History of Buddhism

As an aid to those unfamiliar with the topics presented here, some background information and a few technical terms and dates have been filled in to the summaries of some of the papers. Introduction to the Bhikshuni Vows The Importance of Having Bhikshunis The...

Introduction to Buryatia In the year 2010, there were 286 000 Buryats in the Republic of Buryatia, in Russia, who constituted 30% of the population of the republic. In Chita district, Buryats make up just 5–6% of the population, and Buryats living in the Aginskoye subdistrict...

The Creation of Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia was created as a separate entity from the rest of Mongolia by the Manchus, because the Mongols in this region submitted to the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century, about 60 years before Khalkha, or what later became known as...

Introducing the Three Different Types of Dharma In general, the Dharma teachings can be divided into the Hinayana and the Mahayana teachings. The word “dharma” means “something that holds its own self-nature.” To think of dharmas as being anything that takes or holds anything...

There is a long history of Muslims being regarded by the Christian West as the forces of the devil. This began at the end of the eleventh century CE with the Crusades to take the Holy Lands from the Muslims. It continued with the fall of ­­the center of Eastern Orth­odox...

The Founding of the Qarakhanid Empire When the Orkhon Uighur Turks were driven from Mongolia by the Kyrgyz takeover in 840 CE, they lost possession of the sacred earth-goddess mountain Otukan near their former capital, Ordubaliq. According to the pre-Buddhist and...

Origin of the Text According to Tradition This weekend we are talking about the great Mahayana text by Maitreya, Mahayana-uttaratantra Shastra (Theg-pa chen-po rgyud bla-ma’i bstan-bcos), about Buddha-nature. It’s An Indicative Composition on a Vast Vehicle of the Mind, the...

The Flourishing of Dharma At the time when the Buddha himself was alive in India, the land of Tibet was mostly under water. Buddha prophesized that this water would drain and disappear, and then the land of Tibet would become solid ground on which his teachings would flourish....

First Contacts with Buddhism After the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 CE, Buddhism became strong in northern China, which was fragmented and ruled by a succession of non-Han Chinese people and states. The greatest patron of Buddhism among them was the Toba Northern Wei Dynasty...

Introduction Kalmykia is situated in the lower Volga-Don river basin, to the northwest of the Caspian Sea. There are 170,000 Kalmyks, and they constitute approximately half of the population of both the capital, Elista, which has a total population of 90,000, as well as the...