Buddhism

When Professor Robin Coningham's youngest son Gus was five, he was asked at school what his father did. "He works for the Buddha," said the boy. Which led to a bit of confusion, recalls Coningham. But it turns out Gus was not that far off the mark. Last week it emerged that a team led by Coningham, a professor of archaeology and pro-vice-chancellor at Durham University, had made a startling discovery about the date of the Buddha's birth, one that could rewrite the history of Buddhism. After a three-year dig on the site of the Maya Devi temple at Lumbini in Nepal, Coningham and his team of 40 archaeologists discovered a tree shrine that predates all known Buddhist sites by at least 300 years.

Ancient Buddhist Scriptures Everything we teach comes from the ancient sermons taught by Gautama Buddha and his enlightened disciples that lived with him. They have been preserved in the Sutta Pitaka by the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Shortly after the Buddha passed away, 500 fully enlightened monks gathered at the First Great Council to recite all of the sermons they remembered that the Buddha and his enlightened disciples preached. They then organized them into five collections known as Nikayas. Groups of monks were assigned to memorize these collections and get together frequently to recite them. At the time in India [...]