Buddhism

Buddhism is one of the major religions in the world, which was started by Lord Buddha who believed to live from about 563 to 483 BC. And Buddhism was practiced in India for 1000 years.

Once Buddhism was flourished in India and Great King Ashoka and Kanishka were followers of Buddhism. Buddhism was spread all over the world and later it became one of the great religions of the world.

The four main Buddhist sacred places are Lumbini, Bodhgaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar, which are related to Buddha's Birth, Enlightenment, turning wheel of Dharma and Nirvana (death). There are other important Buddhist pilgrimage places like Vaishali, Rajgir, Ajanta, Ellora and Nalanda in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Overland offers Buddhist Tour packages to Buddhist pilgrimage places, Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, meditation and other Buddhist related tours.

It began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.), a prince from the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned his home and wandered forth as a religious beggar, searching for the meaning of existence. The stories of his search presuppose the Jain tradition, as Gautama was for a time a practitioner of intense austerity, at one point almost starving himself to death. He decided, however, that self-torture weakened his mind while failing to advance him to enlightenment and therefore turned to a milder style of renunciation and concentrated on advanced meditation techniques. Eventually, under a tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he resolved to stir no farther until he had solved the mystery of existence. Breaking through the final barriers, he achieved the knowledge that he later expressed as the Four Noble Truths: all of life is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the end of desire leads to the end of suffering; and the means to end desire is a path of discipline and meditation. Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened one, and he spent the remainder of his life traveling about northeast India converting large numbers of disciples. At the age of eighty, the Buddha achieved his final passing away (parinirvana) and died, leaving a thriving monastic order and a dedicated lay community to continue his work.

By the third century B.C., the still-young religion based on the Buddha's teachings was being spread throughout South Asia through the agency of the Mauryan Empire (ca. 326-184 B.C.; see The Mauryan Empire, ch. 1). By the seventh century A.D., having spread throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhism probably had the largest religious following in the world.