Ganges to the Whole World

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each, Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen and Meditation, Without the Woo

An old man lies down between two sal trees near a small town in northern India. He is about eighty. He has walked these roads for forty-five years, teaching, and now his body is, in his own image, like a worn-out cart that only keeps moving with a great deal of care. His closest companion is weeping. The old man asks the monks around him three times whether anyone has a last question. Nobody speaks. So he gives them a final sentence instead: everything that is put together falls apart, so work out your liberation with diligence.

That, according to the oldest account of his death, is how the Buddha left the world. He named no successor. He left no writings. He told his followers to take the teaching itself as their lamp. Out of that refusal to appoint an heir came one of the most varied religious families on Earth: silent Zen halls in Kyoto, saffron-robed monks walking their alms rounds at dawn in Laos, Tibetan lamas chanting before golden statues, Pure Land devotees calling the name of a Buddha of infinite light, and office workers in London following a ten-minute breathing exercise.

The World's Religions, One Page Each gives Buddhism a single card. This long read is the full version: what the tradition says about its own beginnings and what historians say, kept carefully apart; what the Buddha taught, in the oldest texts' own words; how the community and its scriptures took shape; how the teaching split into schools and travelled across Asia; how ordinary Buddhists actually live; and how Buddhism has met colonialism, modern science, nationalism and the Chinese state. It describes; it does not rank or judge.

In this long read

1. The life: the story the tradition tells and what historians can say
2. The diagnosis: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path
3. No self, dependent origination, karma, rebirth and nirvana
4. The sangha, the councils and the Pali Canon
5. Ashoka: the emperor who changed the map
6. The Great Vehicle: bodhisattvas, emptiness and mind
7. Pure Land and Chan/Zen: faith and the direct path
8. Vajrayana: the diamond vehicle and Tibet
9. Across Asia by road and by sea, and the disappearance from India
10. How Buddhists live: monks, nuns, lay people and the year
11. Colonialism, revival, modernism and mindfulness
12. Engaged Buddhism, and Buddhism's darker entanglements with power
13. Tibet and the question of the next Dalai Lama
14. Buddhism today: numbers, branches and open questions

Part 1 — The life: the story the tradition tells and what historians can say

Every Buddhist child learns some version of the story. Here it is as the tradition tells it, and then as a historian sees it. Both deserve to be heard on their own terms.

The tradition's account

A boy named Siddhartha Gautama is born at Lumbini, in what is now the Nepalese lowlands near the Indian border. His father, Suddhodana, rules the Sakya clan from the town of Kapilavastu; his mother is Queen Maya. Sages foretell that the child will become either a world-conquering king or a world-renouncing teacher. His father, wanting the first, surrounds him with comfort and keeps sorrow out of sight.

For twenty-nine years the plan works. Then, in the best-known form of the story, the prince rides out and sees four things he has never been shown: an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering holy man whose face is calm. The first three show him what waits for everyone. The fourth shows him that someone has decided to look for a way out. Siddhartha leaves the palace at night, cuts off his hair and becomes a wanderer.

He studies meditation under two famous teachers, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, masters their methods and finds that they do not end suffering. He then tries extreme asceticism with five companions, starving himself until, the texts say, he can feel his spine through his stomach. That fails too. After about six years of striving he accepts a bowl of rice milk, sits under a fig tree at Bodh Gaya and resolves not to rise until he understands. Through the night, the tradition says, he is assailed by Mara, the tempter, and remains unmoved. At dawn he awakens. He is now the Buddha, "the awakened one."

At first he hesitates to teach: what he has seen is subtle, and people love their attachments. According to the texts, the god Brahma Sahampati appears and begs him to teach for the sake of those who will understand. He walks to the Deer Park at Isipatana, near Varanasi, finds his five former companions and gives his first sermon, "setting the wheel of the teaching in motion." For the next forty-five years he walks the Ganges plain, teaching kings, merchants, courtesans, farmers, outcastes and philosophers, founding an order of monks and, after some hesitation, of nuns. He dies at Kusinara at about eighty.

Near the end, the oldest account has him name four places a believer should visit "with feelings of reverence and awe": where he was born, where he awakened, where he first taught and where he died. Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar are still Buddhism's great pilgrimage sites.

What historians can say

Historians start from a different question: not "what happened?" but "what can our sources bear?"

The Buddha wrote nothing. His teachings were memorised and recited for at least three centuries before they were written down. The Pali texts are not regarded by scholars as his exact words, and how faithfully they preserve him is, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, an unanswerable question.

The early texts contain more teaching than biography. The full life story, with the four sights and the palace, comes together in later works: the Sanskrit Buddhacarita of Asvaghosa (2nd century CE), the Mahavastu and Lalitavistara, and the Pali Nidanakatha. The oldest discourses mention episodes of his life only here and there. Supernatural elements are best read as hagiography, writing that honours a saint; whether they happened is a matter of faith, not of evidence.

The dates are genuinely uncertain. Theravada Buddhists most commonly date his life to 623–543 BCE. Western scholars from the mid-19th to the late 20th century generally put it around 560–480 BCE. Most scholars now move it about a century later, into the 5th century BCE; Richard Gombrich, for instance, proposed that he died around 404 BCE. No one can settle it conclusively.

What almost no scholar doubts is that a real teacher stands behind the texts: a man of the Sakya clan who renounced household life, taught in the towns of the middle Ganges valley and founded a community that outlived him. The coherence of the core teaching, which keeps returning to the same few ideas in the same characteristic way, persuades many that it bears the mark of one mind.

The tradition asks: what did he see under the tree? The historian asks: how do we know anything he said? Neither question cancels the other.

Part 2 — The diagnosis: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path

The Buddha's first sermon is short enough to read in five minutes. The oldest English translation, by T. W. Rhys Davids in 1881, calls it The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness; in Pali it is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, "Setting the Wheel of the Teaching in Motion" (Samyutta Nikaya 56.11).

It opens by rejecting two lives the Buddha had already tried. One is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, which he had known as a prince. The other is self-torment, which he had known as an ascetic. Between them, he says, "There is a middle path, O Bhikkhus, avoiding these two extremes", one that "leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, to Nirvana!" (SN 56.11, §3, Rhys Davids).

Then come the four "noble truths." Many teachers compare them to a doctor's method: name the illness, find its cause, say whether it can be cured, prescribe the treatment.

What "dukkha" means

Dukkha is usually translated "suffering," and the word does include pain. But it covers far more: the low hum of dissatisfaction, the way pleasant things end, the way even getting what you want leaves you wanting. Some translators prefer "unsatisfactoriness" or "stress." The sermon's last item makes the scope clear: the five "aggregates" that make up a person are themselves dukkha when we cling to them. The claim is not that life is miserable. It is that nothing we cling to can finally satisfy us, because everything changes.

