Word: buddhism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hinduism the concept of the endless cycle of life, in which a man might be reincarnated as anything from a noble elephant to a lowly spider?depending upon the merit of his previous life's deeds. As a kind of cultivated escapism for the individual who masters the drill, Buddhism has been dismissed by some Westerners as Freudianism in reverse: a systematic elimination of the ego so that anxiety has no place to roost. Originally, Buddhism was an otherworldly path leading each man deeper into himself?and certainly not into the political arena...
Buddhist Constantine. Within 200 years after Buddha's death, historians noted 18 different varieties of Buddhism. When the Emperor Asoka, who about 250 B.C. created an Indian Empire not surpassed in extent until the British conquests, felt a surfeit of slaughter after killing 100,000 people, he turned to the new religion and became Buddhism's Constantine. He not only made Buddhism India's state religion, but his missionaries implanted the faith in Ceylon, fanned out through the rest of Asia, even Africa and Europe...
...time it reached Confucian and Taoist China in the 1st century A.D., Buddhism had lost its austerity, and danced happily into the already crowded Chinese religious pantheon as a cheerful faith promising a flowering hereafter. The Chinese took it to Korea, and in the 6th century the Koreans took it to Japan, where in less than 50 years it became the state religion...
Flourishing abroad, Buddhism languished in its birthplace as the Indian monks grew rich and corrupt under state patronage. Today, Buddhists constitute less than 1% of India's population, and the faith is kept alive largely by untouchable converts fleeing the caste system. But in Tibet, Buddhism evolved into a theocracy which lasted 400 years, until the Chinese drove the current Dalai Lama into exile...
...Chariots. For all the local varieties of the Buddhist lotus, two divergent traditions are responsible for the stance of Buddhism in Asia today. The split goes back 2,000 years, and much of the original quarrel is lost in the misty past, though apparently it included some indelicate polemics over whether a monk's nocturnal emission constituted proof of an unredeemed lust. The main argument was really a conflict that sooner or later afflicts most religions: between the fundamentalists and the liberals...