Buddhism: the Buddha's teaching and its spread

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, meaning the awakened one. He taught in the Ganga plain during the mahajanapada period, and tradition presents him as a younger contemporary of Mahavira. His dates are disputed: the traditional reckoning places his life at about 563 to 483 BCE, while much recent scholarship favours a shorter chronology of roughly 480 to 400 BCE. No contemporary inscription names him, and the detailed life stories were written down centuries later, so modern accounts treat the broad outline of his teaching career as historical and the miraculous details as later tradition.

The core teaching is summarised in the Four Noble Truths: suffering exists, it has a cause in craving, it can end, and there is a path to its ending. That path, the Noble Eightfold Path, combines right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. The Buddha rejected the authority of the Vedas and the idea of a permanent soul, and he taught in the everyday language of his listeners rather than in Sanskrit alone. His monastic community, the sangha, admitted men and women, though nuns were placed under additional rules.

After the Buddha's death, his followers held councils to settle the teaching and the monastic discipline, and tradition counts councils at Rajagriha, Vaishali, and Pataliputra. Over time Buddhism divided into schools, of which the Theravada and Mahayana traditions are the best known. Under Ashoka in the third century BCE, Buddhism gained royal support and spread beyond India, and later, under the Kushanas, it travelled along Central Asian trade routes to China. Great centres of learning such as Nalanda, founded in the fifth century CE, carried Buddhist scholarship for centuries.

In India itself Buddhism gradually declined from the later first millennium CE, as royal patronage shifted and its ideas were absorbed into wider Hindu traditions, while it flourished abroad in Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, Tibet, and East Asia. Its legacy in India includes monastic universities, rock-cut architecture at sites such as Ajanta, and an ethical vocabulary of compassion and non-violence that later Indian thinkers, including Gandhi, drew upon.