Tradition · śramaṇa religion · India
Buddhism
Buddhism is a śramaṇa tradition founded by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, in the eastern Gangetic plain of India in the 6th or 5th century BCE. It teaches the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as a route out of dukkha (suffering) toward nirvana, the extinction of craving and rebirth. It rejects a permanent self (anatta) and a creator deity, holding that all phenomena are impermanent and dependently arisen. The tradition split into Theravada, preserved in Pali and dominant in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia; Mahayana, which developed the bodhisattva ideal and shaped East Asian Buddhism; and Vajrayana, the tantric stream centred in Tibet and the Himalayas.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
Worth knowing
The Buddha is claimed by Vaishnava tradition as the ninth avatara of Vishnu, a theological absorption that both honoured and displaced him. Buddhism's near-disappearance from India was reversed in the 20th century by B.R. Ambedkar's 1956 mass conversion of Dalits at Nagpur, founding the Navayana or Neo-Buddhist movement now numbering several million.
Dates for the Buddha's life remain contested, with the traditional 563–483 BCE increasingly displaced by scholarly estimates of c. 480–400 BCE.
Connections (4)
- Craft tradition ofMathurā
Mathura was a major Buddhist centre from the 3rd century BCE through the Kushana period, when its red sandstone workshops produced some of the earliest anthropomorphic Buddha images alongside Jain and Hindu icons. It housed dozens of stupas and monasteries, and Xuanzang in the 7th century still recorded thousands of resident monks.
- Alternative toHinduism
The śramaṇa challenge is what forced the older tradition to argue. Buddhism and Jainism rejected the Vedas' authority, sacrifice and the priesthood, and the answers worked out against them — the Upanishadic turn inward, the six darśanas' formal systems, Śankara's Advaita — are why Hinduism has a philosophical literature at all. Śankara was accused of being a Buddhist in disguise for how much of the method he took, which is roughly the compliment the argument deserves.
- In the same set asJainism
The two śramaṇa religions began in the same generation, in the same eastern Gangetic country, arguing with the same opponents and largely with each other. Both rejected Vedic authority, sacrifice and the priesthood; both organised as monastic orders with lay supporters; both were carried by merchants rather than kings at first. They diverged on what liberation requires — the Jain answer is austerity carried to its limit, the Buddhist a middle way that explicitly rejects that — and on whether a soul exists to be liberated.
- Teaching lineageTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
He is the most widely recognised living Buddhist teacher, and the exile has made India the working centre of Tibetan Buddhism: the great Gelug colleges of Drepung, Ganden and Sera were re-founded in settlements in Karnataka, and the Kalachakra is given at Bodh Gaya. His Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and his dialogues with scientists from 1987 carried the tradition into arguments — non-violence, mind, ethics — that reach well past its own adherents.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Buddhism”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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