Craving, not desire in general

The second truth names the cause as tanha, literally "thirst." The sermon lists three kinds: craving for sensual pleasure, craving for existence (to be, to become, to last forever) and craving for non-existence (to be rid of things, or of oneself). It is not wanting a cup of tea that is the problem. It is the grasping, the clutching, the "I must have this and keep it" that turns experience into a constant transaction.

The Eightfold Path

The fourth truth is the practical part, and it is the bit most Buddhists actually spend their lives on. The sermon gives the eight factors in Rhys Davids' words: "Right views; Right aspirations; Right speech; Right conduct; Right livelihood; Right effort; Right mindfulness; and Right contemplation." Later tradition groups them into three trainings.

"Right" (samma) does not mean obedient to a rule. It means complete, well-tuned, the way an instrument can be in tune. The path is not eight steps in order but eight strands of one rope, each strengthening the others.

"Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of (all) the Awakened." — Dhammapada 183, trans. F. Max Müller (1881)

The Dhammapada, a collection of verses that has been memorised by Buddhists for two thousand years, opens with the same psychological emphasis: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought" (v. 1). And it states the ethic in a line that has travelled far beyond Buddhism: "hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule" (v. 5).

Notice what is missing. The sermon does not ask anyone to believe in a creator. It does not open with a revelation. It describes a problem, claims a cause, promises a cure and prescribes a training. The Buddha's disciples did believe many things on his word, and traditional Buddhism is full of gods, heavens, hells and miracles. But the core structure is a path to be walked and tested, and Buddhists across every school hold to it.

Part 3 — No self, dependent origination, karma, rebirth and nirvana

The Four Noble Truths say what to do. Four further ideas explain why it works. They are the hardest part of Buddhism to grasp, and the part that most sharply separates it from the religions it grew up among.

Anatta: not-self

India in the Buddha's time was full of teachers who said that behind the changing body and mind there was an eternal self, the atman, and that liberation meant realising it. The Buddha's second discourse, the Anattalakkhana Sutta (SN 22.59), goes the other way.

It takes the five "aggregates" that make up a person, one by one: physical form, feelings (pleasant, painful, neutral), perceptions, mental formations (intentions, habits, moods) and consciousness. Of each it asks: is it permanent or impermanent? Impermanent. Is what is impermanent satisfying or unsatisfying? Unsatisfying. Then is it fitting to regard it as "this is mine, this I am, this is my self"? No. The listener is encouraged to see each aggregate as "this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self."

This is not a claim that you do not exist. You still have a name, a history and responsibilities, and the texts use "I" freely. It is a claim that no permanent, independent owner sits behind experience, pulling the levers. Look for the self and you find processes: sensations, thoughts, intentions, moments of awareness, arising and passing. Seen that way, there is nothing to defend at all costs and nothing that has to last forever. Buddhists say the relief that comes from seeing this is the point.

"'All forms are unreal,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity." — Dhammapada 279, trans. Müller

Dependent origination

If there is no fixed self, what holds a life together? The answer is paticca samuppada, "dependent origination" or "conditioned arising": everything arises in dependence on conditions, and when the conditions cease, it ceases.

The tradition applies this to the cycle of suffering in a chain of twelve links: ignorance conditions mental formations; formations condition consciousness; consciousness conditions "name-and-form" (mind and body); that conditions the six senses; the senses condition contact; contact conditions feeling; feeling conditions craving; craving conditions grasping; grasping conditions becoming; becoming conditions birth; and birth conditions old age and death. Each link is a necessary condition of the next, not its only cause.

The chain can be read over three lifetimes or in a single moment. In a moment: you hear your name said in an unkind tone (contact); a painful feeling arises; craving for it to stop, or to strike back, follows; you grab hold of a story about who you are and what they meant; and a whole small "self" is born, suffers and passes. Break the chain anywhere, most practically at the point where feeling turns into craving, and the rest does not follow.

Karma

Karma means "action." The Buddha redefined it in one sentence that the IEP quotes from the Pali: "It is intention, monks, what I call action." What counts morally is the will behind a deed. Intentional actions leave traces in the mind and shape what comes next, in this life and beyond. Karma is not fate, and it is not a cosmic accountant handing out rewards. It is more like a law of mental gravity: generosity makes you more generous and greed makes you greedier, and each tendency bears fruit.

Rebirth

Traditional Buddhism teaches that beings are reborn, again and again, in a cycle called samsara, among five (sometimes six) realms: hell beings, animals, hungry ghosts, humans and gods (with a realm of demigods added in some lists). Where one is reborn depends on karma and on one's state of mind, especially at death.

If there is no self, what is reborn? The tradition's classic answer is that nothing passes over intact, but a stream of causes continues, as one candle lights another: the second flame is neither the same as the first nor different from it. Modern Buddhists divide here. For most Buddhists in Asia rebirth is simply true, and it is the reason merit-making matters. Some Western and modernist Buddhists treat it as a metaphor or set it aside; their critics, including many Asian teachers, reply that a Buddhism without rebirth has quietly dropped the problem the Buddha set out to solve.

Nirvana

Nirvana (Pali nibbana) literally means "blowing out," as of a flame: the extinguishing of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion. It is not a place and not a heaven. The texts distinguish nirvana "with remainder," the state of an awakened person still living out their life with body and mind, from nirvana "without remainder" at death, after which there is no more rebirth.

What is nirvana like? The Buddha mostly declined to say. Asked whether an awakened one exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, he set the question aside as one that does not lead to liberation. He was, in his own words, a teacher with no "closed fist," hiding nothing that mattered (Mahaparinibbana Sutta II.32). But he was also practical. His famous comparison: a man hit by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows the archer's name and caste will die first.

Part 4 — The sangha, the councils and the Pali Canon

The Buddha did not leave a book. He left a community: the sangha. In the narrow sense it means the order of fully ordained monks (bhikkhus) and nuns (bhikkhunis). In the wider sense, used especially in the West, it means all practising Buddhists. Together with the Buddha and the Dhamma (his teaching), it makes up the "Three Jewels" in which every Buddhist "takes refuge."

The rule of the order

Monastic life is governed by the Vinaya, the discipline: rules on robes, food, property, sexuality, speech and how disputes are settled, each traditionally tied to a story of the incident that prompted the Buddha to make it. Monks own almost nothing, eat only what is given, and in Theravada countries may not eat solid food after midday. Every fortnight the community gathers to recite the core rules, the patimokkha, and confess breaches. The four gravest offences (sexual intercourse, theft, killing a human and falsely claiming spiritual attainments) mean expulsion.

The councils

How did a teaching carried in memory stay together after its teacher died? Buddhist tradition answers: by communal recitation, sangiti, the word usually translated "council." The accounts come from different schools, which disagree with each other, and scholars question parts of all of them. Here is what the traditions say, with the scholarly caveats attached.

