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Buddhism
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The founder of Buddhism in this world is Buddha Shakyamuni. He was born as a royal prince in 624 BC in a place called Lumbini, which was originally in northern India but is now part of Nepal. ‘Shakya’ is the name of the royal family into which he was born, and ‘Muni’ means ‘Able One’. His parents gave him the name Siddhartha and there were many wonderful predictions about his future. In his early years he lived as a prince in his royal palace but when he was 29 years old he retired to the forest where he followed a spiritual life of meditation. After six years he attained enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya, India.
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The chief sources for early Buddhism are the sacred books comprised in the first two divisions of the Ti-pitaka (triple-basket), the threefold Bible of the Southern School of Buddhists. In India, today, the Buddhists are found only in the North, in Nepal, and in the extreme South, in the island of Ceylon. They represent two different schools of thought, the Northern worshipping Buddha as supreme personal deity though at the same time adopting most of the degrading superstitions of Hinduism, the Southern adhering in great measure to the original teachings of Buddha. Each school has a canon of sacred books. The Northern canon is in Sanskrit, the Southern in Pali, a softer tongue, into which Sanskrit was transformed by the people of the South. The Southern canon, Ti-pitaka, which reflects more faithfully the teachings of Buddha and his early disciples, embraces
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Buddhism has a very strong code of ethics, coming straight from the Eightfold Path. Karma plays heavily in this: the old parable "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" applies well. Karma is the idea that since the universe is connected in every way, hurting another will hurt you. Being "good" will bring you closer to nirvana. Right action is a definition of behavior, the Five Precepts. The first of these states to refrain from taking life.
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According to Prof. A. Litvinskii, Buddhism had reached Merv and Parthia as early as Achaemenid times. The Mahavamsa, the Great Chronicle of Ceylon described that Parthian and Alexandrian delegates were in attendance at a Buddhist council held by King Duttha Gamani (108-77BC). With the extension of Kushan influence, Buddhism further penetrated the realm of the Parthians and Sassanians. Parthian's Buddhist faith was ... confirmed by the Chinese records of the missions of the Parthian Buddhist preachers, An-Shih-Kao and An Hsuan during the 2nd century.
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Aside from Buddhism, the most important school to arise in this period was Jainism. Unlike the other heretical schools, Jainism has survived to the present day as a major religion in India; unlike Buddhism... it has not spread much outside of India. The great teacher of Jainism, Vardhamana Mahavira, lived at the same time as Siddhartha Guatama, the founder of Buddhism. It appears to Western historians that Jainism actually begins with Vardhamana, although the Jains believe that the religion is far older, extending in fact to the remotest antiquity. Mahavira, they believe, was the twenty-fourth and last of the teachers. He was born in 599 BC, the son of a daughter of the king of Vaisali.
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The fundamental tenets of Buddhism are marked by grave defects that not only betray its inadequacy to become a religion of enlightened humanity, but ... bring into bold relief its inferiority to the religion of Jesus Christ. In the first place, the very foundation on which Buddhism rests—the doctrine of karma with its implied transmigrations—is gratuitous and false. This pretended law of nature, by which the myriads of gods, demons, men, and animals are but the transient forms of rational beings essentially the same, but forced to this diversity in consequence of varying degrees of merit and demerit in former lives, is a huge superstition in flat contradiction to the recognized laws of nature, and hence ignored by men of science. Another basic defect in primitive Buddhism is its failure to recognize man's dependence on a supreme God. By ignoring God and by making salvation rest solely on personal effort, Buddha substituted for the Brahmin religion a cold and colorless system of philosophy. It is entirely lacking in those powerful motives to right conduct, particularly the motive of love, that spring from the consecration of religious men and women to the dependence on a personal all-loving God.
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