Editing India (section)

== Buddhism in India ==

Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born and lived in the Himalayan foothills of a region now shared between India and Nepal. The monastic and lay community that formed around his teaching flourished across the subcontinent for roughly a thousand years, gaining significant royal patronage — most famously under the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE — and producing major centers of learning such as the Nalanda monastic university. From roughly the seventh century CE onward, Buddhism entered a prolonged decline on the subcontinent, driven by a combination of resurgent Brahmanical and devotional Hindu movements that absorbed much of its lay following, the loss of royal patronage, and the destruction of major monastic centers amid the Muslim conquests of northern India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the thirteenth century, institutional Buddhism had effectively disappeared from most of the subcontinent, surviving mainly at its Himalayan periphery, in regions bordering Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, where it remained continuous with Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist traditions rather than reflecting any distinctly Indian revival.

For over six centuries thereafter, Buddhism existed in India chiefly as an object of antiquarian and archaeological interest rather than as a living, organized religious community of any scale. This changed dramatically in the twentieth century, primarily through the efforts of B. R. Ambedkar, discussed below, whose 1956 mass conversion movement created what is today by far the largest Buddhist community in India. According to the 2011 census, India's Buddhist population stands at approximately 8.4 million, and the great majority — some three-quarters of the national total — are Marathi Buddhists concentrated in the state of Maharashtra, overwhelmingly converts or descendants of converts from Ambedkar's Navayana movement. Significant populations also exist in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, as well as among the older, ethnically distinct Himalayan Buddhist communities of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and Darjeeling, whose Buddhist practice predates and remains largely separate from the Ambedkarite revival. This bifurcation — a small, continuous Himalayan Buddhist population alongside a much larger, recently converted Dalit Buddhist population — remains a defining structural feature of Indian Buddhism today.