The Spread of Buddhism on Buddhist Resources

Buddhism on the Silk Road

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:58:10 +0200

The Silk Road was not a road and did not principally carry silk. It was a shifting network of overland routes linking northern India, Iran, Central Asia, and China, along which moved horses, glass, paper, spices, slaves, diseases, technologies, and — with unusual success — Buddhism.

Buddhism in China

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:59:26 +0200

China is the most consequential thing that ever happened to Buddhism. It was the first major civilisation the tradition entered that already possessed a literate high culture, a centralised bureaucratic state, an ancient historical self-consciousness, and philosophical traditions of its own. The encounter took roughly six centuries to resolve, and what came out of it was substantially new.

Buddhism in Japan

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:39 +0200

Japanese Buddhism is the most institutionally distinctive of the East Asian traditions and, in several respects, the most surprising. It produced the sharpest doctrinal simplifications in Buddhist history, abandoned monastic celibacy almost entirely, and today conducts the overwhelming majority of the country’s funerals while most of the population describes itself as non-religious.

How Buddhism Came to Tibet

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:01:47 +0200

Tibet received Buddhism late, and that timing determined everything about what it received. By the seventh and eighth centuries, when the transmission began in earnest, Indian Buddhism was at its scholastic and tantric maturity — the great monastic universities were at their height, the Madhyamaka and Yogacara systems were fully developed, Buddhist logic was a sophisticated discipline, and the tantras were an established part of the curriculum.

Buddhism in Korea and Vietnam

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:03:01 +0200

Surveys of Buddhism tend to move from China straight to Japan and Tibet. Korea and Vietnam get a sentence each, usually as conduits. This is a distortion: both developed substantial traditions with distinctive positions, and both went through twentieth-century histories — colonisation, war, partition, state atheism — that reshaped them severely.