Buddhism A–Z
Explore the rich history of Buddhism
A Cambodian mural of the Buddha teaching his disciples. After his enlightenment, he went to Sarnath, where in his first sermon he taught the four noble truths. Photo by robertharding / Alamy Stock Photo

Today Buddhism is practiced worldwide and claims approximately 520 million followers.

What had begun in the fifth century BCE with Siddhartha’s personal quest for peace and the birth of his sangha would continue to grow. Though initially unsure that he could effectively teach others what he had learned through his efforts, he eventually did so, starting with former meditative compatriots who were at first dubious of his attainment but were quickly convinced by his new countenance and focus. Initially, a group of five constituted his first sangha or spiritual community, their numbers rising as the Buddha continued to travel and teach for the next forty-five years, right up until his passing. Buddhism, as a way of life for monastics and laypeople alike, was becoming established.

This is in large part because of the Buddha’s open-handed approach to teaching, informed by the principle of upaya (Sanskrit/Pali), or “skillful means” — that people should be taught according to their capabilities and interests. Buddhism is not “one size fits all”; rather, recognizing that faculties will differ from person to person, Buddhism has sought from the beginning to offer helpful teachings to everyone, no matter their background or interests.

Growth, and Development of the Mahayana

Buddhism would in time be on its way to becoming a major world religion, in large part thanks to its adoption as India’s state religion in the third century BCE by emperor Ashoka the Great. Ashoka deployed monastics throughout India and beyond — Ceylon, Burma, Nepal, Tibet, central Asia, China, Japan, and so on — to share the Buddhist teachings, and by the second century BCE, it began to take on new flavors and nuances, and indeed a new form. 

It is this form of Buddhism that ended up being exported to East Asia when, according to legend, the great teacher Bodhidharma traveled from India to China around the fifth or sixth century. This new form would develop further over the next couple of centuries, becoming known as Mahayana (Sanskrit: “Great Vehicle”), which comprises Chan, Zen, Pure Land, Nichiren, Tibetan, and other schools.

Mahayanists have, at times, been critical of the foundational Buddhism that had come before it, referring to it as a “lesser” vehicle for realization because it did not place as much emphasis on practicing the dharma for the sake and benefit of others as it did for oneself. But Damien Keown and Charles S. Prebish, editors of Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, assert that modern scholarship suggests that “ideas and practices later characterized as ‘Mahayana’ were current, if not universally accepted, in many of the early schools [of Buddhism]. […] Indeed, in the earliest days of the tradition, the only clear way of distinguishing ‘Mahayana’ Buddhists from their more conservative colleagues would have been to ask the question, ‘Which of the sutras [a Sanskrit word that originally meant string or thread, now commonly used to refer to the discourses of Shakyamuni Buddha] do you find the most helpful and inspiring?’”  

Early sutras had all been recorded in the Pali language and attributed to the Buddha, but around the second or first century BCE, at the time the earliest Buddhist teachings were being committed to writing, a new cycle of sutras began to appear called Prajnaparamita (Sanskrit: Perfection of Wisdom) sutras. These emphasized burgeoning Mahayana ideas such as sunyata (the intrinsic emptiness of all things), buddhanature (our true nature, so often obscured by Buddhism’s traditionally recognized “defilements” or “three poisons” of greed, anger, and ignorance), and the path of the bodhisattva —  a being whose aim is not just personal liberation but the attainment of perfect buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. This concept was present in the earliest teachings, but the Mahayana sutras took what had been a historical description of a future buddha and transformed it into an ideal motivation, something to which all practitioners could aspire.

While the Mahayana sutras are clearly not the direct oral teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, they are regarded by followers of the Mahayana as being no less, and perhaps more, important than the Pali texts.

Continued Spread and Evolution of Mahayana and Vajrayana

In the first century CE, the Mahayana would begin to spread from India and Central Asia into Tibet, China, and Japan, developing by the fourth century CE into the Vajrayana (Sanskrit, the “indestructible vehicle”), in which the basic motivation is to recognize the true nature of our own minds, and the true nature of the environment and all beings. By the eighth century in India, Mahayana and the Vajrayana would experience a boon time, just as Buddhism had worldwide in China, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia over the previous few hundred years, with the creation of new monasteries, learning institutions, and schools. 

The eighth century also saw the birth of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, with the other major schools to come: the Sakya Order and the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism in the eleventh century, and the Gelugpa order in the fourteenth. 

Meanwhile, in the thirteenth century, Nichiren Daishonin, a prominent Japanese priest uniquely devoted to the Lotus Sutra, founded the school that bears his name.

Nichiren Buddhism can be broadly divided into two factions that differ fundamentally in their interpretation of Nichiren. One school, Nichirenshu, reveres him as a bodhisattva and great teacher, while the other, Nichiren Shoshu, considers him an actual buddha heralding a new era.

Buddhism Moves Westward

By the nineteenth century, with Buddhist hotspots well established throughout the rest of the world, the dharma began finally to come to the West, with scholars devoting themselves to it and, in time, practitioners and communities. With California’s mid-century Gold Rush came Chinese immigrants, and by 1853, the first American Buddhist temple had been founded in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As immigrants from China and Japan came to the American West, Buddhism’s footprint continued to grow, resulting in the creation of hundreds of Chinese Buddhist temples. The year 1898 saw the founding of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, the first Pure Land (Jodo Shinshu) Buddhist temple on the U.S. mainland. Hawaii’s first Buddhist temple, of the Shin Buddhist school, would be established in the following year.

The next hundred years would be a boom time for Buddhism and Buddhist institutions in the US, but not without major challenges. Members of the new Buddhist communities that immigrants had given birth to continued tending to their practices while also, at times, enduring all manner of xenophobic horrors as they tried to build their lives in a new homeland that was sometimes inhospitable. Perhaps the most striking example of this would be the internment, during World War II, of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans on the U.S. West Coast, who, as author Funie Hsu writes, were “forced into barren camps because of the ‘suspicious’ nature of their culture and spirituality.” As Funie Hsu wrote for Lion’s Roar in her article, “We’ve Been Here All Along”:

Asians and Asian American Buddhists have a rightful, distinct historical claim to Buddhism. It has been rooted in our cultures for thousands of years. When it is said that Buddhism has been practiced for over 2,500 years, it is important to consider who has been persistently maintaining the practice for millennia: Asians, and more recently, Asian Americans. It is because of our physical, emotional, and spiritual labor, our diligent cultivation of the practice through time and through histories of oppression, that Buddhism has persisted to the current time period and can be shared with non-Asian practitioners. This is historical fact.

Though Buddhists of Asian descent and their religion were largely underappreciated, if not denigrated, by the white American mainstream, they continued on, practicing and building community while their religion was inspiring new champions among the US establishment. Being lauded by the American Transcendentalists and Theosophists in the 1870s, featured at 1893’s World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago (during which the first American was ordained into the sangha), and by the mid-1900s, evolving into a full-fledged subject of concern to American intellectuals and academics and the Beat movement — all this would fuel a growing fascination with Buddhism among non-immigrant student youth and in the wider Western culture that would be ongoing. An American Religious Identity Survey from the time noted that “the number of [Buddhist] adherents rose by 170 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone. As of 2020, Buddhists would make up 1% of the U.S. population.

By 2025, Buddhists worldwide should total some 561 million, up from 69 million in 1800, and 127 million in 1900.

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Buddhism A–Z

Explore essential Buddhist terms, concepts, and traditions.