The first great split came within roughly the first two centuries. The traditional Theravada account blames lax monks who formed the Mahasanghika ("great community"); the Mahasanghika's own account says the other side, the Sthaviras ("elders"), had added rules. There is no clear answer as to which version of the discipline came first. Over the following centuries early Buddhism divided into many schools, traditionally counted as eighteen. Of their lines of monastic discipline, only three survive: the Theravada (Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia), the Dharmaguptaka (China, Korea, Vietnam) and the Mulasarvastivada (Tibet and Mongolia).

The Pali Canon

The scriptures of the Theravada, the one early school that survives as a living tradition, are the Tipitaka, the "Three Baskets," preserved in Pali, a language close to what the Buddha may have spoken.

• Vinaya Pitaka: the monastic discipline.
• Sutta Pitaka: the discourses, gathered into five "collections" (nikayas): the long discourses, the middle-length discourses, the "connected" discourses arranged by theme, the "numerical" discourses arranged by number, and a miscellany that includes the Dhammapada and the Jataka tales of the Buddha's past lives.
• Abhidhamma Pitaka: systematic analyses of mind and matter, later in origin.

As How the Sacred Texts Were Written in this library describes, the canon was carried orally for centuries. Sri Lanka's chronicles say that in the 1st century BCE, under King Vattagamani, monks met at Aluvihare and wrote it down on palm leaves because famine and war threatened the lives of the monks who held it in memory.

The Pali Canon was not the only early canon. Other schools kept their own, in Sanskrit and the Gandhari language of the north-west, which scholars describe as one of the most important vehicles for early Buddhist literature; much survives in Chinese and Tibetan translation, and recent manuscript finds in Pakistan and Afghanistan are adding more. Where the Pali and Chinese versions of the same discourse agree, scholars feel on firmer ground about what the earliest teaching was.

Why the Buddha left no successor

Just before his death, the oldest account says, Ananda hoped the Buddha would leave instructions for the order. The answer is one of the most quoted passages in Buddhist literature.

"Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp." — Mahaparinibbana Sutta II.33, trans. Rhys Davids (1881)

And his last words in the same text: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (VI.10). No pope, no caliph, no single scripture closed by authority. That is a large part of why Buddhism became so many things.

Part 5 — Ashoka: the emperor who changed the map

For two centuries Buddhism was one movement among many in north India. What turned it into a world religion was, more than anything, the patronage of one ruler.

Ashoka was the third king of the Maurya dynasty, which ruled most of the Indian subcontinent. The Buddhist scholar-monk S. Dhammika, introducing his translation of the edicts, gives Ashoka's birth as about 304 BCE and his death as 232 BCE, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign. Early in that reign he conquered Kalinga, on India's east coast. Then he did something no conqueror had done before: he published his regret on stone.

Rock Edict XIII, carved at sites across his empire, counts the cost. In Dhammika's translation: "One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed and many more died (from other causes)." The king, it says, "feels deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas." From now on, "it is conquest by Dhamma" that he "considers to be the best conquest."

What the edicts say

Ashoka's inscriptions, on rocks and polished pillars, were unreadable for centuries until the scholar James Prinsep deciphered their script in 1837. They speak directly in the king's voice.

• They urge compassion, truthfulness, generosity and respect for parents, teachers, servants and animals.
• They announce public works: wells, shade trees, rest houses and medical care for humans and animals.
• They promote not narrow Buddhism but Dhamma, a broad morality, and they ask religious groups to respect one another. Rock Edict XII warns that whoever "praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others" in fact "only harms his own religion."
• They name Greek kings far to the west, Antiochos, Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas and Alexander, as places his envoys of Dhamma had reached.

The first great Buddhist king did not command conversion. He carved an apology for a war on rock and asked his subjects to respect each other's faiths.

Ashoka in Buddhist memory

Buddhist tradition remembers Ashoka as far more than a moral king. The Sri Lankan chronicles credit him with the Third Council and with sending missions in every direction, including his son Mahinda, who in their telling brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka, and his daughter Sanghamitta, who brought the nuns' ordination and a cutting of the Bodh Gaya tree. Northern traditions have their own Ashoka legends, including the building of 84,000 stupas.

Historians separate the Ashoka of the edicts, which say surprisingly little about Buddhist doctrine, from the Ashoka of the chronicles, written centuries later by monks with reasons to magnify him. But on one point the evidence and the tradition agree: from Ashoka's time, Buddhist missions really were active far beyond the Ganges, and a model was set that lasted two thousand years. A Buddhist king protects and supports the sangha; the sangha gives the king legitimacy. That partnership would build the great temples of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet and Japan. Part 12 looks at what happens when it goes wrong.

Part 6 — The Great Vehicle: bodhisattvas, emptiness and mind

Around the turn of the Common Era, new scriptures began to appear in India, presented as the word of the Buddha and often set in vast cosmic scenes with countless buddhas and bodhisattvas. Their followers called their path the Mahayana, the "Great Vehicle," and some called the older path, rather dismissively, the "Lesser Vehicle" (Hinayana). (The word is now avoided in respectful usage; the surviving early school calls itself Theravada, "the teaching of the elders.")

How Mahayana began is debated. It was not one organisation, and for centuries Mahayana monks lived in the same monasteries, under the same discipline, as non-Mahayana monks. What marked it out was a set of ideas and a body of texts.

The bodhisattva

In the early texts the goal is to become an arahant, a "worthy one" who has reached nirvana. The Buddha himself had been a bodhisattva, a being on the way to full buddhahood, over countless lives. Mahayana texts invite everyone to take that longer road: to vow to become a fully awakened buddha in order to free all beings, and to postpone one's own final release until all are freed.

The bodhisattva path is built on two qualities held together: wisdom, especially the insight into emptiness, and compassion, which is the motive for the whole journey. Great bodhisattvas became objects of devotion in their own right: Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (Guanyin in China, Kannon in Japan, Chenrezig in Tibet), Manjusri of wisdom, Ksitigarbha who vows to empty the hells, and Maitreya, the buddha to come.

The new sutras

• The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) sutras, including the short Heart Sutra ("form is emptiness, emptiness is form") and the Diamond Sutra, chanted daily across East Asia.
• The Lotus Sutra, which teaches that the Buddha's many teachings are "skilful means" suited to different listeners, that all may become buddhas, and that the Buddha is eternal. Its Chinese translation by Kumarajiva's team in 406 became the standard text across East Asia.
• The Pure Land sutras about Amitabha's land of bliss, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces to north-western India around the 1st century CE (Part 7).
• Sutras teaching buddha-nature: that every being already has the potential of buddhahood within.

Followers of the older schools did not accept these as the Buddha's word, and modern historians date them centuries after him. Mahayana Buddhists have answered in several ways: that the Buddha taught them to those who could receive them and they were preserved in hidden realms; that whatever is well spoken leads to awakening and so is the Buddha's word; or that inspired visionaries received them from buddhas in meditation.

