Traditions of Buddhism
Nearly 2,500 years ago, 'out of compassion for the world, for
the benefit and welfare of the many', Buddhist monks began
their journey south to take the word of the Buddha across India.
Several centuries later their successors began to follow the long
trade routes east through central and South-East Asia into
China. Several centuries later still, monks crossed the mountain
passes to the north and entered Tibet. In India itself Buddhist
monasteries were gradually deserted and all that remained were
crumbling monuments to the past. The twentieth century has wit-
nessed the establishment of the Buddha's word in the West and
the return of the Buddhist Sangha to its homeland in India.^34 And
despite 'the killing fields' of the Khmer Rouge and the ravages
of the Red Guard, the richness and diversity of Buddhism re-
mains: outside a cottage in the English countryside a small group
of people places food in the bowls of European and American
monks as they file past in silence; a hundred miles or so from the
place ofthe Buddha's birth, pilgrims to the shrine of the primordial
Buddha Svayambhunatha in Nepal turn the countless prayer
wheels as they approach the great stiipa; in the hall of a
monastery situated amidst the rice fields of Korea a group of monks
sits silently in meditation; at Aukana in Sri Lanka a woman dressed
in white carefully places an open lotus bud at the feet of the giant
standing Buddha and raises her joined palms to her forehead.