The History of Buddhism

Siddhartha Gautama, a renunciate of the Shakya clan born in what is now southern Nepal, attained awakening (bodhi) beneath a tree at Bodh Gaya after years of ascetic practice and meditation. Traditional chronology places his life c. 563-483 BC, though modern scholarship often dates it roughly a century later. For some 45 years afterward he taught across the Gangetic plain to followers of all castes, founding both a monastic order and, unusually for the era, an order of nuns.

Location: Bodh Gaya, India

Shortly after the Buddha's death, senior disciples convened a council at Rajagaha to recite and fix his teachings. The doctrines and monastic rules were preserved orally for generations, transmitted in local dialects as the Buddha had urged — an approach that shaped Buddhism's early character as a decentralized, textual-only-later tradition.

Location: Rajagaha, India

The Mauryan emperor Ashoka, converted to Buddhism after the bloody Kalinga war, convened the Third Council at Pataliputra and dispatched missionary embassies across the subcontinent and beyond. Missions reached Sri Lanka and, tradition holds, the Hellenistic world. Ashoka's edicts, carved in rock across the empire, made Buddhism for the first time a religion of state.

Location: Pataliputra, India

Over the final centuries BC, new sutras began circulating that recast the Buddha as a transcendent being and proclaimed the bodhisattva ideal — universal liberation rather than individual awakening. This movement became Mahayana ("Great Vehicle"), which would eventually dominate East Asia, while the elder schools consolidated as Theravada in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

Location: Northwestern India

Buddhism reached China via the Silk Road, supported by Emperor Ming of Han, whose dream of a "golden man" is traditionally linked to the faith's arrival. The White Horse Temple at Luoyang, traditionally founded around 68 AD, became the first Buddhist monastery in China, beginning a centuries-long translation and adaptation process that transformed both Buddhism and Chinese philosophy.

Location: Luoyang, China

King Seong of Baekje (Korea) sent a bronze buddha image, sutras, and monks to the Japanese Yamato court, traditionally dated to 552 AD. The new religion won slow court acceptance, clashing and then blending with the native Shinto tradition — a synthesis that still defines Japanese religious life.

Location: Yamato court, Japan

After King Songtsen Gampo first introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the 7th century, the monk Padmasambhava subdued local opposition and founded Samye, the first Tibetan monastery, around 779 AD. Tibetan Buddhism developed into a distinct Vajrayana tradition with its own lineages, whose leader, the Dalai Lama, remains the faith's most recognized figure worldwide.

Location: Samye, Tibet

King Anawrahta of Pagan adopted Theravada Buddhism after his conquest of Thaton, making it the state religion of the first Burmese empire. Thereafter Theravada became the dominant tradition of mainland Southeast Asia — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos — a religious geography that persists today.

Location: Pagan, Myanmar

Turkic cavalry under the Ghurid general Bakhtiyar Khilji sacked Nalanda, the great Buddhist monastery-university that had drawn scholars from across Asia for over 700 years. The destruction marked the effective end of institutional Buddhism in the land of its birth, where the faith dwindled to small surviving communities.

Location: Bihar, India

At the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon and the Japanese Zen master Soyen Shaku presented Buddhism to a mass Western audience for the first time. The parliament opened a channel of dialogue and immigration that would carry Buddhist ideas, texts, and eventually teachers to Europe and North America.

Location: Chicago, United States

The 14th Dalai Lama, exiled from Chinese-occupied Tibet, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, symbolizing Buddhism's arrival as a global force in ethics and politics. In the same decades, diaspora communities, Western convert sanghas, and the popularization of mindfulness and Vipassana meditation carried Buddhist practice to every continent, making Buddhism one of the fastest-growing religions in the West.

Location: Oslo, Norway