Buddhism

No-self is a foundational Buddhist teaching, presented throughout the earliest recorded discourses.

The twelve nidanas tracing the dependent arising of suffering are central to Buddhist teaching across schools.

The Dhammapada grounds karmic consequence in the intention behind an act.

Madhyamaka Buddhism, founded by Nagarjuna, makes emptiness its central technical doctrine.

The Archaeological Survey of India's collections include Buddhist stupas.

Vajrayana Buddhism of the Drukpa Kagyu school is named the spiritual heritage of Bhutan by the 2008 constitution.

About 97% Theravada Buddhist.

Buddhism travelled east through Central Asia and left the Bamiyan colossi and the Gandharan monasteries.

One of three major traditions braided in Chinese religious life, alongside Taoism and folk practice.

Ajanta's painted Buddhist viharas are cut into the plateau's northern edge.

A state museum on a Buddhist temple site. The finger bone relic recovered from the collapsed pagoda crypt in 1987 is Buddhist, and the museum presents it as such while the temple beside it remains in worship.

Buddhism, arriving over the Silk Road, became one of China's three teachings.

Buddhism first entered China under the Han along the western routes.

Roughly a million adherents by official accounts, from the Po Lin monastery and the Big Buddha on Lantau to hundreds of urban halls, often practised alongside Taoist and folk custom.

A national museum, not a Buddhist body. It holds the Piprahwa relics and gems, recovered from a stupa in 1898 and read as relics of the Buddha by those who deposited them.

Buddhist ideas of kingship and cosmology crossed east on the monsoon and shaped the temple traditions of Southeast Asia.

The tradition's liturgical, scriptural or ancestral language belongs to this family.

Practiced alongside Shinto since its sixth century introduction from the Asian mainland.

Buddhism was displaced from the capital under Joseon and survived in the mountain monasteries.

Kalmykia is the only Buddhist majority territory in Europe, though its liturgy is in Classical Tibetan rather than in Kalmyk.

Ashoka's bilingual Greek and Aramaic edict was found at Kandahar.

A Buddhist council is traditionally placed in Kashmir under Kanishka.

Carried some of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts known, the Gandharan birch bark scrolls written in Gandhari Prakrit.

Buddhism is one of the traditions Muism runs beneath.

Buddhism reached Central Asia and China through Kushan territory, and Gandharan workshops made the earliest Buddha images.

Theravada Buddhism is the dominant tradition, practiced by roughly two thirds of the population.

A Buddhist monastery whose principal treasure is a tooth venerated as a relic of the Buddha.

The lotus is the standard seat of buddhas and bodhisattvas and one of the auspicious symbols, read as purity opening unstained out of the mud.

Ajanta, Ellora and Karla hold early Buddhist rock-cut monasteries, and the Navayana movement began at Nagpur in 1956.

About 19 per cent of the population, predominantly within the Chinese Malaysian community.

The Mathura workshops produced some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form.

The Leshan Giant Buddha was carved above the river to calm the water.

Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelug school, established after the conversion of Altan Khan, destroyed in the purges of 1937 and rebuilt since 1990.

About 88% Theravada Buddhist, with a monastic sangha holding significant social and historical influence.

A great mahavihara of Buddhist learning from the fifth century CE until its destruction around 1200, whose curriculum shaped Buddhist scholasticism from Tibet to East Asia.

A state museum, not a Buddhist body. The link records the tradition of what it holds: the stone bowl at Kabul is venerated as the Buddha's alms bowl.

A national museum, not a Buddhist body. The Kapilavastu relics it holds have been sent abroad on state loan for veneration, which is an unusual footing for a museum accession.

About 9% Buddhist, concentrated among Newar, Tamang and Himalayan communities; Nepal is the birthplace of the historical Buddha.

Their Vajrayana Buddhism is sustained by married vajracharya ritual specialists rather than celibate monks.

A temple of the Chisan branch of Shingon Buddhism, and the custodian of its own library of classical texts.

Anawrahta's adoption of Theravada set the pattern for Burmese Buddhism.

Pali is the canonical language of the Theravada Tipitaka, preserved as a liturgical and scholarly language rather than a spoken vernacular.

Pali, the Theravada canonical language, belongs to the same Middle Indo-Aryan layer.

Founded in 1969 to publish Buddhist and contemplative literature; its name is the mystical kingdom of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

The conch shell trumpet is sounded in Buddhist ritual as well as Hindu, most visibly in Tibetan Buddhist ceremony where it is one of the eight auspicious symbols.

