IB World Religions 1.3.1. Buddhism in Context: the Buddha, the Branches and the Spread of the Dhamma Notes

1.3.1. Buddhism in Context: The Buddha, the Branches and the Spread of the Dhamma

The life of the Buddha

1. Buddhists trace their tradition to a teacher known as the Buddha (the awakened one), born Siddhattha Gotama in Pali and Siddhartha Gautama in Sanskrit. Most historians place his life in the fifth century BCE, in what is now the border region of Nepal and northern India.
2. The traditional account has him born into a ruling family at Lumbini and raised in comfort, kept by his father from any sight of distress.
3. Buddhists tell of the four sights that changed him: an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic. The first three showed him what he had been shielded from, and the fourth showed him a possible response.
4. He left home, studied under meditation teachers, then practised severe asceticism for roughly six years. He abandoned it as useless, which is why Buddhists call his teaching the Middle Way, avoiding both indulgence and self-torture.
5. Buddhists hold that he reached bodhi (awakening) seated beneath a tree at Bodh Gaya, and that he gave his first discourse soon afterwards in the deer park at Sarnath.
6. He taught for some forty-five years and died at Kusinara, an event Buddhists call the parinibbana (Sanskrit parinirvana), the final passing away of one who is enlightened.

The sangha after the Buddha

1. The Buddha gathered a community, the sangha, made up of bhikkhus (monks) and later bhikkhunis (nuns), supported by lay followers who fed and housed them.
2. Buddhists hold that he appointed no successor. He is said to have told the community that the dhamma (Sanskrit dharma, his teaching and the truth it states) and the monastic discipline would be their teacher after him.
3. Tradition records a council at Rajagaha shortly after his death, at which senior monks recited the teachings and the rules from memory so that the community could agree on them.
4. Further councils followed. Disagreements about discipline and doctrine gradually produced distinct schools over the following centuries.
5. The teachings were carried orally for generations before being written. The Pali collection known as the Tipitaka (the three baskets) was committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE.
6. Ordination lineages still trace themselves back through those early communities, and in Theravada countries the sangha remains the visible centre of Buddhist life.

Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana

1. Buddhism has no single head and no single creed. Buddhists divide into broad branches, each with its own texts, practices and emphases.
2. Theravada (the way of the elders) predominates in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. It keeps the Pali canon, stresses monastic discipline, and holds up the arahant (Sanskrit arhat), the person who has reached enlightenment, as its model.
3. Mahayana (the great vehicle) predominates in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. It accepts a further body of Sanskrit sutras and holds up the bodhisattva, who postpones final Buddhahood in order to help other beings, as its model.
4. Vajrayana (the diamond vehicle), found chiefly in Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan and the Himalayan regions, builds on Mahayana teaching with tantric texts, elaborate ritual, visualization practice and close guidance from a lama (teacher).
5. Smaller schools sit inside these branches: Zen and Pure Land in East Asia, Nyingma and Gelug among Tibetans, and forest traditions across Southeast Asia.
6. The branches still recognize the same founder and the same core. Pilgrims from all of them visit the same sites in India, and monastics from different traditions now meet regularly.

The spread of the dhamma

1. Buddhism moved outward from northern India within a few centuries, carried by monks, merchants and rulers rather than by conquest.
2. The emperor Ashoka, who ruled much of the subcontinent in the third century BCE, adopted Buddhist teaching and had edicts on moral conduct carved on rocks and pillars across his territory.
3. Tradition holds that Ashoka sent his son Mahinda to Sri Lanka. Theravada took root there, and Sri Lanka later became the source of the tradition across mainland Southeast Asia.
4. Northward, the trade routes known as the Silk Road carried Buddhism into Central Asia and China from about the first century CE, and from China into Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
5. Buddhism reached Tibet from the seventh century and developed there into Vajrayana forms. In India itself it declined, and it had largely disappeared from the subcontinent by around 1200 CE.
6. Wherever it settled, Buddhism took on local material. Chinese Buddhism borrowed Daoist vocabulary, Japanese Buddhism accommodated the kami of Shinto, and Tibetan Buddhism absorbed older Himalayan ritual.

Buddhism today

1. Buddhists number several hundred million worldwide. They are concentrated in East, Southeast and South Asia, with growing communities in Europe, the Americas and Australasia.
2. In the West, Buddhism has grown through both migration and conversion. Temples serving Vietnamese, Thai or Tibetan families now sit alongside meditation centres whose members were raised in other traditions or in none.
3. Some teachers have become internationally known. The fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh carried Buddhist ideas to large audiences outside Asia.
4. Engaged Buddhism applies the teaching to social questions such as conflict, poverty and the environment. Its supporters describe it as drawing out what the tradition already contained.
5. In India, Bhimrao Ambedkar led a mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956 as a rejection of caste. The movement he began continues and counts millions of adherents.
6. Buddhist practice also reaches people who do not call themselves Buddhist, through mindfulness courses adapted for clinics and workplaces. Buddhists differ over whether this spreads the dhamma or detaches a technique from it.