Buddhism

Siddhartha Gautama was born in the foothills of the Himalayas, in what is now Nepal, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE; the traditional date of 563 BCE is probably too early. His teaching started from a diagnosis rather than metaphysics: suffering is the basic condition; it has a cause in craving; the cause can be removed; and there is a method. Everything else is commentary.

Buddhism spread across the subcontinent under Ashoka, who sent missions as far as Sri Lanka and the Hellenistic kingdoms, and from there across Asia: Theravada southward to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Mahayana northward to China, Korea, and Japan, Vajrayana into Tibet. Nalanda, founded in the fifth century CE, drew students from across Asia and was one of the largest centers of learning anywhere in the world before it was destroyed around 1200.

And then Buddhism essentially disappeared from India, its birthplace: absorbed doctrinally into Hindu traditions, deprived of royal patronage, and finally wrecked by the destruction of the monastic institutions it depended on. By the medieval period, it survived in India mainly at the margins.

Its return is one of the more remarkable stories in modern Indian history. In 1956, B.R. Ambedkar, principal architect of the Constitution and born into an untouchable caste, publicly converted to Buddhism in Nagpur along with several hundred thousand followers, framing it as a deliberate exit from a religion he held to be irredeemably tied to caste. The Navayana Buddhist movement that followed is the reason there are several million Buddhists in India today, and it is a religious movement with a directly political argument at its center.

Further reading: Richard Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism (1988). Christopher Queen and Sallie King on engaged Buddhism, for the Navayana material. Ambedkar’s own The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957).