History, Doctrines, and Philosophy of Buddhism

The history of Buddhism after the Buddha's death begins with a council of five hundred followers at Rajagriha, a meeting at which the versions of the Sutras — the Buddha's teachings — were established and passed on orally to his followers. The second council, held one hundred years later at Vaishali, marked a significant internal division: a liberalist current broke away from the traditionalist followers, who believed in the deeper philosophical dimensions of the Buddhist teachings and sought to promote these as the essential Buddhist doctrine. The splintering continued, and several distinct schools of Buddhism consolidated during this period.

The rise of Emperor Ashoka to power also corresponded with a more institutionalized approach to Buddhism. This meant that the first written Buddhist traditions were recorded and that Buddhist missionaries were sent to spread the Buddha's teachings — not only throughout the Indian subcontinent, but also across Eurasia and as far as Egypt and Greece.

Following the liberal sect that had broken away in the early phases of Buddhist history, Mahayana continued the liberal tradition into the 1st century BC. With new scriptures to complement the old Sutras, the liberal tradition drew on theoretical background texts such as the Perfection of Wisdom and the Pure Land Sutra. Often esoteric, these texts helped forge the two main philosophical pillars of Mahayana — Madhyamaka and Yogachara — which emerged during the same period.

Sometime in the 2nd century AD, around the year 150 AD, Buddhism was brought to China and established as a community, first at Luoyang. There it complemented the already established Chinese religions of Confucianism and Taoism. From China, Buddhism spread through Korea and then to Japan in the 6th century AD, and later — in the form of Zen Buddhism — during the 12th and 13th centuries AD. As China and Japan opened to the West during the 19th century, Buddhism began to make its way into the Western world, where it took hold especially as a philosophy and cultural practice with its own growing community of adherents.

Siddhartha Gautama is acknowledged as the founder of Buddhism. Living between the 6th and 5th centuries BC in India, Gautama was the son of a local ruler who abandoned his privileged earthly life to pursue an ascetic existence and contemplate happiness and self-enlightenment. Through deep meditation and an ascetic way of living — believed to have included surviving on as little as a single grain of rice a day — he achieved enlightenment and became known as the Buddha, meaning "The Enlightened One." The Buddha left behind a large number of disciples and followers, some of whom went on to establish their own schools and Buddhist currents.

Finding enlightenment as a means of escaping the continuous cycle of reincarnation is considered the central purpose of Buddhist belief. In order to find enlightenment, the practice of "taking refuge" is regarded as the essential Buddhist act, performed many times daily to guide the believer toward inner meditation and self-evaluation. Building on this, Buddhist religious practice emphasizes adherence to the Eightfold Path — which includes right thought, right understanding, and right speech — as well as the Five Buddhist Precepts, which are commitments such as refraining from harming living creatures and refraining from sexual misconduct.

Meditation is a religious practice frequently associated with Buddhism, though it is found most commonly within the monastic community rather than among lay believers. While meditation is a practice that some outside the monastic community do pursue, chanting Sutras is generally a more common form of religious observance among laypeople, alongside other traditional rituals and practices that have often been borrowed and adapted from other cultures.

There are three major recognized doctrines in Buddhism: Theravada ("The Speech of the Elders"), Mahayana ("The Great Vehicle"), and Vajrayana ("The Diamond Vehicle").

Theravada represents the initial teaching of the earliest disciples and is considered the most conservative of all three doctrines, remaining closest to the Buddha's own teachings and traditions.