The Buddhism is the v of Buddha in the 6th or 5th century. World religion founded in BC. It is most widespread in Asia, where around 487 million live. There are around 495 million Buddhists worldwide.
After he had achieved his enlightenment, the Buddha announced his new, sober and strict doctrine of self-redemption. The focus is on the “four noble truths”:
- All life is sorrowful.
- Suffering arises from desire, the thirst for life and lust. Gods and humans are inferior to this greed, so they have to endure innumerable rebirths. According to the universal law of retaliation (law of karma), good or bad deeds have happy or painful consequences for the perpetrator himself in a later existence.
- The lifting of suffering means the lifting of greed, the detachment from it.
- The eightfold path leads to the abolition of suffering: right view and disposition, right speech, right action and life, right striving, rethinking and immersion.
According to homethodology.com, the five commandments are binding for all Buddhists: do not kill, do not steal, do not lie, do not do anything unchaste and do not drink anything intoxicating.
The highest goal is to enter nirvana (“blown away”), which goes hand in hand with the liberation from all greed, from passions and delusion as well as with the elimination from the cycle of rebirths. There is no absolute God above the infinitely many worlds; Buddha is revered by Buddhists as a teacher and role model.
In India, the country of origin, Buddhism increasingly lost ground in the second half of the first millennium and was finally suppressed by the Islamic conquerors around 1200. The strict form, the Hinajana (Hinayana, = small vehicle), is still widespread in Theravada Buddhism, especially in Sri Lanka and back India. The Mahajana (Mahayana, = large vehicle), created around the birth of Christ, worships Buddha in a special way as well as other Buddhas and Bodhisattwas who for the time being renounce their own salvation (nirvana) in order to help other beings on the path of salvation. The required moral behavior here is more adapted to laypeople and life-affirming. This form came to Japan via China (Confucius) and Korea. the Zen Buddhism represents the Sino-Japanese form of Mahajana. In Tibet and Mongolia one finds the Wajrajana (Vajrayana, = diamond vehicle) with splendid magic and demon cults, reformed around 1400 by the monastic sect of the yellow hats, which made Tibet a priestly state transformed (Lamaism).
Buddha’s life
The correct name of the Buddha was Siddharta Gautama. He was the son of a wealthy Indian prince. The exact date of his birth is not known. You only know that he was 80 years old. In the past, people put their dates of life between 560 and 480 BC. Chr. Today it is generally dated 100 years later. His birthplace was Lumbini, a city on the Indian-Nepalese border and at the foot of the Himalayan mountains. Siddharta initially led the lavish life of a rich prince’s son. He lived without worries in his father’s grand palace, got married and had a son. But when he was 29 years old, he gave his life the decisive turning point. He renounced his family and property and went on a wandering journey as a poor beggar, in search of truth and enlightenment. He had this enlightenment six years later under a fig tree. Thereupon he took the name “Buddha”. This word comes from the Indian Sanskrit language and means “the awakened” or “the enlightened”. A little later he gave his first religious address to five ascetics. These ascetics, who saw the means to true knowledge in renouncing earthly goods and pleasures, became Buddha’s first followers. The master himself continued his wanderings and spread his teachings among the people of India until he died at the old age of 80 in Kushinagara (northern India). Those who saw the means to true knowledge in renouncing earthly goods and pleasures became Buddha’s first followers. The master himself continued his wanderings and spread his teachings among the people of India until he died at the old age of 80 in Kushinagara (northern India). Those who saw the means to true knowledge in renouncing earthly goods and pleasures became Buddha’s first followers. The master himself continued his wanderings and spread his teachings among the people of India until he died at the old age of 80 in Kushinagara (northern India).
Buddhism in the west
Buddhism in Europe and North America is comparatively young. Efforts to convey it to the Western Christian culture began in the second half of the 19th century, with A. Schopenhauer beginning as a mediator of Buddhist ideas. The Indologists Thomas William Rhys Davids (* 1834, † 1922), H. Oldenberg and Karl Eugen Neumann (* 1865, † 1915; translation of further parts of the Pali canon: »Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos« were the spiritual pioneers of Buddhism in the true sense of the word., 1896–1902), the theosophist Helena P. Blavatsky and the philosopher Paul Carus (* 1852, † 1919; originally teacher at the Military Academy in Dresden, later emigrated to the USA because of liberal views) Buddhist communities and societies in the west that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. HS Olcott is one of their pioneers; Leading in Germany were the private scholar Karl Seidenstücker (* 1876, † 1936), who founded the first German Buddhist organization in Leipzig in 1903 (»Buddhist Missionsverein in Deutschland«), the physician Paul Dahlke (* 1865, † 1928), founder of the » Buddhist House “in Berlin-Frohnau (1924), the lawyer G. Grimm (“Old Buddhist Congregation”, 1935) and the philosopher and archaeologist Ernst Lothar Hoffmann (* 1898, † 1985), who, after stays in Sri Lanka, Ladakh, Sikkim and Tibet, received the order “Arya Maitreya Mandala” for Europe in 1952 as Lama Anagarika Govinda founded. The teaching of Zen in Europe and the USA is largely based on the Japanese Buddhist Daisetsu Suzuki return. The independent communities and centers united in the umbrella organization of the “German Buddhist Union – Buddhist Religious Community” (DBU; founded in 1955, current name since 1988; seat: Munich) are shaped differently, but united in their efforts to adapt Buddhism to Western thought. This is to be distinguished from the Buddhist communities founded by the Japanese in Hawaii and on the west coast of North America, which promote reformed Buddhism (reform Buddhism).