The riots opened over a Buddhist religious procession barred from passing a mosque and were carried out by crowds drawn from the island's Sinhalese Buddhist majority. Historians including Blackton and Roberts read the violence as communal antagonism aimed substantially at the Muslim community's commercial standing and expressed through religious symbolism, connected to Buddhist identity rather than directed by Buddhist teaching.
Clergy or specialist role within Buddhism.
Clergy or specialist role within Buddhism.
Clergy or specialist role within Buddhism.
The rioting crowds across Colombo and other cities were overwhelmingly Sinhalese Buddhist by ordinary demographic fact; this edge connects that shared communal identity to the riots without asserting Buddhism's own doctrine as their cause, matching how the Sri Lankan Civil War's own record connects that same shared identity.
The Ashokan edicts, the earliest substantial body of Buddhist inscriptional evidence, were written primarily in Brahmi script.
Anapanasati, mindfulness of breathing, watches the breath without altering it.
Buddhist Global Relief is a Buddhist charitable organization founded by a Theravada Buddhist monk expressing Buddhist ethical commitments, not affiliated with one Buddhist school specifically, so linked to Buddhism at the religion level.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Thai forest tradition).
Butter lamps are the standard offering of light in Tibetan temples, and the offering is counted in lamps rather than in time.
Buddhist temples offer lamps alongside flowers, incense and water.
Buddhist tantra maps the subtle body differently from the Hindu schools, counting four or five centres rather than seven and working with channels and winds in the completion stage of practice; the teaching is transmitted at initiation rather than published.
Cheng Yen is a Buddhist nun and Tzu Chi's teaching and charitable mission are framed throughout as an expression of Buddhist practice.
His 1902 Act is the founding statute of the modern Thai monastic order and remains the model for its successors.
Ikeda led Soka Gakkai as a lay Nichiren Buddhist movement throughout his presidency.
Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana are not denominations in any useful sense. They are not separated bodies with rival memberships but different textual canons, lineages and practices, and monastic ordination lineages cut across them.
Buddhist cosmology recasts devas and asuras as realms of rebirth rather than as two sides of one lineage.
He made it the religion of the Japanese state, put ordained clergy on provincial revenue, and called himself a servant of the Three Treasures.
The closest Chinese equivalent to a Buddhist monarch on the Indian model, and the standing example in later Chinese debate of a ruler whose patronage cost him his state.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Vajrayana).
His consecration in 1353 turned a Tai chieftaincy into a Buddhist kingship on the Khmer and Mon model.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Mahayana).
The ghanta is the left-hand half of the vajra and bell pair and stands for wisdom and emptiness.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (East Asian Mahayana).
Built in 652 CE to house the Buddhist scriptures and relics Xuanzang brought back from India, within the Da Ci'en Temple complex.
A Japanese Buddhist observance specific to Pure Land teaching.
A Chinese Mahayana Buddhist temple built by the Fo Guang Shan order, dedicated in 1988.
The Buddhist Yulanpen reading of the observance.
The jikininki's condition is an explicitly Buddhist karmic rebirth, a punishment for greed rather than a free-standing folk monster.
The same scarf is offered in Mongolian Buddhist settings, and shares its form with the Tibetan khata.
The khatvanga staff is carried by wrathful and yogic figures and marks the consort who is not physically present.
Staged at a Buddhist monastery and led in part by its monks, though the performance itself propitiates the neak ta, local guardian spirits, alongside its Buddhist setting.
Other accounts tie the Lantern Festival to a later Buddhist practice of lighting lamps in the emperor's palace to honor the Buddha; both readings are attested.
Lingguang Temple is a working Buddhist temple in the western hills of Beijing, and the tooth relic it keeps is held as a temple possession rather than as a museum accession.
Its own record calls it a Buddhist monastic establishment, matching Buddhism already carried by the other Buddhist fraternities in this same fill.
Buddhist practice uses the same count, and the bead material is chosen for the practice rather than for display.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Mahayana and Vajrayana).
The third and last East Asian Buddhist Dharma age, in which only the teaching is held to survive, central to the Japanese Pure Land and Nichiren schools.
Maya, Figures The mother of the founder, and the subject of two of the most frequently depicted scenes in Buddhist art, the dream and the birth at Lumbini.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Mahayana and Vajrayana).
Buddhism treats seated meditation as the discipline the Buddha taught for liberation itself, whether as Theravada insight practice noting sensation as it rises and falls or as Zen sitting in bare awareness.
Japanese Buddhist temple practice
The moktak is the hand percussion of Korean Buddhist practice.
A Buddhist monastery rests on a training rule rather than a vow to a house. A monk may move between monasteries or disrobe entirely, and neither requires dispensation from anyone.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Nichiren).
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Theravada).
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Pure Land).
The Northern Wei dynasty sponsored Buddhism as an officially favored state religion for most of its rule.
Held in Thai Buddhist temple lineages, above all Wat Pho
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Vajrayana).
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Vajrayana, Nyingma).
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Mahayana and Vajrayana).
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Vajrayana).
Buddhist upasampada requires a quorum of ordained monastics before whom a motion is put and recited three times.
The Theravada funerary offering.
The Cambodian Theravada Buddhist fortnight of the ancestors.
Its own record calls it the monastic school of Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism, matching Buddhism already carried by the other Theravada fraternities in this same fill.
