INTRODUCTION

GENERAL SURVEY OF BUDDHISM AND ITS EVOLUTION

"I pay homage to the Buddha, I pay homage to the Teachings, I pay homage to the Community" original Sanskrit: "Namo Buddhāya, namo Dharmāya, namo Saṅghāya": such is the formula that represents the essence of the Buddhist religion. It is spoken and repeated several times a day by countless Buddhist monks and priests, as well as by those laypeople who are educated in their faith. Others simply repeat the magic formula: "Om, the jewel is in the lotus!" original Sanskrit: "Oṃ, maṇi padme, hūṃ".

To provide a general idea of this great religion—whose followers make up a third of the human race—it is enough to explain this formula of the three jewels (Triratna). First, we shall examine the life of the only historical Buddha (the "Enlightened One"), Shakyamuni, the founder of the faith. Then, we shall briefly summarize the doctrine he preached, following its evolution through space and time so that we may understand the forms it has taken in the various countries it has reached. Finally, we shall describe the organization of the Buddhist clergy (especially the Tibetan Buddhist or "Lamaist" tradition) and outline the practical or material side of the religion.

I. BUDDHA

Most historians place the birth of Siddhartha, the future founder of Buddhism and the son of Prince Shuddhodana and his wife Maya, toward the end of the sixth century BCE.¹ Prince Shuddhodana was a leader of the Shakya tribe in the kingdom of Magadha and belonged to the Gautama clan (Gotra). For this reason, the name "Gautama Buddha" is often applied to Siddhartha, especially among Southern Buddhists. In the North, he is generally called Shakyamuni (where "muni" simply means "wise man" or "saint" in Sanskrit).

Buddhist texts identify the birthplace of Shakyamuni as the garden of Lumbini near Kapilavastu, the capital of the small principality ruled by Shuddhodana. It is located in northern India at the foot of the Himalayas, near the modern border of Nepal. In Buddhist literature, there is no single, complete biography of Shakyamuni; one must reconstruct his life from fragments found in various documents.² These documents share only one common characteristic—the

¹ For details see p. 16.
² The Jataka (the "Adventures of Buddha in previous Incarnations"), with their introduction and commentaries in the Pali language a dialect between Sanskrit and Prakrit, and the sacred language of Southern Buddhists, only take us to the moment when Shakyamuni begins his preaching after attaining perfect knowledge (Bodhi).

The Lalita Vistara (known in Tibetan as Rgyacer-rol-pa) and the Mahavastu of the Northern Buddhists provide only a few new details. Some fragments concerning the end of the life of the "Blessed One" original Sanskrit: "Bhagavat" are found in the Vinaya (the oldest part of the Pali scriptures), and other texts.