Madhyamaka: the middle way of emptiness

The most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha is Nagarjuna, who lived around 150–250 CE, probably in southern India. His Mulamadhyamakakarika ("Root Verses on the Middle Way"), about 450 verses, founded the Madhyamaka school.

His central term is emptiness (sunyata). Emptiness is always the emptiness of something, and what things are empty of is svabhava, "own-being": an independent, self-standing essence. Nothing exists from its own side; everything exists in dependence on causes, parts and the concepts we use to pick it out. Emptiness, then, is not a mysterious void behind the world. It is dependent origination taken all the way down, and Nagarjuna turned it against every view that tries to fix reality in a final description, including Buddhist ones. To manage this without collapsing into nihilism, Madhyamaka distinguishes two truths: conventional truth, in which tables, persons and karma work as we ordinarily think, and ultimate truth, in which nothing has its own essence.

Yogacara: the practice of mind

The other great Indian Mahayana school, Yogacara ("practice of yoga"), is associated with the half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, whom the SEP places in the 4th to 5th centuries CE. Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses opens with the claim that everything in the three realms is "only appearance" (vijnaptimatra), often translated "consciousness-only."

Yogacara analyses how experience is constructed. It describes a "storehouse consciousness" (alayavijnana) holding the seeds of past actions, which ripen into the appearances of a world. It speaks of three natures: how a thing appears, the dependent process that produces the appearance, and the "perfected" nature, which is the absence of the thing as it falsely appears. Whether this is idealism, the view that only minds exist, is one of the oldest live debates in Buddhist studies. Some scholars read it that way; others argue it is a phenomenology of experience that makes no claim about what lies beyond it.

Madhyamaka asks what things are empty of. Yogacara asks how the mind builds a world. Both are trying to loosen the same grip.

Both schools were carried to Tibet and East Asia. When Xuanzang (602–664), the most famous Chinese pilgrim, spent years studying in India, it was Yogacara above all that he brought home.

Part 7 — Pure Land and Chan/Zen: faith and the direct path

Two East Asian forms of Mahayana have shaped more lives than any philosophical school. They can look like opposites: one relies on the saving power of a Buddha, the other on seeing your own nature directly. Both grew from Indian roots but took their final form in China and Japan.

Pure Land

The Pure Land sutras tell of a monk named Dharmakara who, long ago, made forty-eight vows, promising to become a buddha only if he could create a land of perfect conditions for awakening, open to all who call on him with faith. He fulfilled them and became Amitabha (Amida in Japanese), the Buddha of Infinite Light. His "primal vow" became the heart of a devotional tradition.

Chinese masters such as Tanluan (476–542) and Shandao (613–681) developed the practice of calling on Amitabha's name. In Japan, Honen (1133–1212) made the spoken nembutsu, "Namu Amida Butsu," "I take refuge in Amida Buddha," an independent path. His disciple Shinran (1173–1263) went further. For Shinran, even the effort of reciting is a kind of pride. Buddhism, he taught, distinguishes "self-power," practices that rely on one's own efforts, from "Other Power," entrusting oneself wholly to Amida's vow. Shinran's movement, Jodo Shinshu, allowed its priests to marry and became one of the largest Buddhist denominations in Japan.

To outsiders Pure Land can look like Christianity in Buddhist dress. Its practitioners see it as the most honest form of Buddhism: an admission that ordinary people in a degenerate age cannot reach awakening by their own strength, and a trust that compassion reaches them anyway.

Chan and Zen

The library's piece on Bodhidharma tells the founding story of Chan (from Sanskrit dhyana, "meditation"; Seon in Korea, Thien in Vietnam, Zen in Japan): an Indian monk who arrived in China, meditated facing a wall for nine years, and passed on a "special transmission outside the scriptures." Here, as with the Buddha, the tradition's account and the historians' account need to be kept apart.

The tradition's account. Chan lineages trace an unbroken "mind-to-mind" transmission from the Buddha through twenty-eight Indian patriarchs to Bodhidharma, the first Chinese patriarch, then through Huike (487–593) to the sixth patriarch, Huineng (638–713), an illiterate labourer whose teaching, the Platform Sutra, was given a title normally reserved for a buddha's words. Chan presented itself in four famous phrases: a special transmission outside the scriptures; not founded on words and letters; pointing directly to the human mind; seeing one's nature and becoming a buddha.

What historians say. Scholars such as John McRae and Bernard Faure regard much of this lineage history as an "invention of tradition," assembled from the late 6th century onward and well established only by the 10th; the four-phrase summary was used in the Song dynasty to define Chan's distinctiveness. That does not make the practice less real. It means the story of a single line of transmission was written backward by a movement establishing its identity.

Chan flourished in the Tang dynasty, survived the great Huichang suppression of Buddhism (841–846) better than the scripture-based schools, and developed its distinctive literature: records of encounters between masters and students, later collected as gong'an (Japanese koan, "public cases") such as the 13th-century Gateless Barrier. Linji (died 866), whose lineage became Rinzai Zen, is said to have dismissed the great scriptures as hitching posts for donkeys.

In Japan, Eisai brought the Linji/Rinzai line in the late 12th century, and Dogen (1200–1253) the Caodong/Soto line, with its emphasis on shikantaza, "just sitting," as itself the expression of awakening. Zen shaped Japanese gardens, ink painting, the tea ceremony, poetry and the martial arts. The library's Laozi piece notes that Chan absorbed Daoist sensibilities; the SEP is more careful, saying that Confucian and Daoist ideas about nature, spontaneity and "the Way" shaped the Chinese culture in which Chan's teaching resonated.

Part 8 — Vajrayana: the diamond vehicle and Tibet

From around the 7th century, a third great current took shape in India: Vajrayana, the "diamond" or "thunderbolt" vehicle, also called Tantric or esoteric Buddhism. It accepts the Mahayana goal of buddhahood for the sake of all beings but claims a faster method, capable in principle of awakening within a single lifetime.

What is different

Vajrayana practice is based on texts called tantras and is transmitted in initiations from teacher to student. Its methods include:

• Deity yoga: visualising oneself as a fully awakened buddha or bodhisattva, in a sacred palace (mandala), to dissolve the ordinary sense of self and train the mind to see itself as already pure.
• Mantras, sacred syllables, such as Avalokitesvara's Om mani padme hum, carved on stones and turned in prayer wheels across the Himalayas.
• Mudras, ritual hand gestures, and ritual implements such as the vajra (thunderbolt) and bell.
• Advanced yogas working with breath and subtle energies, and in some lineages practices that use what is normally forbidden (meat, alcohol, sexual imagery) as a way of transcending attachment and aversion.
• Absolute centrality of the guru or lama, the teacher who embodies the lineage.

Because these methods are powerful and easily misunderstood, they have traditionally been secret, given only to initiates. Critics, inside and outside Buddhism, have long worried about the power the guru relationship concentrates; Part 14 returns to that.