The mani wheel holds a written mantra, and turning it is counted as reciting it. The practice belongs to Tibetan Buddhism specifically.
Chinese Buddhist monasteries developed their own exercise sets, the Shaolin traditions best known, both for health under long sitting and for martial training; the frame is Chinese medicine rather than Buddhist doctrine, and no canonical teaching requires it.
He rebuilt the Siamese establishment after the destruction of Ayutthaya, in both its monastic and its textual dimensions.
Usui was a Japanese lay Buddhist and the practice carries Buddhist vocabulary and precepts, with symbols used at the higher levels drawn partly from Shingon; no Buddhist school teaches Reiki, and the connection is one of origin rather than of doctrine.
Buddhist relic containers, in the stupa and the casket traditions, are the closest parallel and are older than the Christian ones.
Theravada Buddhist vipassana retreats, the tradition's own named form of the practice, described in the first article on this page.
The sangha has no head, no central doctrinal authority and no mechanism by which one country's monastic community binds another's. It is held together by the Vinaya and by the fortnightly assembly within a boundary.
Bhikkhuni; led the mission that founded the Sri Lankan bhikkhuni ordination lineage.
Sarira reliquaries are enshrined in Korean pagodas when the pagoda is consecrated.
Sermon, Practices The Buddhist form is named the dharma talk and follows no fixed liturgical placement.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (Mahayana and Vajrayana).
A hidden kingdom described in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, later embraced by Theosophy and the wider esoteric imagination.
Its own record calls it the monastic college of Tibetan Buddhism, matching Buddhism already carried by the other Buddhist fraternities in this same fill.
The standard Bamar form of Theravada temporary novitiation for boys.
The first of the three ages East Asian Buddhist writers divided the time after the historical Buddha into, in which teaching, practice and attainment are all held fully present.
Why this is disputed. Genuine East Asian Buddhist ritual bells exist and are well documented, the rin and keisu that mark intervals in Japanese, Chinese and Korean temple chanting. The specific claim sold with Tibetan singing bowls, that they represent an ancient Himalayan sound healing technology once suppressed by monastic authorities, is not supported by the Tibetan Buddhist textual or ritual record, which uses cymbals, horns, drums and bells rather than struck standing bowls this way. The bowls were largely domestic vessels exported from Nepal and India from the mid twentieth century, and the therapeutic tradition around them was assembled in the West from the 1970s onward.
The Thai Theravada Buddhist New Year.
A sixth century Buddhist pagoda built at Songyue Monastery on Mount Song, the oldest surviving brick pagoda in China.
In medieval Japanese Buddhist writing tengu are hostile: arrogant monks reborn as tengu, enemies of the dharma who abduct clerics and set fires. Only later do they soften into guardians of the mountains and teachers of swordsmanship.
A thangka is a scroll painting used for visualisation practice, rolled for travel and unrolled for teaching or ritual.
Thangtong Gyalpo was a Tibetan Buddhist master, and the performance tradition credited to him remains bound up with Buddhist ritual invocation and blessing.
The 969 Movement's own Buddhist nationalist religious framing, delivered through Ashin Wirathu's sermons in the weeks before the riots, directly incited the violence; this connects the riots to that organizing identity, not a claim that mainstream Burmese Buddhist teaching endorses communal violence.
A dramatized account of Tibetan Buddhist monastic life made by a recognised tulku and cast largely with real monks, offering an inside view of the tradition to set beside the outside dramatizations already in the atlas.
The Buddhist division of a single world system's life into four kalpas of forming, duration, dissolving and voidness, together one mahakalpa.
Sinhala Buddhist monks and nationalist politicians invoked the Mahavamsa's account of Sri Lanka as a dharmadwipa to frame the war as a defense of Buddhism, a real and influential framing on the government side of an underlying ethnic conflict rather than the war's actual cause.
The album's own title and the publisher's own catalogue text both name the Soto Zen sect of Buddhism outright as this recording's subject, corroborated by an independent university library's own Buddhism and Zen Buddhism subject headings; the first musical work the atlas holds for the tradition.
Derived from the tradition recorded on the mantra, Buddhism (all schools).
He made Buddhism the religion of the Tibetan state and funded the translation programme that carried its literature into Tibetan.
Tzu Chi is a Taiwanese Buddhist organization, teaching a form of engaged, humanistic Buddhism founded by a Buddhist nun; it is not tied to a single Buddhist denomination, so linked to Buddhism at the religion level.
The vajra is held in the right hand as method, paired with the bell as wisdom, and the pair is inseparable in Vajrayana ritual.
Tibetan Buddhism took Indian astrology through the Kalachakra tantra and combined it with Chinese elemental reckoning, so monasteries produce the annual almanac and cast charts for death rites and auspicious days; early Buddhist texts had discouraged the practice for monks.
Carries Buddhist elements including the blessed mongkhon headband placed by the trainer.
A major imperial patron of Buddhism, commissioning temples and monumental art and promoting the Dayun Jing commentary that helped legitimize her rule as emperor; she also patronized Daoism and Confucian state ritual, so this is a patronage tie rather than sole lifelong adherence.
Buddhist tantra uses the same class of diagram, usually under the name mandala.
He patronized Buddhist institutions, had scriptures printed, and set the Ming pattern of recognizing several Tibetan hierarchs at once.
The second of the three East Asian Buddhist Dharma ages, in which practice continues but attainment is held to have failed.