The religion known as Buddhism began in the northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent several centuries before the Christian era. In the past 150 years or so archaeologists and scholars have uncovered and identified most of the ancient sites throughout the Ganges Valley region where Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, lived and ministered during a lifespan of eighty years.
Other aspects of Buddhism's origins are not as well known as the geographical factors, however. Regarding chronology, there are current today at least three serious theories about Gautama's birth and death that vary as much as a two centuries! Concerning the ethnic origins of the Buddha and most of his followers, there has been surprisingly little speculation among scholars; and yet certain assumptions, upon which numberless other "facts" have been erected, have been rife.
Buddhism, it is true, began in India, but the India of twenty or twenty-five centuries ago was a cauldron of races and tribes striving for mastery. The Central Asian contingent was particularly strong at this time: it is probable that the Mahayana movement began among these nomadic and semi-nomadic invaders from the north.
When Buddhism began to take root in China about the time of the Christian era, there were two strong reasons why the religion became profoundly different from what is depicted in the Pali canonical writings: (1) the missionaries and translators who went to China were mostly Central Asians with a penchant for Mahayana tenets; and (2) the Chinese themselves had a radically distinct civilization and temper from the Indian. Buddhism in China had to make its way among a people who were contemptuous of all things and even persons foreign; its chief rivals for intellectual and spiritual allegiance were Confucianism and Taoism.
Buddhism gave the Chinese people a religion of transcendence and meditation, it introduced monasteries and taught the need for asceticism. There were numerous setbacks to Buddhism in China over the centuries, but gradually the alien faith was accommodated to its surroundings.
In VietNam, the three rival religions of Confusciansim, Buddhism and Taoism were introduced during the thousand years period between the initial Chinese conquest and Vietnamese independence in 939 A.D. Confucianism in particular was strongly identified with the alien Chinese mandarin class and Taoism tended to sink in status by becoming immersed in superstitious practices. As for Buddhism, it was Mahayanist and largely Zen in orientation. A series of able and patriotic native monarchs became zealous patrons of the faith and employed their statesmanship in ways that would identify Buddhism with nationalism.
