Gautama Buddha

Siddhartha was born to Shuddhodana, a ruler of the Shakyas, and it was foretold that he would be either a great king or a great renunciate, so his father kept him from every sight of suffering. Going out from the palace he saw four things: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic - and understood that age, illness and death come to everyone. He left at twenty-nine, on the night his son was born, and studied with teachers and then practised extreme asceticism for six years until he was near death. Then he took food from a village woman, Sujata, and understood that neither indulgence nor mortification was the way. He sat under a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya and would not rise until he understood, and at dawn he did. At Sarnath he gave the first teaching to five former companions: the four noble truths - that there is suffering, that it has a cause, that it can end, and that there is a path - and the eightfold path that follows. He taught for forty-five years and died at Kushinagar at eighty, his last words being that all conditioned things pass away and that one should work out one's own liberation with diligence.

The Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions differ profoundly in how they understand what the Buddha was and what awakening is - whether he was a man who woke up or a manifestation of something beyond that, whether there is one Buddha or countless. The Hindu inclusion of the Buddha as Vishnu's ninth avatar is a claim Buddhists do not accept and whose purpose has been argued over for a very long time; it should be reported as a Hindu position, not as a shared fact. Ambedkar's Navayana, set out in The Buddha and His Dhamma, explicitly reinterprets several doctrines and is regarded by some traditional Buddhists as a departure; it is the form held by the largest Buddhist community in India and cannot be omitted. Dates for his life vary by decades between traditions and scholars.

For the first few centuries he was not depicted in human form at all: an empty throne, a footprint, a wheel, a bodhi tree, a stupa. The human image appears around the first century CE at Gandhara and Mathura, and the Gandhara style's Greek influence is visible and well documented. The standard forms are seated in meditation with hands in dhyana mudra; the bhumisparsha mudra with the right hand touching the earth, which is the Bodh Gaya awakening moment and the commonest of all; the dharmachakra mudra of the first teaching at Sarnath; the abhaya mudra of fearlessness; and the reclining parinirvana at Kushinagar. The ushnisha on the head, the elongated ears, the urna between the brows and the monastic robe are constant. The mudra is not decorative - each one names a specific event, and getting it wrong is a substantive error.

Mahabodhi Temple, Bodh Gaya — Gaya, Bihar. Where he attained awakening, under the descendant of the original bodhi tree. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most important Buddhist site in the world, with monasteries built by many Buddhist countries around it. Buddha Purnima; the winter teaching season. Bodh Gaya, Gaya district. Delivery cities: Gaya, Patna, Varanasi.

Sarnath — Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Where he gave the first teaching. The Dhamek Stupa stands there, and the Sarnath lion capital is India's state emblem. Buddha Purnima. Sarnath, near Varanasi. Delivery city: Varanasi.

Kushinagar — Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh. Where he died. The reclining parinirvana image is the principal object. Buddha Purnima. Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh. Delivery cities: Gorakhpur, Kushinagar.

Deekshabhoomi, Nagpur — Nagpur, Maharashtra. Where Ambedkar and hundreds of thousands of followers converted to Buddhism on 14 October 1956. The single most significant site for Indian Buddhism today by attendance. Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, October; Ambedkar Jayanti, 14 April. Nagpur, Maharashtra. Delivery cities: Nagpur, Aurangabad, Mumbai.

Ajanta, Ellora and Sanchi — Aurangabad, Raisen, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh. The great ancient Buddhist monuments - the Ajanta painting cycle, the Ellora excavations, and the Sanchi stupa with its Ashokan-period core. Year-round. Aurangabad and Raisen districts. Delivery cities: Aurangabad, Bhopal.

