Author: Sujoy Dhar
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: May 10, 2006
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1694962,001100020016.htm
Some time during the sixth century BC, a wandering
ascetic sat to meditate under a tree in the vast plains of northern India,
resolving not to rise until he had attained the ultimate knowledge of spiritual
enlightenment.
Thus began Buddhism, one of the world's great
religions that originated in India and still exerts a magnetic pull for devotees
the world over.
The religion that preaches peace, tolerance
and non-violence has found many takers in an increasingly anarchic world and
thousands of pilgrims from Japan, Sri Lanka and increasingly from countries
like the US wing their way to India to see for themselves where the Buddha
started life from.
Buddhism today has made deep impact in places
like the US.
One consequence of Hollywood attention from
people like Richard Gere, who found peace in Buddhism and whose emotional
explorations took him from Zen to Tibetan Buddhism as enunciated by the Dalai
Lama - is that Buddhism, especially the Tibetan strain, has entered mainstream
America.
Madison Avenue uses Buddhist lingo to sell
goods, and Buddhist terminology crops up on The Simpsons and other high-profile
television shows.
In fact, Buddhism is sometimes referred to
as one of India's better-known exports to the world.
The stream of people from across the world
to the Buddhist centres in India continues.
In February this year, the spiritual head
of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, inaugurated a three-day international conference
to mark the 2550th death anniversary of the Buddha near the site of the ancient
university of Nalanda in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
Hundreds of delegates from 25 countries attended.
They also visited other Buddhist pilgrim sites
like Bodh Gaya, the birthplace of Buddhism, to participate in the Maha Nirvan,
or death anniversary commemorations.
It's a story that started an age ago.
Buddhism began with the life of Siddhartha
Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.),a prince from the small Shakya kingdom located
in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal.
Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned
his home and wandered forth as a religious beggar, searching for the meaning
of existence.
The stories of his search presuppose the Jain
tradition - the religion of 'ahimsa' or non- violence started by Lord Mahavira
- as Gautama was for a time a practitioner of intense austerity, at one point
starving himself almost to death.
He decided, however, that self-torture weakened
his mind while failing to advance him to enlightenment and therefore turned
to a milder style of renunciation and concentrated on advanced meditation
techniques -the famous middle path of Buddhism.
Eventually, under a tree in the forests of
Gaya (in modern Bihar), he resolved to stir no farther until he had solved
the mystery of existence.
Breaking through the final barriers, he achieved
the knowledge that he later expressed as the Four Noble Truths: all of life
is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the end of desire leads to
the end of suffering; and the means to end desire is a path of discipline
and meditation.
Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened
one and he spent the remainder of his life travelling about northeast India,
converting large numbers of disciples.
At the age of 80, the Buddha achieved his
final passing away (parinirvana) and died, leaving a thriving monastic order
and a dedicated lay community to continue his work.
By the third century BC, the still-young religion
based on the Buddha's teachings was being spread throughout South Asia through
the agency of the Mauryan Empire (ca. 326-184 BC).
By the seventh century AD, having spread throughout
East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhism probably had the largest religious
following in the world.
Indian King Ashoka (273-232 BC), the grandson
of the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, demonstrated his conversion to Buddhism
by vigorously promulgating the religion across India.
His edicts were carved on pillars of stone
and wood, from Bengal to Afghanistan and into the south to Sri Lanka.
For centuries, Indian royalty and merchants
patronised Buddhist monasteries and raised beautiful, hemispherical stone
structures called stupas over the relics of the Buddha in reverence to his
memory.
Since the 1840s, archaeology has revealed
the huge impact of Buddhist art, iconography, and architecture in India.
The monastery complex at Nalanda in Bihar
was a world centre for Buddhist philosophy and religion until the thirteenth
century.
But by the thirteenth century, when invaders
destroyed the remaining monasteries on the plains, Buddhism as an organised
religion had practically disappeared from India.
It survived only in Bhutan and now northeast
Indian state of Sikkim, both of which were then independent Himalayan kingdoms,
among tribal groups in the mountains of northeast India and in Sri Lanka.
The reasons for this disappearance are unclear,
and they are many.
Shifts in royal patronage from Buddhist to
Hindu religious institutions; a constant intellectual struggle with dynamic
Hindu intellectual schools, which eventually triumphed and slow adoption of
popular religious forms by Buddhists while Hindu monastic communities grew
up with the same style of discipline as the Buddhists, leading to the slow
but steady amalgamation of ideas and trends in the two religions.
Buddhism began a steady and dramatic comeback
in India during the early twentieth century, spurred on originally by a combination
of European antiquarian and philosophical interest and the dedicated activities
of a few Indian devotees.
The foundation of the Mahabodhi Society (Society
of Great Enlightenment) in 1891, originally as a force to wrest control of
the Buddhist shrine at Gaya from the hands of Hindu managers, gave a large
stimulus to the popularisation of Buddhist philosophy and the importance of
the religion in India's past.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1956 after
some 30 years of the Untouchable, or Dalit, agitation when Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,
leader of the untouchable wing within the Congress party, announced that he
was converting to Buddhism as a way to escape from the impediments of the
Hindu caste system.
He brought with him masses of untouchables,
also known as Harijans or Dalits and members of Scheduled Castes, who mostly
came from western state of Maharashtra and from the Agra area in Uttar Pradesh.
Buddhist sites in India are a prime attraction
for tourists across the world. There are between four and 16 principal Buddhist
pilgrimage sites in India, with the most important located primarily in India's
Ganges valley.
Lumbini, for instance, is one of the most
important places of Buddhist pilgrimage located near the Nepal-India border.
This is where Buddha was born to a royal family.
Another must visit site for pilgrims and tourists
is Bodh Gaya where Buddha attained enlightenment at the age of 29.
The Mahabodhi Temple marks Bodhgaya. A thriving
Monastic Order continues in the area today.
Sarnath is another place in the valley where
Buddha proclaimed the law of faith while Nalanda is important both because
it was blessed with the presence of the Buddha and because of the famous monastic
university that developed there.
Other commemorative monuments to the spread
in Buddhism in India include Sanchi, Bharhut, Amaravati, and Nagarjunakonda
where great Buddhist stupas and Buddhist university sites remain.
Famous Buddhist cave temples, Ajanta, Ellora,
Kanheri and Karli in western India are also major attractions as living symbols
of a religion that has more meaning now than perhaps ever before.
