From medieval China to Civil Rights–era America, the teachings and practice of Buddhism have evolved over the centuries in a dynamic dance between tradition and adaptation. While the dharma is constantly changing, the Buddha’s core teachings have preserved their authenticity. 

There are not only many different Buddhist lineages around the world today but also many different ways of walking the Buddhist path. While many people practice Buddhism as their religion—with a focus on faith, scripture study, and ritual—others consider Buddhism to be more of a philosophy or way of life. 

The variety of Buddhist traditions across the globe is astonishing. In this deck, we’ll explore both the universal elements of Buddhism across traditions and its unique expressions across diverse cultures. Learn how Buddhism spread worldwide and what that means for those of us interested in it now.

Discover Deck 4: 

How did Buddhism become a global religion? An overview. The Buddha’s teachings spread from what is now northwestern India, starting in the first millennium BCE. 

Early Buddhist history: the councils When the Buddha died, one of his senior disciples convened a council of 500 monks to determine the way forward without their teacher. 

Buddhism in Southeast Asia A look at the origins of how Buddhism became the most widely practiced religion in many Southeast Asian countries. 

To China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam: Buddhism in East Asia The Silk Road took Buddhist monks to China and beyond. 

Tibet and the Himalayas Long after the Buddha’s death, his teachings made their way to Tibet and blended with the indigenous Bon religion to form what is now the Vajrayana (“diamond way”) tradition. 

Buddhism comes to America From the Chinese immigrants of the gold rush to the transcendentalists to the Beat poets, here’s an overview of the birth of American Buddhism. 

Are there different kinds of Buddhism? Many schools and sects across the globe base their practices on the Buddha’s teachings, but they are often grouped into two major traditions.

Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, or a way of life? The short answer: all of the above. 

Is there a Buddhist Bible? Each Buddhist tradition has its own set of foundational texts. 

Are there Buddhist saints? Yes. In Buddhism, saints are beings who become fully enlightened. 

What is a Buddhist service like? Buddhist rituals vary widely, but they often include chanting and prayer. 

Recommended Reading: 

• Buddhist History for Buddhist Practitioners, by Rita M. Gross 
• A Brief History of Buddhism, by Sherab Chodzin Kohn
• The Lost Art of Reading Scripture, by Karen Armstrong 
• Milarepa: From Magician to Tibetan Saint, by Julia Lawless and Judith Allan  
• Revisiting Ritual, by Anne C. Klein 

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The spread of Buddhism beyond northern India began during the reign (c. 268–232 BCE) of Ashoka, whose empire included most of today’s India and a large part of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries to all parts of his empire, to Sri Lanka, and as far away as Egypt and Greece.

Under Ashoka’s rule, Buddhism was established in Gandhara (the ancient name for the region of the Peshawar and Swat valleys of today’s Pakistan) and spread west from there into central Asia. The artists of Gandhara and central Asia produced exquisite Buddhist art, including what may be the earliest depictions of the historical Buddha.

In the first century CE, Buddhist missionaries from Gandhara and central Asia began following merchants traveling east on the Silk Road into northern China. At the same time, monks from India traveled, mostly by sea, to southern China and southeast Asia, including Indonesia.

Chinese Buddhism, which developed into several unique schools such as Pure Land and Chan (Zen), was introduced to the Korean Peninsula in the 4th century and to Japan (initially by Korean monks) in the 7th century.

In 641 a Chinese princess was given in marriage to the king of Tibet, and she introduced Buddhism to the Tibetan court. However, most of the first Buddhist teachers in Tibet were associated with Indian lineages.

Buddhism in southeast Asia―Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand―came to be dominated by Theravada, a tradition that was brought to Sri Lanka. Both Theravada and Chinese forms of Buddhism (Zen and Pure Land) are found in Vietnam.

Asian immigrants brought Buddhism to North America in the 19th century. At the same time, scholars in European colonies in Asia began producing translations of Buddhist texts, which drew the attention of philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the 20th century, increasing numbers of non-Asian westerners began to practice Buddhism.

In time Buddhism would disappear from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and very nearly from Indonesia, although it has been reintroduced to India and Indonesia in modern times. Today, some 500 million people practice Buddhism worldwide, with nearly 1.5 million in the United States.

