Otherwise, however, he is active enough. As prime minister, he governs a country of more than 1.4 billion people, around 80 percent of whom are Hindus.
Modi is a Hindu nationalist and basks in the glory of his grand project: making the country even more Hindu. But what happened to the Buddhists in Buddha’s spiritual homeland? Today, they make up only 0.7 percent of the population, or about 8.4 million people.
Buddha — or Siddhartha Gautama, as he was originally called — was born around five hundred years before the Common Era. He was born a prince in a small kingdom in northern India. According to legend, he lived a sheltered life of luxury behind palace walls, completely cut off from the suffering of the world.
As a young man, he managed to sneak out, and during his travels he was brutally confronted with old age, illness, and death. He also encountered a poor wandering ascetic seeking spiritual peace.
These experiences shook him so deeply that he chose to abandon everything — luxury, wife, and child alike. For several years he experimented with the most extreme lifestyles of his time, such as fasting until he nearly died, but without finding the answers he sought.
Eventually, he realized that neither extreme luxury nor extreme poverty led anywhere. He therefore chose the Middle Way. After six years of wandering, he sat beneath a pipal tree in the city of Bodh Gaya, where after a night of deep meditation he attained a state of complete awakening. He said he had found the answer to humanity’s existential suffering, and from then on he was called Buddha — “the awakened one.”
His later work turned Indian society upside down because his message was radical and democratic. In his very first sermon, delivered in a deer park in Sarnath near the city of Varanasi, he explained that life inevitably brings disappointment and suffering, and that this suffering is caused by humanity’s endless craving to possess and cling to things.
Buddha believed that anyone could free themselves from this cycle through ethical living and mental discipline. He firmly rejected the idea that priests held a monopoly on truth, and he dismissed the caste system. For Buddha, a person’s worth was determined by actions, not by birth. He founded an order of monks and nuns and wandered throughout northern India for 45 years spreading his teachings, until he died at the age of eighty.
Although Buddhism grew steadily after Buddha’s death, it remained for a long time a small regional movement. The truly major turning point came a little more than two hundred years later under Emperor Ashoka, who ruled over nearly the entire Indian subcontinent.
At first, he was a ruthless conqueror. In 261 BCE, he launched a bloody war against the neighboring state of Kalinga (present-day Odisha). According to Ashoka himself, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 killed, and even more died as a result of the war.
When he witnessed the devastation, he was overcome with deep remorse. The experience caused him to renounce violence and military power and become a Buddhist. Suddenly, he decided that the empire should henceforth be governed according to moral principles. To spread his message as widely as possible, he launched an unparalleled information campaign. Throughout the empire, stonecutters and engravers were commissioned to carve the new teachings into rocks and stone pillars.
These edicts were written in popular dialects and local scripts so that as many people as possible could understand them. Ashoka used the texts to preach practical compassion rather than deep theology. “The Beloved of the Gods requests non-violence, moderation, and justice toward all living beings,” one inscription declares.
He advocated religious tolerance and wrote that we honor our own faith by respecting the faith of others. He banned animal sacrifices, reduced meat consumption, and ordered the construction of hospitals for both humans and animals. Along the main roads, he had wells dug and trees planted to provide shade for travelers.
It is impossible to overstate Ashoka’s importance to the history of Buddhism. By making morality, compassion, and religious tolerance the foundation of his rule, he gave Buddhism a prestige it had never before possessed. At the same time, he sent missionaries — including his own children — to neighboring countries to spread Buddha’s teachings. Ashoka therefore deserves part of the credit for Buddhism later taking root outside India, first in Sri Lanka and later in other parts of Asia.
After his death, his empire quickly fell apart, and Buddhism lost some of its influence. Nevertheless, it experienced new golden ages under changing dynasties in the centuries that followed. During the Kushan Empire (c. 30–375 CE) in northwestern India, artists for the first time began depicting Buddha in human form, heavily inspired by Greek sculptural traditions.
Later, under the powerful Gupta dynasty (320–550 CE), Buddhist art and philosophy flourished alongside Hinduism. Great cave monasteries were carved into mountainsides, many beautifully decorated with murals that can still be admired up close today.
The foremost symbol of this intellectual era was the university at Nalanda University, founded in the 5th century in northeastern India. Nalanda was not merely a monastery but a major international center of learning. At its height, it is said to have had ten thousand students and two thousand teachers (though the figures are probably exaggerated). Most came from India, while others arrived from China, Korea, Japan, Burma, and Tibet.
The university complex contained lecture halls, temples, and a nine-story library housing hundreds of thousands of unique handwritten manuscripts. Students were taught not only religion but also astronomy, medicine, logic, and mathematics. Education was free for those who passed the rigorous entrance examinations.
Given Buddhism’s strong position, it seems strange that it later lost its foothold and nearly disappeared, especially from the 11th century onward. The reasons were a combination of internal weakness, competition from Hinduism, and the arrival of Islam. One of the main reasons was that Buddhism gradually isolated itself from ordinary people’s daily lives. The monasteries became so wealthy and powerful that monks withdrew into academic ivory towers. They discussed advanced philosophy in Sanskrit instead of speaking the common languages used in the villages. Buddhism became, simply put, an elite project that gradually lost touch with the grassroots.
At the same time, Hinduism succeeded in renewing itself. Wandering poets and singers spread messages of personal devotion to gods such as Krishna and Shiva, singing in the people’s own languages.
Moreover, Hindu scholars chose to absorb elements of Buddhism rather than fight it. They simply declared that Buddha was an avatar — an earthly manifestation — of the great Hindu god Vishnu. As a result, people no longer needed to abandon their old faith in order to honor Buddha; he was already part of Hinduism. In this way, Buddhism’s distinctiveness was gradually erased.
The final physical death blow came with the Islamic invasions around the year 1200. The army of the military leader Bakhtiyar Khilji advanced into northern India and burned Nalanda University to the ground in 1193. Historical accounts say the enormous book collections burned for days, while large numbers of monks were killed or driven into exile. Whereas Hinduism survived these wars because it lived in every small village, Buddhism was vulnerable because it depended on its large centralized monasteries. Once the institutions burned and the monks disappeared, the Buddhist infrastructure collapsed.
When India became independent in 1947, however, the country’s first leaders revived symbols from Buddhism’s golden age. They placed Ashoka’s wheel of law at the center of the Indian flag, and the lion figures from the emperor’s stone pillars became the nation’s official state emblem.
Today, it is moving to visit Sarnath and see one of the tall pillars erected around 250 BCE. In the local museum, visitors can also admire the lion capital that once crowned the pillar. The four carved lions sit back to back, gazing in each direction of the sky. In the new millennium, they must look to neighboring countries to find larger Buddhist populations — above all Thailand, China, Japan, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.
According to one estimate (2020), there are around 324 million Buddhists worldwide. The figures are uncertain, however, particularly because religious affiliation in China and East Asia is often fluid. Many people participate in Buddhist rituals without necessarily identifying Buddhism as their formal religion.
In India — under Prime Minister Modi — Buddhists are largely left in peace, although many report discrimination and suspicion. Buddhism is not regarded as a foreign religion but as part of the country’s spiritual heritage. Muslims, however, face a more difficult situation, as many feel more vulnerable than they have in a long time in today’s Hindu nationalist climate.