Buddhism
There were many religions that were practiced among the people of central Asia back in the early second and third centuries and forward. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were among the main three religions practiced then. Buddhism has been around since 273 B.C. It started in India and traveled into central Asia and continued on into Korea and Japan becoming one of the major religions in all of central China. By the ninth century nine-tenths of the population in northwest China was converted to Buddhism. So let's take a closer look at Buddhism and find out who started the religion and what the beliefs are behind it. How did it become central Asia's major religion and what caused its decline?Within the Gautama clan in India was a noble ranking man by the name of Siddhartha. According to the traditional story, Siddhartha had become distressed by all of the suffering around him. So he gave up his family and all his material comforts of life and set out on a life of wondering. It was during a time in his travels when he was close to the point of death that he sat beneath a papal tree and vowed not to move from the spot until Enlightment had been obtained. It was then that Siddhartha was known to have achieved Enlightmen
So Buddhism continued traveling through Asia, reaching areas of Korea and then into the island of Japan. It reached Japan in the late sixth century when the Japanese at the time was under the Shinto religion. The Shinto looked entirely to the external world, one without icons, whereas Buddhism brought to the Japanese culture the words for compassion, wisdom, mercy, and kindness. It brought flexibility in the fact that there are many paths to the same final truth (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan 158). Bowering, Richard and Kornicki, Peter, eds. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan. Even though Buddhism declined at some point in time in all of the three countries it traveled through, it has yet to die out completely. Buddhism is slowly regaining its strength. Mahayana forms of Buddhism are still being practiced in central Asia today and there are over 350 million Buddhists worldwide. Within the last century Buddhism has arrived in the West and hundreds of Buddhist centers and groups are sprouting up across the USA. Buddhism was broken and lost forever. Tokugawa put Buddhism as an institution under strict
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Approximate Word count = 1185
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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