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The assembled monks agreed that these recitations were accurate and that the Buddha’s teachings would be preserved by memorizing and chanting them. There was precedent for this method: the Vedas, ancient texts associated with Hinduism, had been passed on orally for centuries. But while early generations of Buddhist monks and nuns probably did memorize and chant the Buddha’s teachings, some historians question whether this First Buddhist Council actually took place.

There is more agreement that a Second Buddhist Council took place about 70 years after the first. It marked the first significant division of the Buddhist sangha into two major schools, Sthaviravada (“school of the elders”) and Mahasanghika (“great assembly”). The principal cause of this schism appears to have been disagreement over monastic rules. The Sthaviravadins thought the Mahasanghikas were too lax; the Mahasanghikas accused the Sthaviravadins of adding rules the Buddha hadn’t taught.

At first, Buddhism existed mainly in northeastern India, in the area occupied by the present-day states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The greatest expansion of Buddhism took place under the patronage of the Emperor Ashoka, who ruled most of India and beyond from about 268 to 232 BCE. Ashoka’s missionaries successfully spread Buddhism throughout the Indian subcontinent and into today’s Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Ashoka is credited with convening a Third Buddhist Council. It adopted a text called the Abhidharma, which remains one of the most popular texts in the scriptural canon. As many as three more Buddhist councils are said to have been convened after that, though historians believe these were more legend than fact.

The school of Sthaviravada Buddhism established by Ashoka’s missionaries in Sri Lanka was the forerunner of today’s Theravada Buddhism, the dominant school in southeast Asia. In the first century BCE, the monks of Sri Lanka committed their chanted teachings to writing, which is the basis of the scriptures called the Pali Canon. (The Pali language is similar to Maghadhi.)

The Mahasanghika school also continued to develop until early in the first millennium CE, when it faded away. Elements of Mahasanghika can be found in Mahayana Buddhism, which in time would dominate China and east and north Asia.

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From the 7th through 12th centuries much of what is now Malaysia and Indonesia was a single kingdom called Srivijaya, described by one 7th-century Chinese traveler as a center of Buddhist learning. In the 9th century the Srivijayans built in central Java what is still the world’s largest Buddhist temple, called Borobudur. After the kingdom of Srivijaya ended in the 13th century, Buddhism also declined in the region, and Borobudur was abandoned. Located in an area of active volcanoes, Borobudur remained buried under volcanic ash and jungle growth until British explorers discovered it in the 19th century.

Another massive temple complex, Angkor Wat, was built in Cambodia by the Khmer people in the 12th century. Its history tells us much about how Buddhism developed in the region. Originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, Angkor Wat was rededicated to Mahayana Buddhism in the late 12th century by the Khmer kings. In the 13th century, missionary monks from today’s Sri Lanka introduced Theravada Buddhism to the Khmer people, and Theravada prevails in Cambodia to this day.

Sri Lankan missionaries also established Theravada Buddhism in Laos and Siam (now Thailand). Legend has it that the Buddha himself came to Burma (now Myanmar), but this is improbable. There is archeological evidence of Buddhism in southern Burma dating to the 4th century CE, but most of the Burmese followed indigenous religions until the mid-11th century, when the king was converted to Theravada Buddhism and made it his state religion.

Today Buddhism remains the dominant religion of the southeastern mainland nations. However, it is a minority religion in the island ones, with the exception of Singapore. Over the centuries people from many parts of Asia settled in Singapore, bringing various forms of Buddhism with them, and Buddhism is the most widely practiced religion in that country today.

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It is believed that Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries throughout his empire―which included most of today’s India and a large part of Pakistan and Afghanistan―and to most of the world that was known to him. During his reign, Buddhism spread to central and southern India and to today’s Sri Lanka. Buddhism also took root in Ashoka’s western kingdom, especially in Gandhara, which was the ancient name for the area around the Swat and Peshawar valleys in northern Pakistan. For the next few centuries Buddhism continued to flourish throughout the Indus Peninsula and in Gandhara and began to move into central Asia.

Beginning in the first century CE, Buddhist monks from Gandhara and central Asia began to follow merchants east on the Silk Road into northern China. At the same time, missionaries from India also traveled to China, usually by ships that landed at the southern port of Guangzhou. Because of the combined work of many dedicated traveling monks, Buddhism became the dominant religion of China during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), and several new styles emerged over the years. And it was mostly from China that Buddhism spread to the rest of east Asia.

Buddhism was introduced to the kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula by monks from Gandhara and China in the 4th century. In the 6th century, an emissary from a king of Korea introduced Buddhism to the court of the emperor of Japan. For many centuries after, it was common for Korean and Japanese monks to travel to China to study before becoming teachers in their own countries. Several schools of Chinese Buddhism were established in Korea and Japan, and a few new schools developed in both places as well.

Buddhism may have been introduced to the Vietnamese from India about the same time it reached China, but over the centuries Chinese forms of Buddhism became dominant in Vietnam. Chinese settlers brought Buddhism to Taiwan in the 17th century, and it has flourished there since.

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Most teachers and scholars agree that Buddhism was adopted in Tibet under the aegis of Songtsen Gampo, a leader who had united a number of warring kingdoms, bringing political stability and recognition to the region. According to legend, he married two Buddhist women, one Chinese and one Nepalese, and they promoted their religion to Songtsen Gampo and his subjects.

Just as had happened in India, China, Korea, Japan, Thailand and most other Buddhist places, Buddhism in Tibet flourished under state sponsorship. Over the course of the centuries after Songtsen Gampo’s reign, Indian Buddhist masters traveled to Tibet to teach and conduct translation efforts, including Padmasambhava, an 8th-century tantric adept who is considered a founder of Tibetan Buddhism and who is venerated as a semilegendary figure.

By the 14th and 15th centuries, Buddhism was deeply rooted in Tibet and permeated its culture and society. Nearly all extant Indian and Chinese Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan. Tibet’s valleys, plateaus, and cities were home to thousands of monasteries in the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism—Nyingma (the oldest), Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. Many of these monasteries operated as large universities, providing monastic education up to the doctorate level.

From Tibet, Vajrayana Buddhism spread to Mongolia, Bhutan, Central Asia and several parts of what is today Russia, including Buryatia and Tuva. As Buddhism had blended in some ways with Tibet’s indigenous Bon religion, so the teachings were taken up by local shamanistic traditions in other parts of the Himalayas.

Following the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and waves of persecution of Tibetan Buddhists and destruction of monasteries across the Himalayas, refugees from those places fled to safety, bringing their religion with them to India, Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. The diaspora has sparked the widespread interest in Tibetan practice among Buddhist converts that we see today.

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In the 1880s, Japanese immigrants began coming west also. In 1898, a branch of Jodo Shinshu, a Pure Land school of Japan, sent two missionaries to San Francisco. By the turn of the century Jodo Shinshu priests were opening temples in California and along the West Coast into Canada and Mexico. By the 1930s, most of the other Buddhist schools of Japan had also built at least one temple in North America to serve the growing Japanese American population.

At the same time, non-Asian Westerners took an interest in Buddhism. By the 19th century European scholars living in British colonies in Asia were producing English translations of Asian sacred texts, including Buddhist sutras. These influenced European and American philosophers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Few writers and translators did more to bring Buddhism to the West than Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966), who had studied European and Asian languages at Tokyo University. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, his books, translations, and (later, in the US) lectures introduced Buddhism, especially Japanese Zen and Pure Land, to a vast audience of non-Asian Western readers including the writer Alan Watts and Beat Generation authors Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their popular and widely read books made Zen a household word in the 1950s and 1960s.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Zen temples already in the US expanded to accommodate a wave of new non-Asian students, and more were built. Soon Americans began to explore many other schools of Buddhism. Today it’s believed that every form of Buddhism found in Asia is represented in the United States―the Theravada Buddhism of southeast Asia; Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Zen and Pure Land schools; the several schools of Tibetan Buddhism; and more, albeit often with practices and rituals adjusted to meet the needs of Western Buddhists. At this point, some temples still primarily serve ethnic Asian populations and others serve non-Asian Western converts, but in other centers this division is fading away.

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In the centuries following the Buddha’s death, his teachings spread across India and to most of the rest of Asia, where they blended with existing religions and cultures. Each tradition has developed its own liturgy, meditation practices, and chanting style; even a special way of bowing. But even more important is how the various schools differ in their interpretations of who the Buddha was, what enlightenment is, and how the path to awakening is traversed.