Theravada Buddhism was the religion of the Siamese state and monarchy.

About 31 per cent of the population, the largest single group in a society where none holds a majority.

The Sinhalese are Theravada Buddhist and keep the Pali canon.

About 15 per cent of the population, centred on the Jogye order and the mountain monasteries founded under Silla and Goryeo.

About 70% Theravada Buddhist, chiefly among the Sinhalese majority.

Practised both in traditional temples and through large modern organisations such as Tzu Chi, Fo Guang Shan and Dharma Drum Mountain.

About 93% Theravada Buddhist, closely bound to the Thai monarchy and state.

Buddhist monasteries in China and Tibet were closed and damaged.

The eight rules of respect said to condition the admission of women to the Buddhist order.

The targeted tradition. Associated With edge to the tradition persecuted, not a perpetrator-tradition edge.

The targeted tradition. This is an Associated With edge to the tradition that was persecuted, not a perpetrator-tradition edge.

The ruling of the assembly at Vesali rejecting ten relaxations of monastic discipline.

Tibetan civilization is built around Vajrayana Buddhism.

Chinese pilgrims describe Valabhi as a Buddhist university comparable to Nalanda.

The nearby Deer Park at Sarnath is where the Buddha is said to have delivered his first sermon.

Mahayana Buddhism is the largest registered religion, layered over village tutelary and ancestor practice.

Buddhist monks and nuns led the protest movement of 1963 and the struggle movement of 1966, and engaged Buddhism took its name and shape in these years.

Buddhist elements joined with older animist protective practice

White Lotus teaching drew its central promise, the imminent return of Maitreya, from Buddhist eschatology, though the movement's organized congregational structure and folk practice developed well outside monastic Buddhism and were never recognized by it.

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.

Theravada Buddhism specifically; the atlas carries no separate Theravada Buddhism entity yet.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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.

In the Indianised kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

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.

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.

Chan monastic discipline

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.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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).

Tibetan Buddhism specifically; the atlas carries no separate Tibetan Buddhism entity yet.

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.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

Carries Buddhist elements including the blessed mongkhon headband placed by the trainer.

Derived: this work depicts a figure already recorded as belonging to this tradition; the work-to-tradition link is inferred from that live depicts edge and the figures own attested tradition affiliation, not independently sourced beyond it.

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.

His edict of 574 dissolved the monastic communities of his state, and the conquest of 577 extended the measure across northern China.

Practices Newar Buddhism, a distinct Vajrayana tradition led by hereditary non-monastic vajracharya priests.

A contemporary sramana movement out of the same Magadhan milieu, holding an opposed position on causation and moral agency.

Draws vocabulary and concepts from Buddhist cultivation theory, but Li Hongzhi's own teaching presents Falun Gong as a complete and independent system rather than a Buddhist school or reform movement.

Lung belongs to Sowa Rigpa, the medical tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Shinto largely delegates funeral rites to Buddhism because of the Shinto treatment of death as kegare, ritual pollution; the division dates to the Edo-period danka temple registration system.

Bodh Gaya, Rajgir and Nalanda all lie in Bihar.

Mount Hiei's Enryaku-ji, guarding the city's northeast, made Kyoto a center of Japanese Buddhist scholarship and training.

Buddhist cosmology identifies it with Anavatapta, the cool lake at the centre of the world from which four great rivers flow.

Lhasa has been the religious capital of Tibetan Buddhism since Songtsen Gampo's founding of the Jokhang.

The Mahamuni image and the marble canon of the Fifth Council are both here.

Kurama-dera was founded on the mountain in the eighth century.

Vulture Peak and the Bamboo Grove are here, and tradition places the First Council in the Sattapanni cave above the old city.

Swayambhunath and Boudhanath are among the most important Himalayan stupas.

Sarnath, where the first sermon was given, lies outside Varanasi.

The Buddha taught here repeatedly and announced his coming death nearby, and the Second Council met here.

The Shwedagon Pagoda is held to enshrine relics of four Buddhas, and the Sixth Council met in the city in 1954.

The swastika as a shared auspicious motif in Buddhism (the Chinese wan, a mark on the Buddha's chest).

Tibet's second diffusion, the later dissemination (phyi dar) that answers the fragmentation following the empire's collapse and gives rise to the schools every major surviving Tibetan Buddhist lineage descends from.

The founding episode of Buddhism's own spread history.