Buddhist practice centres on taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha; on the five precepts for lay people; on meditation; and on offering flowers, light and incense before an image - where the offering is understood as an act of the person making it rather than a transaction with a being, since the Buddha has passed beyond intervening. Buddha Purnima, the full moon of Vaishakha, marks birth, awakening and death together. Circumambulation of stupas is the characteristic act at the ancient sites. In the Ambedkarite tradition the practice includes the twenty-two vows taken at conversion, and Dhammachakra Pravartan Din at Nagpur each October draws enormous numbers. The Tibetan community in India - Dharamshala, Bylakuppe, Tawang - maintains Vajrayana practice with its own elaborate ritual.

• Buddha Purnima / Vesak — Vaishakha full moon, Apr-May — Birth, awakening and death marked together. The principal Buddhist festival worldwide.
• Dhammachakra Pravartan Din — October, around Vijayadashami — The anniversary of Ambedkar's 1956 conversion at Nagpur. The largest Buddhist gathering in India.
• Ambedkar Jayanti — 14 April — Observed across India, and centrally by Buddhist communities.
• Asalha Puja and the Rains Retreat — Ashadha full moon, Jul — The first teaching at Sarnath, and the start of the monastic rains retreat.
• Losar — Feb-Mar — Tibetan new year, in the Himalayan and Tibetan-exile communities.

Metal images belong to several Buddhist artistic traditions. The suitability of an individual design depends on the particular image and its intended handling; a broad Buddhist label does not settle those questions.

The archaeological Lion Capital and the protected Indian State Emblem need to be distinguished. Vittarq has withheld the unresolved Lion Capital and Ashoka Pillar offers while the exact artwork and applicable restrictions are reviewed. This does not mean every Buddhist wheel or archaeological image is prohibited.

Indian Buddhism has two distinct histories. The ancient one runs from the Buddha through Ashoka's patronage, the great monastic universities at Nalanda and Vikramashila, and then a long decline that left Buddhism nearly absent from India by the thirteenth century while it flourished everywhere else in Asia. The modern one begins with the Mahabodhi Society's nineteenth-century revival and, decisively, with B. R. Ambedkar's conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, when he and several hundred thousand followers - most of them Dalits - became Buddhists in a single act that was religious and political at once. The overwhelming majority of Indian Buddhists today are from that tradition, concentrated in Maharashtra. The Tibetan refugee community since 1959 forms a third, distinct population. Anyone writing about Indian Buddhism who mentions only the ancient history is describing something that mostly is not there.

• That the Buddha is a Hindu deity. The identification as Vishnu's ninth avatar is a Hindu position that Buddhists do not accept, and its purpose has been argued over for a very long time.
• That Indian Buddhism is ancient and small. The largest Indian Buddhist community dates from 1956 and Ambedkar's conversion, and is concentrated in Maharashtra.
• That the mudras are decorative hand positions. Each names a specific event - earth-touching is the awakening, the wheel is the first teaching - and using the wrong one is a substantive error.
• That the Buddha was always depicted in human form. For the first few centuries he was represented by an empty throne, a footprint, a wheel or a tree; the human image appears around the first century CE.
• That offering to a Buddha image is a request. The Buddha has passed beyond intervening; the offering is understood as an act of the person making it.

• Avalokiteshvara, Tara and Manjushri - the Mahayana and Vajrayana bodhisattvas.
• Ambedkar - whose 1956 conversion founded the largest Indian Buddhist community.
• Ashoka - whose patronage spread Buddhism across Asia, and whose lion capital is India's state emblem.
• Mahavira - his contemporary, with whom he is frequently and wrongly conflated.

Buddha means the awakened one - a title, not a name. Siddhartha Gautama was the person; Shakyamuni means the sage of the Shakya clan; Tathagata, the term he used of himself, is variously read as the one thus gone or the one thus come and its ambiguity is deliberate.

• Pali Canon - the Tipitaka, the Theravada scriptures, including the Dhammapada.
• Mahayana sutras - the Lotus, Heart and Diamond Sutras among them.
• Ashokan edicts - the third-century BCE inscriptions, the earliest hard evidence of Buddhism's spread.
• The Buddha and His Dhamma by B. R. Ambedkar, 1957 - the foundational text of Navayana.