How Tibet became Buddhist

Tibetan tradition says Buddhism was first established at court under King Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century and firmly planted under King Trisong Detsen in the 8th, when the Indian scholar Shantarakshita and the tantric master Padmasambhava, revered as "Guru Rinpoche," came to Tibet. Tradition says Padmasambhava subdued the local spirits so that Samye, Tibet's first monastery, could be built, and that the first Tibetan monks were ordained there. A famous debate at Samye in the late 8th century, between an Indian master and a Chinese Chan monk, was remembered as settling Tibet's allegiance to Indian rather than Chinese Buddhism.

After a period of persecution and fragmentation, a "second diffusion" from the late 10th century brought new translations and lineages from India. Tibetan Buddhism took shape as four major schools:

Tibetan Buddhism brought two distinctive institutions to the world. The first is the tulku, a recognised reincarnation of a deceased master, identified as a child and raised to take up the predecessor's role. The second is the Dalai Lama. In 1578 the Mongol ruler Altan Khan gave the title "Dalai Lama" ("ocean" lama) to the Gelug leader Sonam Gyatso, who became the third of the line, the first two being recognised retrospectively. From the 17th century the Dalai Lamas were both religious and political heads of Tibet.

Vajrayana also travelled well beyond Tibet: to Mongolia, Bhutan (where it is the state religion), Nepal, Ladakh and the Russian republics of Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva, and, in another form, to Japan, where Kukai (774–835) founded the esoteric Shingon school.

Theravada is often pictured as the path of the monk, Mahayana as the path of the bodhisattva, Vajrayana as the path of transformation. Each tradition claims, with good reason, to contain the other two.

Part 9 — Across Asia by road and by sea, and the disappearance from India

Buddhism became a world religion without armies. It travelled with merchants, monks, translators, pilgrims and princesses along two great networks: the overland Silk Roads and the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.

The northern route

From the Ganges valley Buddhism moved north-west into Gandhara (today's northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan), where under the Kushan empire, in the first centuries CE, sculptors made some of the earliest surviving images of the Buddha in human form, in a style that borrowed from Greek and Roman art. (Earlier Buddhist art had shown him only through symbols such as a footprint, a tree or an empty seat; whether Gandhara or Mathura, in north India, made the first human images is debated.) From Gandhara, monasteries spread along the oasis cities of Central Asia and into China.

Chinese accounts of Buddhism's arrival include a famous dream of the Han emperor Ming, which historians treat as semi-legendary. The first documented translations of Buddhist scripture into Chinese were made by An Shigao, a Parthian monk working in Luoyang from about 148 CE. Translation became one of the great intellectual projects in history. Over centuries Chinese and foreign monks rendered thousands of texts, coining new vocabulary and at first borrowing Daoist terms to explain foreign ideas. Kumarajiva, a monk from the Silk Road kingdom of Kucha, led a translation bureau in Chang'an whose versions, like the Lotus Sutra of 406, became classics of Chinese literature.

Chinese pilgrims also walked the other way. Faxian set out at the end of the 4th century; Xuanzang spent some seventeen years travelling to India and back in the 7th, and his account later inspired the novel Journey to the West, with its Monkey King.

From China, Buddhism reached Korea, where the kingdom of Goguryeo adopted it in 372 and Silla in 528, and Japan, where the official introduction was an embassy from the Korean kingdom of Baekje bearing an image and sutras, dated to 538 or 552 depending on the source. Vietnam received both Chinese Mahayana and Indian influences. Tibet, as Part 8 described, drew on India directly.

The southern route

By sea, Buddhism went south and east. Sri Lanka became the great centre of the Theravada, based in the Mahavihara monastery at Anuradhapura, and its monks and texts later shaped Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Across maritime South-East Asia, Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms rose and fell. The Srivijaya kingdom on Sumatra was a centre of Buddhist learning; on Java, the colossal Mahayana monument of Borobudur, a mountain of carved stone stairs leading pilgrims past scenes of the Buddha's lives toward a summit of stupas, still draws pilgrims every Vesak. In Cambodia, Angkor's temples changed from Hindu to Buddhist and back again as kings changed. Over the second millennium, the Theravada gradually became the dominant religion of mainland South-East Asia, and Islam that of most of the Indonesian and Malay islands.

The decline in India

The strangest fact in Buddhist history is that the religion almost vanished from the land of its birth. In the first millennium CE India had great monastic universities. Nalanda, in today's Bihar, was founded according to Nalanda University by the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta in 427 CE, and is believed to have had some 2,000 teachers and 10,000 students; Xuanzang studied there. It ended in the 12th century. By around 1300, institutional Buddhism had all but disappeared from most of India, surviving at the Himalayan fringes.

Historians give several reasons, and argue about their weight:

• Dependence on monasteries and royal patrons. Indian Buddhism was centred on large monasteries supported by kings and merchants. Lay Buddhists often worshipped at Hindu shrines too, and had no separate parish life. When patronage dried up, there was little to fall back on.
• Hindu revival and absorption. Devotional Hinduism, with temples, saints and philosophies that answered many of Buddhism's questions, flourished; Hindu texts even came to count the Buddha among the avatars of Vishnu.
• Invasion. The great monastic centres of the north-east, Nalanda among them, were sacked during the Turkic conquests at the end of the 12th century. Monasteries were easy targets, and once destroyed were not rebuilt.

How much weight to give the last factor is politically charged in today's India. Some accounts emphasise the destruction by invaders; others stress a long internal decline that left the monasteries vulnerable. Most historians see a combination.

Buddhism thrived wherever it became a people's religion with village temples and family rituals. Where it stayed the religion of great monasteries, it was fragile.

The return

Buddhism came back to India in the 20th century in two ways. In 1956 B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist who chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, converted publicly at Nagpur together with hundreds of thousands of followers, presenting Buddhism as a religion of equality and reason against caste. Most of India's Buddhists today, about 10 million by Pew's estimate for 2020 (under 1 percent of the population), belong to this "Navayana" or Ambedkarite movement. And from 1959, Tibetan refugees rebuilt their monasteries in India, with the exile government seated at Dharamshala.

Part 10 — How Buddhists live: monks, nuns, lay people and the year

Surveys of Buddhism often stop at doctrine. But most Buddhists are not meditating philosophers. Here is what Buddhist life tends to look like, with the caution that it varies enormously between Thailand, Tibet, Taiwan and Toronto.

An ordinary day

For a Theravada monk in Thailand, Laos or Myanmar, the day begins before dawn with chanting and meditation, then the alms round: walking barefoot through the village in silence while lay people kneel to place rice and food in the bowl. The monk does not thank them; in the logic of the gift, they are thanking him for the chance to make merit. There is one main meal, finished before noon, then study, teaching, chores, meditation and evening chanting.

For a lay Buddhist, a day might include bowing three times before the household shrine, offering flowers, a candle, incense or water to the Buddha image, and reciting the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts: to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech and intoxicants. In East Asia, it might mean a Pure Land chant or a visit to a temple to light incense for a sick relative or ask a bodhisattva for help with exams.

