Buddhism: Encyclopedia II - Buddhism - Buddhism after the Buddha

Buddhism - Buddhism after the Buddha

Buddhism spread slowly in India until the powerful Mauryan emperor Ashoka converted to it and actively supported it. His promotion led to construction of Buddhist religious sites and missionary efforts that spread the faith into the countries listed at the beginning of the article.

From the 1st century BCE Buddhism started to emerge, receiving influences "from popular Hindu devotional cults (bhakti), Persian and Greco-Roman theologies which filtered into India from the northwest" (Tom Lowenstein, p63). Some of these influences appear on the artistic plane with the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara. Mahayana then expanded into Central Asia and to Eastern Asia.

After about 500 CE, Buddhism showed signs of waning in India, becoming nearly extinct after about 1200 CE. This was in part due to Hinduism's revival movements such as Advaita and the rise of the bhakti movement. Over time, the local Buddhist populations gradually assimilated into Islam, hence the concentration of South Asian Islam in the far west and east of the Subcontinent.

Elements of Buddhism have remained within India to the current day: the Bauls of Bengal have a syncretic set of practices with strong emphasis on many Buddhist concepts. Other areas of India have never parted from Buddhism, including Ladakh and other areas bordering the Tibetan, Nepali and Bhutanese borders.

Buddhism also remained in the rest of the world although in Central Asia and later Indonesia it was mostly replaced by Islam. In China and Japan, it adopted aspects of the native beliefs of Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto respectively. In Tibet, the Tantric Vajrayana lineage was preserved after it disappeared in India.

Buddhism - Principal schools of Buddhist philosophy

In his lifetime, Gautam Buddha had not answered several philosophical question. On issues like whether the world is eternal or non-eternal, finite or infinite, unity or separation of the body and the soul, complete inexistence of a person after nirvana and then death, nature of the Supreme Truth, etc, the Buddha had remained silent. Hence the Buddhist missionaries often faced philosophical questions from other religions whose answers they themselves did not know. So later Buddhists made various interpretations of Buddha's teachings and formed four major schools of thought.

• Shūnyavāda of the Mādhyamikas: this is a Mahayana school, popularized by Nagarjuna and Ashvaghosha. According to the Mādhyamikas, there is a supreme indescribable substance—Shūnyatā (lit., voidness)—which is neither true nor false. Everything in this world arises from this voidness. Hence the world is false as compared to the Shūnyatā. This concept somewhat resembles the Brahman of Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Adi Sankara. (However, Shankara had condemned Shūnyavāda to be "contradictory to all valid means of knowledge".)
• Vijñānavāda of the Yogāchāras: this is another Mahayana school, propounded by Asanga and Vasubandhu. According to them, only the consciousness (Vijñāna) is true, and all objects of this world external to the mind are false. They believe in an absolute, permanent consciousness (similar to a soul) called Ālaya Vijñāna. This branch became famous in China, Tibet, Japan and Mongolia.
• Bāhyānumeyavāda of the Sautrāntrikas: this is a Theravada school which believes in the existence of both consciousness and material objects—but believes that the external objects can only be percieved indirectly through inference by our mind (Indirect Realism).
• Bāhya-Pratyakshavāda of the Vaibhāshikas: this is another Theravada school—based on an ancient Buddhist conference in Kashmir, which also believes in the existence of both consciousness and material objects (as composed of atoms). They believe that external objects are known through direct perception (Direct Realism).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Buddhism after the Buddha", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki