---
title: Buddhism
---

Buddhism is the tradition that grew from the teaching of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha ("the awakened one"), in the Ganges plain some 2,400 years ago. From a renunciant movement in ancient India it became one of the world's major religions, reshaping the spiritual life of Asia — and, through Chan/Zen, the culture and martial arts of China.

## The Buddha's core teaching

The historical Buddha diagnosed life as pervaded by *dukkha* (unsatisfactoriness) and taught a path beyond it: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the marks of impermanence (*anicca*) and not-self (*anattā*), and liberation (*nirvāṇa*) from the cycle of rebirth. He emerged from the wider renunciant ferment of his age — see the <PageRef space="briefings" slug="sramana-movement" /> and the <PageRef space="events" slug="life-of-the-buddha" />.

## The three vehicles

After the Buddha's death the teaching diversified. **Theravāda** ("way of the elders"), anchored in the Pali Canon, predominates in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. **Mahāyāna** ("great vehicle"), emphasizing the *bodhisattva* who vows to liberate all beings, spread across China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. **Vajrayāna**, the tantric path, took root in Tibet and the Himalayas. Each carried the core teaching into very different cultures.

## Buddhism comes to China

Buddhism reached China along the Silk Road by the 1st century CE and, over centuries of translation and adaptation, became thoroughly Chinese — a process the historian Erik Zürcher called "the Buddhist conquest of China." It blended with and competed against Taoism and Confucianism, producing distinctively Chinese schools: Pure Land, Tiantai, Huayan, and Chan.

## Chan, Zen, and the martial connection

Chan (禪, from Sanskrit *dhyāna*, "meditation") — known in Japan as Zen — prized direct insight over scripture. Tradition credits its founding to the Indian monk Bodhidharma (Damo), and later legend made him the source of Shaolin boxing. Historians treat that martial attribution as a much later myth, but the institutional link between Chan monasticism and Chinese martial arts is real; see the <PageRef space="briefings" slug="shaolin-temple" /> and <PageRef space="briefings" slug="history-of-chinese-martial-arts" />.

## Perspectives

Buddhism is often presented in the West as a "rational," almost secular philosophy of mindfulness — a framing that downplays its devotional, cosmological, and monastic dimensions. Like other traditions on the mainland, it suffered grievously in the 20th century: clergy and sites were attacked during the <PageRef space="events" slug="cultural-revolution" />, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular remains tightly controlled by the Chinese state.

## Sources

1. Rupert Gethin, *The Foundations of Buddhism* (1998).
2. Richard Gombrich, *What the Buddha Thought* (2009).
3. Erik Zürcher, *The Buddhist Conquest of China* (1959).
4. Paul Williams, *Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations* (2nd ed., 2009).