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By the time it reached Confucian and Taoist China in the 1st century A.D., Buddhism had lost its austerity, and danced happily into the already crowded Chinese religious pantheon as a cheerful faith promising a flowering hereafter. The Chinese took it to Korea, and in the 6th century the Koreans took it to Japan, where in less than 50 years it became the state religion.
Flourishing abroad, Buddhism languished in its birthplace as the Indian monks grew rich and corrupt under state patronage. Today, Buddhists constitute less than 1% of India's population, and the faith is kept alive largely by untouchable converts fleeing the caste system. But in Tibet, Buddhism evolved into a theocracy which lasted 400 years, until the Chinese drove the current Dalai Lama into exile in 1959.
Two Chariots. For all the local varieties of the Buddhist lotus, two divergent traditions are responsible for the stance of Buddhism in Asia today. The split goes back 2,000 years, and much of the original quarrel is lost in the misty past, though apparently it included some indelicate polemics over whether a monk's nocturnal emission constituted proof of an unredeemed lust. The main argument was really a conflict that sooner or later afflicts most religions: between the fundamentalists and the liberals.
The fundamentalist Buddhists stuck to Buddha's narrow, escapist but arduous path and came to be known, to their distaste, as the Hinayana, or "lesser chariot." They prefer the name Theravada, or "doctrine of the elders." The "greater chariot," or Mahayana, branch attempted to enlarge and socialize the Middle Way. Their Buddha became less the example who must be emulated, more the savior who had mystically improved the lot of all mankind. By giving nearly equal weight to concern for others and to withdrawal for the self, Mahayana provided a platform for political engagement as Theravada could not.
The Twofold Path. When the modern world broke into Asia during the 19th century, Buddhism resisted. In the Boxer Rebellion, Buddhist deities were relied on for help against the Christian bullets. In Indo-China, Burma and elsewhere, Buddhism became identified with the nationalist struggle against colonial rule.
When the great recessional of the Western colonial powers finally began, the Buddhists awoke to find themselves in new positions of leverage. Their power stemmed from one source more than any other: the village pagoda, which today remains what it has been for centuries—the center of rural life, a place where laymen can go to sleep off a hangover, hide out from the police, or spend an undisturbed hour with their girl friends. The bonzes are schoolmasters and doctors, as well as priests.
This grass-roots power has taken a twofold—if not an eightfold—path. In the more agitated countries, the monks have used it as a way into politics; in the quieter lands, all of the lesser-chariot persuasion, they have used it to stay out of politics, merely adding a conservative prop to support existing institutions.