Merit

The central idea of lay Buddhist life across much of Asia is merit (punna): the good karma produced by generosity, morality and meditation. The most meritorious act for most lay people is dana, giving, especially to the sangha. Merit can be shared or "transferred," above all to dead relatives. Feeding monks, sponsoring a temple building, releasing captive animals, copying a sutra or ordaining a son can all produce merit.

Outsiders sometimes dismiss this as a spiritual economy. Buddhists tend to see it as the training ground of the whole path: generosity loosens craving, and the sangha and lay people sustain each other. Monks receive food and robes; the laity receive teaching, blessings, rituals and the merit of having given.

The week and the year

Many Theravada lay people observe uposatha days, linked to the phases of the moon, by visiting the temple and taking eight precepts instead of five, adding celibacy, not eating after noon, and abstaining from entertainment and luxurious seats. The monastic year turns on the rains retreat (vassa), about three months in the monsoon season when monks stay in one place for study and practice, ending with the Kathina festival, when lay people present new robes and other necessities to the monks.

In 1999 the United Nations General Assembly recognised the Day of Vesak internationally (resolution 54/115), describing it as the day Buddhists commemorate "the birth, the attainment of enlightenment and the passing away of the Buddha."

Nuns

The Buddha, according to the texts, agreed after some hesitation to ordain women, and the order of nuns, bhikkhunis, flourished in India and Sri Lanka and still exists in East Asia, where Taiwan's nuns are among the most visible and active Buddhists in the world. But the full ordination line for women appears to have lapsed in Sri Lanka around the 11th century, and it is commonly said never to have reached Tibet or most of South-East Asia (some historians dispute this). Since the late 20th century, women have been ordained again in Sri Lanka and elsewhere with the help of East Asian nuns. Supporters see this as restoring what the Buddha established; many conservative monks, especially in Thailand and Myanmar, hold that a lapsed lineage cannot be revived. It is one of the liveliest debates in Buddhism today.

Life's passages

In Theravada countries many young men ordain temporarily, for weeks or months, sometimes to make merit for their parents. In Japan, as the companion long read on China and Japan describes, Buddhism is above all the religion of death and memory: funerals, posthumous names, memorial services and the summer festival of Obon, when the dead are believed to return.

Part 11 — Colonialism, revival, modernism and mindfulness

The modern history of Buddhism begins with an encounter that went badly for Buddhists: European empire.

The colonial shock

By the 19th century, Sri Lanka, Burma and much of South-East Asia were under British or French rule. Colonial governments ended royal patronage, which had sustained the sangha for two thousand years; in Burma the British abolished the monarchy in 1885. Christian missionaries opened schools and published attacks on Buddhism. European scholars, meanwhile, were discovering the Pali texts and constructing "Buddhism" as an object of study, often admiring a supposedly pure, rational original teaching while disparaging the ritual and devotional religion actually practised in Asia.

Revival

Buddhists answered. In Sri Lanka a revival movement held public debates with missionaries and founded Buddhist schools. Two Americans, Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, formally took the refuges and precepts in Ceylon in 1880; Olcott wrote a Buddhist Catechism (1881) modelled on Christian ones and helped design the Buddhist flag (1885), now used worldwide. His young protégé Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) campaigned to restore Bodh Gaya to Buddhist hands and spoke for Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, alongside the Japanese Zen teacher Soyen Shaku.

Dharmapala's legacy is double-edged. He gave Sri Lankans pride in a tradition colonial rulers looked down on. He also fused Buddhism with Sinhala nationalism, in language hostile to Christians, Muslims and Tamils, a strand whose consequences Part 12 describes.

Scholars call the result Buddhist modernism, and sometimes, following the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, "Protestant Buddhism" because of its lay leadership, emphasis on texts and suspicion of ritual. As the scholar David McMahan has described it, modernist Buddhism reinterpreted the tradition in dialogue with Western rationalism, science, Romanticism and Protestant Christianity. It presented Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a religion, compatible with science, centred on meditation, and individual rather than communal.

The meditation revolution

Before the 20th century, intensive meditation was largely the work of a minority of monks. In colonial Burma, teachers such as Ledi Sayadaw and later Mahasi Sayadaw opened vipassana (insight) meditation to lay people, with simplified methods suited to busy lives. It was a revolution: meditation centres where office workers and housewives could practise for days. From Burma, Thailand, Japan and the Tibetan diaspora, teachers brought meditation to the West from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Mindfulness

In 1979 the molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at what is now UMass Memorial Health in Massachusetts: eight weeks of meditation and yoga drawn from Buddhist practice but taught without Buddhist language or belief. MBSR and its offshoots, such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for recurrent depression, spread to hospitals, schools, armies and corporations. The library's Meditation, Without the Woo covers the practice itself.

The evidence is real and moderate. A 2014 meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine (Goyal and colleagues) pooled 47 randomised trials with 3,515 participants. It found moderate evidence that mindfulness programmes improved anxiety, depression and pain, with effect sizes around 0.3, low or insufficient evidence for many other claimed benefits, and no evidence that meditation was better than other active treatments such as drugs or exercise.

The critics

Mindfulness has critics from several directions, and their arguments differ.

To one teacher, secular mindfulness is the Buddha's medicine finally reaching everyone. To another, it is the medicine with the active ingredient removed. Both are Buddhists, and both have a point.

Part 12 — Engaged Buddhism, and Buddhism's darker entanglements with power

Buddhism is often presented in the West as the religion of peace. Its history, like every religion's, is more complicated, and its modern history includes both some of the most admired peace movements of the century and some of its most troubling nationalist violence. Both deserve to be described plainly.

Engaged Buddhism

The Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was ordained at sixteen and, during the war in Vietnam, developed what he called engaged Buddhism: a Buddhism that responds directly to the suffering of society, through relief work, peace activism and mindful daily life. His calls for peace led to decades of exile. From his community at Plum Village in France he became, perhaps more than anyone, the person who taught mindfulness to the West. He suffered a severe stroke in November 2014, returned to Vietnam, and died on 22 January 2022, aged 95.

Engaged Buddhism has many other faces: Ambedkar's movement against caste in India; the Sarvodaya Shramadana village development movement in Sri Lanka; Thai monks who "ordain" trees to protect forests from logging; Taiwanese Buddhist relief organisations; and the Dalai Lama's long advocacy of non-violence, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

In Myanmar in 2007, after the military government removed fuel subsidies, tens of thousands of monks marched through Yangon and other cities in what became known as the Saffron Revolution. Human Rights Watch reported that on 24 September estimates reached 30,000 to 50,000 monks. Their most powerful weapon was religious: they "overturned their bowls," refusing alms from soldiers and officials, which denied the regime the merit and legitimacy that came from supporting the sangha. The army cracked down on 26 and 27 September, raiding monasteries, detaining thousands of monks and killing an unknown number of people.

