Buddhism in India
"Sometime during the sixth century BC a solitary, wandering ascetic
sat to meditate beneath a shady tree, resolving not to rise until he had attained
the ultimate knowledge of spiritual enlightenment. Thus began Buddhism, one
of the world's great religions and pilgrimage traditions."
It
began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.), a prince from
the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal.
Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned his home and wandered forth as a
religious beggar, searching for the meaning of existence. The stories of his
search presuppose the Jain tradition, as Gautama was for a time a practitioner
of intense austerity, at one point almost starving himself to death. He decided,
however, that self-torture weakened his mind while failing to advance him to
enlightenment and therefore turned to a milder style of renunciation and concentrated
on advanced meditation techniques.
Eventually, under a tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he resolved
to stir no farther until he had solved the mystery of existence. Breaking through
the final barriers, he achieved the knowledge that he later expressed as the
Four Noble Truths: all of life is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire;
the end of desire leads to the end of suffering; and the means to end desire
is a path of discipline and meditation. Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened
one, and he spent the remainder of his life traveling about northeast India
converting large numbers of disciples. At the age of eighty, the Buddha achieved
his final passing away (parinirvana) and died, leaving a thriving monastic order
and a dedicated lay community to continue his work.
By the third century B.C., the still-young religion based on the Buddha's teachings
was being spread throughout South Asia through the agency of the Mauryan Empire
(ca. 326-184 B.C.; see The Mauryan Empire, ch. 1). By the seventh century A.D.,
having spread throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhism probably had
the largest religious following in the world.
For centuries Indian royalty and merchants patronized Buddhist monasteries and
raised beautiful, hemispherical stone structures called stupas over the relics
of the Buddha in reverence to his memory. Since the 1840s, archaeology has revealed
the huge impact of Buddhist art, iconography, and architecture in India. The
monastery complex at Nalanda in Bihar, in ruins in 1993, was a world center
for Buddhist philosophy and religion until the thirteenth century.
But by the thirteenth century, when Turkic invaders destroyed the remaining
monasteries on the plains,
Buddhism
as an organized religion had practically disappeared from India. It survived
only in Bhutan and Sikkim, both of which were then independent Himalayan kingdoms;
among tribal groups in the mountains of northeast India; and in Sri Lanka.
The reasons for this disappearance are unclear, and they are many: shifts in
royal patronage from Buddhist to Hindu religious institutions; a constant intellectual
struggle with dynamic Hindu intellectual schools, which eventually triumphed;
and slow adoption of popular religious forms by Buddhists while Hindu monastic
communities grew up with the same style of discipline as the Buddhists, leading
to the slow but steady amalgamation of ideas and trends in the two religions.
Buddhism began a steady and dramatic comeback in India during the early twentieth
century, spurred on originally by a combination of European antiquarian and
philosophical interest and the dedicated activities of a few Indian devotees.
The foundation of the Mahabodhi Society (Society of Great Enlightenment) in
1891, originally as a force to wrest control of the Buddhist shrine at Gaya
from the hands of Hindu managers, gave a large stimulus to the popularization
of Buddhist philosophy and the importance of the religion in India's past.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1956 after some thirty years of Untouchable,
or Dalit (see Glossary), agitation when Bhimrao Ramji (B.R.) Ambedkar, leader
of the Untouchable wing within the Congress (see Glossary), announced that he
was converting to Buddhism as a way to escape from the impediments of the Hindu
caste system (see Varna, Caste, and Other Divisions, ch. 5). He brought with
him masses of Untouchables--also known as Harijans (see Glossary) or Dalits--and
members of Scheduled Castes (see Glossary), who mostly came from Maharashtra
and border areas of neighboring states and from the Agra area in Uttar Pradesh.
By the early 1990s, there were more than 5 million Buddhists in Maharashtra,
or 79 percent of the entire Buddhist community in India, almost all recent converts
from low castes. When added to longtime Buddhist populations in hill areas of
northeast India (West Bengal, Assam, Sikkim, Mizoram, and Tripura) and high
Himalayan valleys (Ladakh District in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and
northern Uttar Pradesh), and to the influx of Tibetan Buddhist refugees who
fled from Tibet with the Dalai Lama in 1959 and thereafter, the recent converts
raised the number of Buddhists in India to 6.4 million by 1991. This was a 35.9
percent increase since 1981 and made Buddhism the fifth largest religious group
in the country.
The
forms of Buddhism practiced by Himalayan communities and Tibetan refugees are
part of the Vajrayana, or "Way of the Lightning Bolt," that developed
after the seventh century A.D. as part of Mahayana (Great Path) Buddhism. Although
retaining the fundamental importance of individual spiritual advancement, the
Vajrayana stresses the intercession of bodhisattvas, or enlightened beings,
who remain in this world to aid others on the path. Until the twentieth century,
the Himalayan kingdoms supported a hierarchy in which Buddhist monks, some identified
from birth as bodhisattvas, occupied the highest positions in society.
INITIAL SPREAD: Initially, Buddhism remained one of the many small sects
in India. The main breakthrough came when King Asoka (ca. 270-232 BCE) converted
to Buddhism. He did not make it a state religion, but supported all ethical
religions. He organised the spreading of Buddhism throughout India, but also
beyond; most importantly to Shri Lanka. This occurred after the Third Council.
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