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Thinking about Buddhism as a religious tradition
requires us to keep in mind its deep roots as well as its wide branches.
The roots of Buddhism stretch back in time
to about the fifth century BCE in a time of great social, economic,
and political change Buddhism's beginnings were profoundly
shaped by these conditions of changed in ancient India,
but Buddhism also represents a distinctive and innovative response
to these same conditions.
While Buddhism has its historical roots in India reverence for the Buddha--
Buddhist thought and practice, and Buddhist institutions--
spread first throughout Asia and then across the entire world.
Thus to understand Buddhism as a religion we always
have to consider its deep roots in time, as well as its wide branches in space.
Buddhists see the origins of their religious traditions
in the life of a prince named Siddhartha Gautama.
Buddhist accounts of his life portray him
as leaving behind his royal status, his family, as well as his palace,
to set out to find answers to deep questions about suffering
and its causes as well as to find out whether freedom
from suffering and death is possible.
After years of searching and effort he discovered what he was seeking
and this discovery is encapsulated in the epithet, Buddha, the awakened one.
The name Buddha-- a name that no parent ever gave--
indicates that the Buddha is to us as we are to people who are asleep.
The name is a celebration of his achievement.
On the basis of what he discovered the Buddha began
to teach the Dharma, truth with a capital T.
And the diversity of Buddhist thought, over the ages across Asia,
represents the efforts of countless men and women
to understand and realize this truth and especially
to understand and realize what the Buddha taught us
about reality and human flourishing.
The Buddha not only taught ideas, but also a way of life.
The Buddha established institutions that grounded the community that
developed around him and teachings that provided guidance to that community
on how to live, so that its members could achieve enlightenment themselves.
Those who set out to live as the Buddha taught are called the Sangha.
From the beginning the Buddha's disciples
included both female and male monastics as well as male and female laypeople.
This way of life and these institutions were enduring
but they also proved to be very adaptable to new settings
and circumstances.
As early as the first century the tradition began to travel over the Silk
Road into West and Central Asia, and by the eighth century Buddhism was well
established in China, Korea, .
And Japan Buddhism also spread south across India to Sri Lanka,
and to Southeast Asia from Burma to Vietnam and Java.
This spread of Buddhism across Asia enriched the Buddhist heritage
by the addition of new texts into the canons of Buddhist scriptures
and in this regard Buddhists have had more open canons
than have Christians and Muslims.
In time some Buddhist communities also developed
dual canons in which one portion of scripture
was interpreted in the light of the subsequent canon of scriptures that
was deemed to be closer to the intentions of the Buddha
as a teacher Buddhist's dual canons are analogous to the combination
of the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Christian Bible,
or the Quran-- in relation to the texts of other peoples of the book.
The Buddhist heritage was also greatly enriched
by the translation of Buddhist scriptures
into many different languages, including Pali and Sanskrit in South
and Southeast Asia, to Tibetan and Chinese in Central and East Asia.
The translation of Buddhist scriptures into different languages
was always an enormous project since the canonical collections
of texts that carry the Buddha's teachings can
include thousands of individual texts.
The complexity and diversity of Buddhist thought and practice--
the richness of its character in local settings--
are so pronounced that when Europeans first encountered Buddhists
in their explorations at the beginning of the colonial,
age it took them quite a while to realize
that the religion they encountered in Sri Lanka
was historically related to what they saw in Japan.
And yet amidst all the diversity and complexity
of ideas, practices, experiences, values, and institutions,
we can see that Buddhists still have much in common and that they share,
especially, a sustained attentiveness to suffering and the stopping
of suffering.
Just as the Buddha said about his long career of teaching,
"Both formally, and now, it is only suffering and the stopping
of suffering that I describe."
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