Comment

Comment by doone on June 29, 2012 at 1:57am

A reincarnation gone wrong

Comment by doone on June 28, 2012 at 7:13am

Timeline of Buddhism

 

BCE
563 BCE: Siddhārtha Gautama, Buddha-to-be, is born in Lumbini into a leading royal family in the republic of the Shakyas, which is now part of Nepal.
534 BCE: Prince Siddhartha goes outside the palace for the first time and sees The Four Sights: an old man, an ill man, a dead man, and a holy man. He is shocked by the first three—he did not know what age, disease, and death were—but is inspired by the holy man to give up his wealth. He leaves his house and lives with three ascetics. However, he wants more than to starve himself, so he becomes a religious teacher.
528 BCE: Siddhartha attains Enlightenment in Buddha Gaya (modern-day Bodhgaya), then travels to a deer park in Sarnath (near Varanasi), India, and begins expounding the Dharma.
528 BCE According to legend, Tapassu and Balluka, two trader-brothers from Okkala (modern-day Yangon), offered Siddhatha Gautama his first meal after his enlightenment. The Buddha gives eight strands of his hair to the two brothers; the strands are brought back to Burma and enshrined in the Shwedagon Pagoda. Thus, according to myth, this is the year when the Shwedagon Pagoda was built.
c. 490–410 BCE: Life of the Buddha, according to recent research.[2]
c. 483 BCE: Gautama Buddha dies ('attains parinibbana') at Kusinara (now called Kushinagar), India. Three months following his death,[dubious – discuss] the First Buddhist Council is convened.
383 BCE: The Second Buddhist Council is convened by King Kalasoka and held at Vaisali.
c. 250 BCE: Third Buddhist Council, convened by Ashoka the Great and chaired by Moggaliputta Tissa, compiles the Kathavatthu to refute the heretical views and theories held by some Buddhist sects. Ashoka issues a number of edicts (Edicts of Ashoka) about the kingdom in support of Buddhism.
c. 250 BCE: Emperor Ashoka the Great sends various Buddhist missionaries to faraway countries, as far as China and the Mon & Malay kingdoms in the east and the Hellenistic kingdoms in the west, in order to make Buddhism known to them.
c. 250 BCE: First fully developed examples of Kharoṣṭhī script date from this period (the Aśokan inscriptions at Shāhbāzgaṛhī and Mānsehrā, a northwestern Indian subcontinent).
3rd century BCE: Indian traders regularly visit ports in Arabia, explaining the prevalence of place names in the region with Indian or Buddhist origin; e.g., bahar (from the Sanskrit vihara, a Buddhist monastery). Ashokan emissary monks bring Buddhism to Suwannaphum, the location of which is disputed. The Dipavamsa and the Mon believe it was a Mon seafaring settlement in present-day Burma.
c. 220 BCE: Theravada Buddhism is officially introduced to Sri Lanka by the Venerable Mahinda, son of the emperor Ashoka of India during the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa.
185 BCE: Brahmin general Pusyamitra Sunga overthrows the Mauryan dynasty and establishes the Sunga dynasty, apparently starting a wave of persecution against Buddhism.
180 BCE: Greco-Bactrian King Demetrius invades India as far as Pataliputra and establishes the Indo-Greek kingdom (180–10 BCE), under which Buddhism flourishes.