Buddhist nationalism: Myanmar

The same country shows the other face. After political reforms began in 2011, Myanmar saw what the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar called "an increase in Buddhist nationalism, virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence between Buddhists and Muslims." The largest nationalist organisation, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha), "cast itself as the protector of Buddhism." The ultranationalist monk Ashin Wirathu became its best-known voice.

In the mission's account, a campaign of hatred against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Rakhine State, was led from 2012 by Rakhine nationalist parties and organisations, "radical Buddhist monk organizations," officials and others, spreading through publications, rallies, shop boycotts and, crucially, Facebook, which for most users in Myanmar "is the Internet." Wirathu preached in northern Rakhine in May and July 2017. After Rohingya militants (ARSA) attacked police posts on 25 August 2017, the army launched what it called "clearance operations." By mid-August 2018, nearly 725,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh.

The mission's 2018 report concluded that there was sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior military officers for genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Myanmar's government and military rejected the findings, describing the operations as a response to terrorist attacks. In 2019 The Gambia brought a case against Myanmar under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice. The court ordered provisional measures to protect the Rohingya in January 2020, confirmed its jurisdiction in July 2022, and heard the merits from 12 to 29 January 2026. As of October 2026 it had not delivered its judgment.

Buddhist nationalism: Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, Buddhism is woven into the state. Article 9 of the constitution gives Buddhism "the foremost place" and makes it "the duty of the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana, while assuring to all religions" the rights to freedom of religion. Since independence, a strand of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has seen the island as a land entrusted to Buddhism and its Sinhala people as its guardians, a vision with roots in the ancient chronicles and in Dharmapala's revival.

Its harder edge has turned against minorities. In June 2014, according to Human Rights Watch, a rally by the hardline Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena in Aluthgama escalated into anti-Muslim riots that killed four Muslims, injured at least 80 people and destroyed many Muslim homes and businesses. In March 2018 anti-Muslim riots in Ampara and then Kandy, linked by HRW to ultranationalist Sinhala Buddhist groups, killed at least two people and led to a ten-day nationwide state of emergency. After the Easter Sunday bombings of 21 April 2019, in which Islamist suicide bombers killed more than 250 people in churches and hotels, mobs attacked Muslim property, some of them encouraged, HRW reported, by hardline monks.

How to understand this

Describing these events is not the same as blaming Buddhism, and it is not the same as excusing it. Three points are fair to all sides.

1. The nationalists' own case. Nationalist monks present themselves as defenders of a minority faith worldwide and of a heritage they see as threatened by demographic change, conversion and, after 2019, terrorism. Many of their supporters remember colonial rule as a time when Buddhism was humbled.
2. The critics within Buddhism. Many Buddhist monks and lay people in both countries have condemned the violence as a betrayal of the first precept, against killing, and of the Buddha's teaching that hatred is never ended by hatred. Scholars have pointed out that Buddhist texts were used to justify war long before modern nationalism (the collection Buddhist Warfare, 2009, edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, gathers examples).
3. The general pattern. When a religion becomes the badge of a nation, and its clergy depend on the state, religious language is easily recruited for ethnic conflict. Buddhism is not exempt from that pattern, and neither is any other faith.

The same monasteries produced the monks who overturned their bowls against a dictatorship and the monks who preached hatred against a minority. Neither group is the "real" Buddhism. Both are part of its history.

Part 13 — Tibet and the question of the next Dalai Lama

No question in Buddhism is more political than who will be the next Dalai Lama.

The background

In 1950 the People's Liberation Army entered Tibet. After a failed uprising in Lhasa in 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, born on 6 July 1935, fled to India, followed, according to the Central Tibetan Administration, by some 80,000 Tibetans. On 29 April 1959 he established an exile administration, now based in Dharamshala; the exile population is over 140,000, about 100,000 of them in India. Beijing regards Tibet (which it calls Xizang) as an inalienable part of China and its rule there as liberation from feudal serfdom and the driver of economic development; Tibetan exile groups and international human rights organisations describe decades of political and religious repression.

The 1995 precedent

The fear on both sides comes from what happened to the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Gelug lama, who traditionally helps identify the Dalai Lama's reincarnation and vice versa. On 14 May 1995 the Dalai Lama recognised a six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the 11th Panchen Lama. Shortly afterwards, as UN human rights experts recounted in 2020, he and his parents were taken from their village by Chinese authorities. The government said he was under "government protection," later that he was living a normal life, but has refused to give precise information about his whereabouts. It installed its own candidate. In 2007 the State Religious Affairs Bureau issued Order No. 5, setting out rules under which reincarnations of "living Buddhas" require state approval.

The two positions

In a statement dated 21 May 2025 and released on 2 July 2025, days before his 90th birthday, the Dalai Lama declared: "I am affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue." He said that "the Gaden Phodrang Trust has sole authority to recognize the future reincarnation" and that "no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter."

China's position, as set out in an official China Daily commentary in June 2025, is that the reincarnation of living Buddhas must "abide by national laws and regulations and follow religious rituals and historical customs," including "the golden urn lot-drawing and the approval of the central government," and a "domestic search."

Since then the dispute has become international. In March 2026 the Czech Senate passed a resolution saying China has no legitimate authority over the succession. In August 2025, Human Rights Watch reported, President Xi Jinping visited Tibet and called on Tibetan Buddhism to "adapt to socialist society," and authorities tightened restrictions at several monasteries around the Dalai Lama's birthday.

Why it matters

Many observers expect that when the 14th Dalai Lama dies there may be two Dalai Lamas, one recognised by his own office and almost certainly found outside China, and one chosen inside China with state approval, just as there are now two Panchen Lamas. For Tibetan Buddhists the question is not political at all: it is whether the compassionate intention of a bodhisattva can be directed by a government. For Beijing it is a question of sovereignty and stability. For everyone else, it is a test of whether a religion's own institutions can decide its succession.

A reincarnation system designed to keep a teaching alive across lifetimes has become one of the sharpest tests of religious freedom in the world.

Part 14 — Buddhism today: numbers, branches and open questions

How many Buddhists?

Counting Buddhists is harder than counting adherents of most faiths, because in East Asia many people mix Buddhist practice with folk religion, Confucian ethics and ancestor rites without identifying as "Buddhist" on a survey. With that caution, the most careful global estimate comes from the Pew Research Center, published in June 2025.

Pew attributes the decline mainly to people raised Buddhist in East Asia ceasing to identify with any religion (China lost 23 million self-identified Buddhists over the decade and Japan 7 million; South Korea's Buddhist share fell about 7 points to 19 percent), together with low birth rates and ageing populations. For every 1.0 person who became Buddhist, 1.8 raised Buddhist left.

These numbers carry a large uncertainty in China. Only about 4 percent of Chinese adults identify Buddhism as their religion, but, as the companion long read describes, a third of Chinese adults told one 2018 survey they believe in the Buddha or bodhisattvas. Depending on how you count, there are between three hundred million Buddhists in the world and well over half a billion.

