South Asia: The Original Home of Buddhism

- by Wes Kawato

Did you know that Buddhism originated in India, not East Asia, where it is now more widely accepted? Originally it was a reform movement within Hinduism. It began perhaps 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, during a time when India was divided into numerous petty kingdoms. The founder of Buddhism, Siddharta Guatama, was a Hindu prince of one of India's petty kingdoms. Historians can't agree on the date of Siddharta's birth or the date of his death. They aren't even sure to which royal family Siddharta belonged. One of the few things to which historians agree is that Siddharta came from a small Indian kingdom near today's border with Nepal. That is because Siddharta spoke Pali, a language once spoken in the part of India just south of Nepal.

So little is known about Siddharta Guatama because very little was written about him during his lifetime.

What we know about the life of Siddharta Guatama comes from documents written centuries after his death. Many historians believe these documents were oral traditions that eventually were put in written form. According to these oral traditions, Siddharta Guatama lived a sheltered life until age 35, when he saw human suffering for the first time. That caused him to go on a search for spiritual truth. He tried self-gratification and self-mortification, but found no satisfaction in either extreme. Siddharta then meditated under a fig tree until a "middle path" between these two extremes was revealed to him. That is when he became known as the "Buddha," or "enlightened one."

After Buddha's death, his closest disciples held a council to codify the teaching of their dead leader. This meeting probably took place between 500 B.C. and 400 B.C. This uncertainty results from the lack of written records dating back to this period. This Buddhist council produced two oral records, the "Dharma," which consisted of the spiritual teachings of the Buddha, and the "Vinya," which consisted of the rules for organizing a Buddhist monastery. Over the years sects developed among the followers of Buddha. The key doctrinal issue was the importance of monastic life in achieving enlightenment. Some Buddhists believed it was almost impossible to be enlightened without being a monk.

The Spread of Buddhism in South Asia
Buddhism spread widely in India only after Ashoka the Great, who ruled the Mauryan Empire from 273 to 232 B.C., came to power. He converted from Hinduism to Buddhism after being horrified by his own bloody conquest of the Kingdom of Kalinga, in what is now the Indian state of Orissa. In Buddhism Ashoka found a religion that taught peace and tranquility. Ashoka soon sent missionaries around the world to spread this religion. We know from historical records that some of these missionaries went as far as Afghanistan, Egypt, and Greece, though most of Ashoka's missionaries traveled to other parts of South Asia. By the end of his reign Buddhism was practiced in all parts of India.

Around 100 B.C. a Buddhist council was called because a doctrinal dispute had arisen because some Buddhist sects had accepted doctrinal texts written after a previous Buddhist council. This council was given the task of deciding which texts were orthodox and which were heretical. The council majority voted to translate all Buddhist texts into Sanskrit from the original Pali language. A minority faction argued that the Buddha had forbidden the translation of his teachings into non-Pali languages. The anti-translation faction walked out of the council and later formed the Theravada sect of Buddhism. The majority would later form the Mahayana sect of Buddhism.

Aft1er the council, the Theravada sect would seek refuge in Sri Lanka, fearing persecution from the Mahayana sect. Missionaries sent out by King Ashoka had converted Sri Lanka to Buddhism 150 years earlier. From Sri Lanka Theravada Buddhism would spread to Southeast Asia in the years to come.

Mahayana missionaries took their brand of Buddhism to China, where, after a couple of setbacks, it became widely accepted. The first big wave of Chinese conversions to Buddhism happened around the time of the birth of Christ. Chinese Buddhist missionaries would eventually spread the Mahayana sect of their faith to Korea in A.D. 372 and Japan in A.D. 500.

Buddhism Becomes An East Asian Religion
As Buddhism took root in the Far East, it was slow1ly dying in India, the land of its birth. By A.D. 1000 an emphasis on monasticism had turned Buddhism into an elitist religion, cut off from the masses. A new form of Hinduism was also spreading across India, one that accepted Buddha as a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Then in A.D. 1192, Muslim invaders began conquering India. These invaders sacked Buddhist monasteries, killing monks or forcing them to flee. This loss of leadership caused the extinction of Buddhism in most of India, because the religion had few followers outside the upper classes. By A.D. 1300 only a few Indian villages in the Himalaya Mountains still had Buddhist majorities. The Muslim armies had bypassed these villages. Today, these are the regions of South Asia where Buddhism remains strong. Buddhism wouldn't resume spreading in India again until the 1890s, when the religion took root among India's untouchables. There was another wave of untouchables converting to Buddhism in 1956.

Buddhism in the West
For most of its existence Buddhism had been an Asian religion. Around 250 B.C. Buddhist missionaries had reached Greece and Egypt, but they had won few converts. Years later, Roman era writers mentioned the existence of small Buddhist communities in the Eastern Roman Empire, but those communities quickly died out.

The real spread of Buddhism into the West began after A.D. 1800, when European scholars began studying Buddhist documents. Some of these scholars took these documents back to their home countries and translated them into European languages. But for most of these scholars Buddhism was only a matter of intellectual curiosity. There was no thought of converting to Buddhism. Frederick Nietzsche, in 1895, became the first western scholar to practice Buddhism. But before 1960 people like Nietzsche were the exception to the rule. Only a few scholars living in university towns practiced Buddhism prior to 1960.

In the United States, Buddhism arrived with the first Chinese immigrants to California around 1850, when the railroads employed them to build the Trans-Continental Railroad. The arrival of Japanese immigrants in California, around the 1880s, brought a second group of Buddhists to America. Heavy discrimination by the White majority prevented the spread of Buddhism beyond these Asian ethnic communities. That changed after 1945, when American servicemen, who had fought in Japan or in Korea, brought home Buddhist teachings. Such servicemen were a small minority. The Cold War was a time of severe anxiety, and many Americans were searching for peace and tranquility, which they hoped to find in Buddhism. After 1960, Buddhism took root among some members of the Boomer generation. Today there are Buddhist temples in every major city of America and seeing White Americans within these temples is common, even though Buddhists comprise less than one percent of America's population. Asians make up the majority of most American Buddhist congregations.

Buddhism Today
Today Buddhism is the majority religion of a large part of Asia, from Myanmar to Japan and from Mongolia to Thailand. Buddhism also has a strong presence in the Asian minority communities of North America and Europe, along with a few western devotees. Many of the least reached peoples live in the remote, mountainous regions of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and even Bangladesh. These are the peoples that we will devote to prayer this month.

Buddhism appeals to the human pride by preaching that a person can reach a higher state, called enlightenment, by doing good works. One of the main stumbling blocks to witnessing to a person from a Buddhist background is the doctrine of sin. Many Buddhists don't consider themselves to be sinners because they evaluate themselves like a student being graded on a curve, and not by an absolute standard. A Buddhist person believes himself to be on the road to Nirvana (i.e., a state of non-being pursued by Buddhists) if his community doesn't consider him to be a criminal.

As we pray this month, remember that few people practice pure Buddhism. Ancestor worship and Animism often gets mixed into the Buddhism practiced by most Asian people groups. The fear of shaming your ancestors becomes a form of community control that prevents exploration of other religions.

Let Us Pray...