Buddhism in India – Buddha
Reincarnation and the wheel
In the 500s BC, during the later part of the Vedic period in India, the idea of reincarnation became very strong among Hindus. Most people believed that after you died, you would be reborn in another form, and then reborn again, and again, forever.
Read up on Hinduism…
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But then people started to not like this idea. They didn’t want reincarnation to just go on and on forever. Wasn’t there any way to stop this; to get off the wheel of reincarnation and just be?
Siddhartha Gautama Buddha
A young Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama Buddha had an idea. He thought that you could get off the wheel of reincarnation if you were good and pure enough. He refused to be a prince anymore, and tried to spend his life being good and pure so he could get off the wheel.
Gautama Buddha had many followers during his lifetime, and after he died he had even more. Most of Buddha’s followers tried to be good while still living their normal lives – working in the fields or as soldiers, getting married, taking care of their parents and their children.
Ancient India’s economy
But some of his followers adopted a Jain idea of getting away from the world so they could work full-time on being good and pure. These people were called monks or nuns.
More about Buddhist monks and nuns
Asoka and Buddhism in India
This Buddhist inscription from Kandahar, in Afghanistan, has Greek writing at the top, translated into Aramaic at the bottom. The Mauryan Indian king Ashoka put it up about 258 BC.
In the 300s BC, one of the great Mauryan kings, Asoka, became a Buddhist, which helped Buddhism to succeed. Asoka convinced many other Indian people to become Buddhists.
Who was Asoka?
Buddhist monks started great monasteries, and some of these monasteries developed into centers of scholarship and research, like the great university at Nalanda in north-eastern India.
Nalanda and Indian science
By 200 BC, scholars were coming from as far away as China to study with the Buddhists at Nalanda.
What was going on in China?
That’s where, about 100 AD, scholars developed the numbers (1,2,3,4) we use today. But they don’t seem to have heard about the research going on in Egypt, at the University of Alexandria, at the same time.
Indian numbers
Egyptian science and math
Buddhism spreads from India to China
At first, most Buddhists were in India. But by 500 AD, under the Guptan Empire, travelling Buddhist monks spread Buddhist ideas west to the Sassanian Empire. Other Buddhist monks went east to China and other parts of East Asia.
What’s the Guptan Empire?
The Sassanian Empire
Sui Dynasty China
Travelling Buddhists also brought other Indian things like sugar with them to China. Chinese Buddhists kept on coming to India to study at the university at Nalanda.
What was Chinese Buddhism like?
Buddhism reaches Japan
Indians go back to being Hindus
Nalanda University, India – A Buddhist university
By the 600s AD most of the Buddhists in India had gone back to being Hindus again. They still remembered Buddha, but as one of many Hindu gods. In West Asia, most of the Buddhists gradually converted to the new religion of Islam.
What’s Islam about?
As Buddhism went out of fashion in India, the university at Nalanda began to be short of money and people. Instead, scholars went to the newer Islamic university at Baghdad (in modern Iraq). By the 1200s AD, Nalanda had closed down.
Medieval Islamic science
But Buddhism becomes stronger in China
In China, on the other hand, Buddhism got stronger and stronger. Soon most of the Buddhists were in China and not India. In China, just as in India, most Buddhist people continued to lead more or less ordinary lives. As in India, some Buddhist men and women left their jobs and their families in order to live in Buddhist monasteries as monks or nuns. But Chinese Buddhism was about meditation and action, not about scholarship and research. No new Buddhist universities opened there.
Zen Buddhism in China
Did you find out what you wanted to know about Buddhism in India? Let us know in the comments!
Buddhism in China
Learn by Doing – Buddhism Projects
Bibliography and further reading about Buddhism:
Woah
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Thanks, Mat!
Hi Dr. Karen,
Thanks for publishing a proud feeling era of India. The evolution of Buddhism which teaches us how to live among humans is the principle of thoughts. This buddhism spread in world but now in India buddhism is living as minority. Hope the history will come back and once again teach to Indians how to live with buddhism and science.
Once again thanks for your efforts.
Thank you! I’m glad you like our article, sir.
Dear Author,
Thank you so much for taking your time to write such a well explained, accurate, and interesting description of history relating Buddhism. Our past is an important part of our present, and reading about it not only gains knowledge about the past, but it helps us better understand the world around us. This has really helped me complete my AP World History Project. I highly appreciate your time, devotion, and support. Thank you very much :) I wish you a splendid day!
Sincerely, Stephanie
Wow, thank you, Stephanie! I’m so glad we could help. Indeed, you can’t really understand the present without knowing what went before. I’m even planning a series of articles now that relate the problems we have now to things that happened in the past.
Hi Karen, thanks for the pithy introduction to Buddhism.
I was just wondering if I could pick your brains about something? I read here (https://tinyurl.com/y7e7vupl) that Russian dolls actually originate from the Japanese depiction of an Indian bodhisattva, but tbh it sounds like quite a spurious theory..
Have you heard of this and, if so, is it true?
Thank you!
I didn’t know that story before, so thanks for sharing it! But it’s probably right. It’s on the Wikipedia page, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll. And anyway it’s easy to confirm that there really were Japanese nesting dolls before there were Russian ones, and that the Russian ones got started just after Japan was opened up, which created a fad for anything Japanese.