The only two majority-Buddhist nations in South Asia are Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Buddhists are also found in Nepal, India (especially in Ladakh and Sikkim) and Bangladesh in small minorities.
Bhutan has got the highest Buddhist percentage (uncertain but it must over 75%) among other South Asian countries. Sri Lanka is 70% Buddhist and its un-official state religion here; Buddhism is also the most important minority religion in Nepal (11% of Nepal's population). India has 0.8% Buddhist population and it is growing rapidly in recent years because the conversion of Hindu dalits, while Theravada Buddhism is the third largest religion in Bangladesh with about 0.7% of the total population are Buddhists.
Indian civilization was cradled in the area of the Indus River Valley and the Punjab. The earliest members of the Indus Valley civilization occupied a considerable area of the northwest sometime between 3000 and 1800 B.C..Much is not known about the religious ideas and practices of these people. The civilization was in decline when Indo-Aryan tribes invaded by crossing high mountain passes in the far northwest and settled in the regions nearby Punjab between 1800 and 1500 B.C. The religion of the Indo-Aryans was a regional variant of Indo-European practices, called either Vedism or Brahmanism. Unlike the peaceful agrarians of the Indus Valley, these people were rough cattle herders. Within the tribe political and military power occurred. This became the classical Hinduism. While its doubtful whether the office of priest (Brahmana) was hereditary among the early Indo-Aryans by the time that the Buddha taught only members of certain class. It was considered a personal merit to worship. Buddhism is a later branch from the same stock that grew and flourished in the religiously diverse plains of the Indus and Ganges.
Famous quotes containing the words buddhism, south and/or asia:
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“I have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the “hot bread and sweet cakes;” and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)