The other major challenge to orthodox Vedism was
founded by the son of a chief of a region called the Shakyas. This
region lay among the foothills of the Himalayas in the farthest
northern regions of the plains of India in Nepal. This founder, Siddhartha
Gautama, the Buddha, has many legends and stories that have accreted
around his lifẹ While we can't be certain which of these stories and
legends are true and which of the thousands of sayings attributed to
him were actually said by him, we do know that the basic historical
outlines of his life are accuratẹ
He was the chief's son of a tribal group, the
Shakyas, so he was born a Kshatriya around 566 BC. At the age
of twenty-nine, he left his family in order to lead an ascetic lifẹ A
few years later he reappears with a number of followers; he and his
followers devote their lives to "The Middle Way," a lifestyle that is
midway between a completely ascetic lifestyle and one that is
world-devoted. At some point he gained "enlightenment" and began to
preach this new philosophy in the region of Bihar and Uttar Kadesh.
His teaching lasted for several decades and he perished at a very old
age, somewhere in his eighties. Following his death, only a small
group of followers continued in his footsteps. Calling themselves
bhikkus , or "disciples," they wandered the countryside in
yellow robes (in order to indicate their bhakti , or "devotion"
to the master). For almost two hundred years, these followers of
Buddha were a small, relatively inconsequential group among an
infinite variety of Hindu sects. But when the great Mauryan emperor,
Asoka, converted to Buddhism in the third century BC, the young,
inconsequential religion spread like wildfire throughout India and
beyond. Most significantly, the religion was carried across the Indian
Ocean (a short distance, actually) to Sri Lankạ The Buddhists of Sri
Lanka maintained the original form of Siddharthás teachings, or at
least, they maintained a form that was most similar to the original.
While in the rest of India, and later the world, Buddhism fragmented
into a million sects, the original form, called Theravada
Buddhism, held its ground in Sri Lankạ
History