Many schools and sects across the globe base their practices on the Buddha’s teachings, but they are often grouped into two major traditions.

Theravada (literally, “way of the elders”) is the name given to the form of Buddhism based on the Pali canon, a collection of some of the earliest records of the Buddha’s teachings. A remaining strand of what were once multiple monastic lineages, Theravada is practiced mostly in Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.

The second is Mahayana (“great vehicle”) Buddhism (“vehicle” refers to the means to awakening). Mahayana first developed in ancient India, but is now well-known in its Chinese and Japanese forms—for example, Zen or Pure Land Buddhism. The scriptures for these schools are taken from the Chinese canon, a collection of Buddhist texts—many of which were translated into Chinese from now-lost Sanskrit texts and interpreted by Chinese scholars beginning as early as the 2nd century CE. The role model for Mahayana practitioners is the “Buddha-to-be,” or bodhisattva, who vows to become a Buddha in order to relieve the suffering of all conscious beings.

A form of Mahayana called Vajrayana (the “diamond” or “thunderbolt” vehicle), which focuses on tantra, also emerged in India. Though it gradually died out there, it is now the predominant form of Buddhism in Tibet and is also practiced to some extent in East Asia. Like the other Mahayana schools, Vajrayana embraces the bodhisattva ideal.

As these traditions have been transplanted to the West, they have spawned adaptations and new practices—so the varieties of Buddhism continue to multiply.

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In the view of many practitioners and scholars, Buddhism is a religion—or rather, a family of religions—with myriad philosophical aspects. In fact, one of the things about Buddhism that appeals to many people is how philosophical it is. Buddhism asks us to investigate the nature of our minds and how we construct our own reality, and it promotes critical thinking and reasoning, in a way most schools of philosophy do as well.

But Buddhism has a religious end-goal that transcends life and death—and philosophy as well: liberation from suffering and the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). It also offers a path for reaching that goal, grounded in a system of practice and ethics. Buddhists practice to connect with that freedom in a wholly transformative way, not an intellectual one.

Many other elements of Buddhism can be considered religious as well. Each school of Buddhism has its own particular rites and liturgy, and expresses faith in the Buddha’s teachings in its own way. And each honors a set of scriptures and holds certain objects to be sacred.

All that said, there are many characteristics of Buddhism that do not align with typical notions of religion, including a lack of divine revelation, any requirements to regularly attend service, or scripture considered to be the absolute truth. It also doesn’t ask you to make a leap of faith or take the teachings at face value. Rather, you’re encouraged to put the teachings into practice, test them out, and see if they do what they’re meant to do—free you from ignorance and suffering.

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Theravada Buddhists root their practices in the Pali canon, which includes some of the earliest-dated Buddhist texts, recorded in an ancient Indian language called Pali. These scriptures are known as the Tipitaka (“Three Baskets”) because they include three major groups of texts. The “Sutta Pitaka” contains the suttas (Sanskrit, sutras) or recorded discourses of the Buddha and some of his disciples; the “Vinaya Pitaka” contains the Buddha’s code of discipline for his monastic community; and the “Abhidhamma Pitaka” contains a detailed analysis of the nature, origin, and interaction of material and psychological phenomena. Scholars generally date this last group of texts to a few hundred years after the Buddha’s death, perhaps between the third and first century BCE.

The Chinese canon, the body of scriptures that is considered authoritative by East Asian Buddhist traditions (including Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese), was likely recorded between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE. There’s plenty of overlap between the Chinese and Pali canons (for instance, the Chinese canon contains a version of the suttas, the Buddha’s discourses, known as the agamas), but they part in crucial doctrinal ways, too. The Tibetan canon, split into the Kangyur (what’s considered the word of the Buddha) and the Tengyur (later commentaries), also overlaps with the Chinese canon and contains its own unique scriptures, including the tantra texts.

Some other schools of Buddhism base their practices and doctrines on specific sutras or treatises. Nichiren Buddhism, for instance, is founded on a scripture known as the Lotus Sutra, and chanting the sutra’s title is a principal part of the practice. Pure Land Buddhists, meanwhile, study three sutras that concentrate on a buddha known as Amitabha, or the Buddha of Infinite Light, who is said to reign over the “pure land,” a kind of Buddhist heaven where conditions for attaining enlightenment are favorable.

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