The branches today

Open questions inside Buddhism

1. What did the Buddha actually teach? Scholars and practitioners still argue over which layers of the texts are earliest, and some Western and Asian movements try to recover an "early Buddhism" stripped of later additions. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists reply that later teachings are not additions but fuller revelations.
2. Rebirth. Is it essential, or can a Buddhism without literal rebirth still be the Buddha's path? (Part 3.)
3. Women's ordination. Can the full ordination of nuns be restored where it lapsed, and should women have equal standing in the sangha? (Part 10.)
4. Teachers and power. Several Western Buddhist communities, in both Zen and Tibetan lineages, have been shaken by revelations of sexual and financial abuse by revered teachers. The debate is over how a tradition that asks students to trust a teacher deeply can also protect them.
5. Religion and nation. Can the old partnership between the sangha and the state survive without Buddhism becoming a tool of ethnic politics? (Part 12.)
6. Secularisation and the mindfulness market. East Asian Buddhism is ageing and shrinking even as Buddhist-derived practices spread worldwide in secular form. Is that decline or transformation?

The takeaway

Buddhism began with a man of the Sakya clan, probably in the 5th century BCE, who diagnosed the human condition as dukkha, unsatisfactoriness rooted in craving, and prescribed a path of ethics, meditation and wisdom to end it. He taught that there is no permanent self behind experience, that everything arises from conditions, that intention shapes the future and that the fires of craving can go out. He left no successor, only a community and a teaching carried in memory. From that open beginning grew the Theravada of South and South-East Asia, the Mahayana of East Asia with its bodhisattvas, emptiness, Pure Land and Zen, and the Vajrayana of Tibet. Spread by monks and merchants rather than armies, Buddhism nearly vanished from India, met colonial rule with revival and reinvention, and gave the modern world both mindfulness and engaged Buddhism, while also, like other faiths, lending its language to nationalism and violence. Today about 324 million people identify as Buddhist, most in Asia, and many more live with Buddhist practices without the label.

Try this: read the Buddha's first sermon in full; it takes about five minutes, and free translations are linked below. Then, for one day, watch for the moment in the second noble truth: the instant a pleasant or unpleasant feeling turns into "I must have this" or "make it stop." You do not have to believe anything to notice it. Noticing it is where the path begins.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Buddha" (iep.utm.edu/buddha): traditional and scholarly dates (623–543 BCE; c. 560–480; 5th century; Gombrich c. 404 BCE), the sources for his life, the core teachings, karma as intention, the five destinations, nirvana.
- T. W. Rhys Davids (trans.), Buddhist Suttas, Sacred Books of the East vol. 11 (Oxford, 1881, public domain; via archive.org): Dhamma-kakka-ppavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) §§3–8; Maha-parinibbana Suttanta II.32–33, V.16–20, VI.10.
- F. Max Müller (trans.), The Dhammapada, Sacred Books of the East vol. 10 (1881, public domain; Project Gutenberg #2017): verses 1, 5, 183, 279.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Nagarjuna" (dates, MMK, svabhava); "Vasubandhu" (dates, vijnaptimatra, three natures, idealism debate); "Japanese Pure Land Philosophy" (sutras, Tanluan, Shandao, Honen, Shinran, self-power and Other Power); "Chan Buddhism" (Huike, Huineng, Linji, Huichang suppression, gong'an, McRae and Faure on "invention of tradition"; Xuanzang's dates).
- S. Dhammika, The Edicts of King Asoka (Buddhist Publication Society, Wheel 386/387, 1993), accesstoinsight.org, reproduced for free distribution under the BPS licence: Rock Edicts XII and XIII; Ashoka's dates; Prinsep's decipherment (1837).
- Traditional accounts of the councils and the schools, with scholarly caveats, from the standard literature summarised in Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (1998); Gandhari as a vehicle of early Buddhist literature: gandhari.org.
- Nalanda University, "History and Revival" (founding by Kumaragupta in 427 CE, scale, end in the 12th century).
- United Nations, "Day of Vesak" (resolution 54/115, 1999); Plum Village, "Thich Nhat Hanh" (dates, stroke, death); UMass Memorial Health, Center for Mindfulness (MBSR, 1979).
- M. Goyal et al., "Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis," JAMA Internal Medicine 174(3), 2014, 357–68.
- Human Rights Watch, Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma (December 2007); World Reports 2015, 2019 and 2020 (Sri Lanka chapters) and 2026 (China chapter).
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, report A/HRC/39/64 (12 September 2018); International Court of Justice, The Gambia v. Myanmar, case page (accessed October 2026).
- Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Article 9 (parliament.lk).
- Central Tibetan Administration (tibet.net): "Statement Affirming the Continuation of the Institution of Dalai Lama" (dated 21 May 2025, released 2 July 2025) and "About CTA"; UN special procedures communication AL CHN 12/2020 (2 June 2020) on Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5; China Daily, "Dalai Lama clique up to its tricks again" (4 June 2025), for the PRC position.
- Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" and "Buddhist population change" (9 June 2025); "Measuring Religion in China" (30 August 2023).
- Dates for the spread to Korea and Japan, Samye, the Dalai Lama title (1578), the 14th Dalai Lama's birth and Nobel Prize, Olcott and Dharmapala, Ambedkar's 1956 conversion and the Lotus Sutra translation of 406 follow standard reference accounts and were cross-checked where possible against the sources above.

Go deeper
- 📘 What the Buddha Taught — Walpola Rahula (1959). A Sri Lankan monk-scholar's short, clear account of the core teachings from the Pali texts; still the best first book.
- 📘 The Foundations of Buddhism — Rupert Gethin (1998). The best one-volume scholarly introduction to the shared ideas and practices of all the schools.
- 📘 In the Buddha's Words — Bhikkhu Bodhi (2005). An anthology of the Pali discourses arranged by theme, with introductions; the way to read the sources themselves.
- 📘 Mahayana Buddhism — Paul Williams (2nd ed., 2008). The standard guide to the Great Vehicle, from Madhyamaka and Yogacara to Pure Land and Tibet.
- 📘 The Making of Buddhist Modernism — David McMahan (2008). How Buddhism was reinvented in conversation with science and the West; essential context for mindfulness.
- 📘 McMindfulness — Ronald Purser (2019). The sharpest critique of the corporate mindfulness boom; read it alongside Goyal et al.
- 🌐 Access to Insight — thousands of free translations of Pali texts, including the first sermon (SN 56.11) and the discourse on not-self (SN 22.59), offered for free distribution.
- 🌐 Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" — the numbers, country by country.
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: The World's Religions, One Page Each; Bodhidharma; Meditation, Without the Woo; How the Sacred Texts Were Written; Mysticism 101; Pilgrimage; and in this series, China and Japan: Confucianism, Daoism and Shinto.