How did it ‘Stack Up’ in India and Elsewhere and Why? Some Sociology of Religion

So Buddhism was a Hindu Sramana venture but Siddhartha indicated that the Veda (that at this time hadn’t been written down) were not necessary for Buddhists to learn. Equally, there were no efficacious Brahman rituals that he prescribed. It was all down to the individual and becoming aware of a subtle truth that he clearly felt would be extremely difficult if not impossible for anybody to fully understand in one lifetime. The orthodox Hindu starting-point for learning the religion today is thus some revealed text or other of the Veda but the Buddhist one is internal and empirical and guided purely by humans.

The lack of emphasis on any social policy in any of the teachings was one of the things that enabled Buddhism to be widely adopted in areas like China, where accepted social systems already existed. Another was the appeal to rationality that remains one of its appeals in the West today. Orthodox Bramana Hinduism would have seemed an imposition in China based upon an alleged revelation. Siddhartha’s language could be fiery and urgent, however, in the Sramana tradition. He likened the world to a house on fire and used another fire metaphor when he suggested people regard their metaphorical hair as being on fire.

He was certainly a happy Buddha, however, and by no means a pessimist. The traditions make it clear that his enlightenment fairly shone from him from the beginning. He apparently actually glowed and had become even more beautiful.

I’ve given possible reasons for Buddhism’s acceptance worldwide but why (and how) did Buddhism spread in India in the first place? Were there special reasons for its success there?

It spread there partly for the same reasons that it spread elsewhere and partly for peculiarly Indian reasons.

Indian religion always seems to have sought answers to questions we would regard as philosophical but also answers to questions that were about wisdom and it appeared to the Indians that a man so clearly brimming with enlightenment must have found some answers worth discussing of both of those kinds. The glow and beauty of his enlightenment apparently rubbed off on many of his early monks and nuns, too. Siddhartha attributed their phenomenally rude health and glowing state when that was remarked upon to their practice (that he had instituted) of living in the moment and refraining from self-mortification.

Socially, a new merchant class had recently developed in India that saw in Buddhism a new religion that met their needs better than what had been on offer (it perhaps seemed to them a relatively positive social message coming from the Sramana view that must have seemed to combine the best and discard the worst of both the Sramana and Bramana views and also seemed practical to a pragmatic class). They bought land for the monks and several kings, too, sought his advice in his 45 years of enlightenment before what is called his parinibbana (in Pali, or parinirvana in Sanskrit), his human ‘death’ as a Buddha, and traditionally as an octogenarian.

Early European scholars of the sociology and nature of eastern religions such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Max Weber appear to have underestimated Buddhism as escapist and unduly pessimistic (a pessimism that was certainly a trait of Schopenhauer himself) at least from an Indian point of view. Weber was of course attempting to explain the absence of western capitalism in the East in terms of his theory of a uniquely western protestant ethic of work. Siddhartha certainly did not reject the world (or business) out of hand.

A contrasting unorthodox view that perhaps, by comparision, helps make Buddhism appear more reasonable is Jainism. It was started perhaps a few centuries before Buddhism and its doctrine is that bad karma literally weighs a person down. As a result, practitioners don’t kill even plants (or fires!) They are very strict about this as they regard an action as the same as an intention for karmic-consequence purposes. Killing is called himsa and non-killing is called ahimsa. Their monks allow their laypeople to light and ‘kill’ fires (and plants, presumably, as they cook the monks’ obviously vegetarian meals) and therefore suffer the bad karma for the monks. They believe their asceticism 'burns off' the bad karma somehow to produce the desired freedom of moksa and non-existence (the Indian Sramana goal in some sense analogous to the Buddhist nirvana).