A journey of ideas
From Sarnath to Mount Hiei: Buddhist philosophy travels east
The Buddha's teaching moved from the Ganges valley through the monastic university of Nalanda to Tang Chang'an and on to Japan. Each crossing meant translation into new languages and new schools: Indian Yogācāra became Chinese Faxiang; esoteric Zhenyan became Kūkai's Shingon; Dōgen, first ordained in the Tendai school on Mount Hiei, founded Sōtō Zen; and in the twentieth century D. T. Suzuki carried Zen to readers far beyond Japan.
The line joins the steps in order; it shows the order, not the roads taken. Coastlines: Natural Earth (public domain).
The journey, step by step
450 BCEVaranasiThe Buddha
By tradition the Buddha began teaching his followers at Sarnath, just north of Varanasi, a spot later marked by the Dhamek Stupa and by a pillar of the emperor Ashoka, whose lion capital is now the basis of India's state emblem. His dates are disputed. What he passed on was a teaching about suffering, its causes and its ending, carried by communities of monks and nuns. Over the following centuries rival Indian schools argued about how that teaching should be understood.
Source: britannica.com
At the monasteries of Nalanda, in the Ganges plain, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang found the teachers he had travelled to meet. He had left Chang'an secretly in 629 in defiance of an imperial ban, and in 636 he became the disciple of the master Silabhadra. He studied Yogācāra, the school that analyses experience as 'ideation only', left a detailed account of the studies he found there, and gathered a great number of Sanskrit texts to carry back to China.
Source: iep.utm.edu
Back in Chang'an in 645, Xuanzang spent the rest of his life translating the texts he had brought, working at the Temple of Great Happiness until his death in 664. His Yogācāra became the Chinese Faxiang, or Weishi ('ideation only'), school. Translation reshaped the ideas it carried, as Chinese vocabulary, debates and lineages took hold of Indian arguments. The school then passed on to Korea, where it was called Popsang, and to Japan, where it became Hossō.
Source: iep.utm.edu
In 804 the Japanese monk Kūkai sailed with an official embassy to China and spent thirty months in Chang'an, where he met Huiguo, seventh patriarch of the esoteric Zhenyan school. He returned to Japan in 806 with its teachings. In 809 the emperor Saga ordered him to the new capital, Kyoto, where he stayed until 823, and in 816 he began building a monastic centre on Mount Kōya. The esoteric teaching he brought became a distinctively Japanese tradition.
Source: plato.stanford.edu
1212Mount HieiDōgen
Mount Hiei, centre of the Tendai school above Kyoto, trained several reformers of Japanese Buddhism. Dōgen studied the mixed exoteric and esoteric Buddhism of the Tendai tradition there from 1212 to 1217. In 1223 he accompanied his teacher Myōzen on a pilgrimage to China, and in 1227 he inherited Rujing's Caodong Chan lineage, which became Japanese Sōtō Zen, and returned home. The monastery he later founded was renamed Eiheiji in 1246. A Chinese lineage, carried back across the sea, became a Japanese school.
Source: encyclopedia.com
Kamakura's Zen temples later linked medieval practice to modern philosophy. In 1892 the young D. T. Suzuki began Zen practice with the master Imakita Kōsen of Engaku-ji, an important Zen temple in the city, and continued after Kōsen's death under Shaku Sōen. In 1888 he had entered the Fourth High School alongside Nishida Kitarō. In 1946 Suzuki established the Matsugaoka Bunko foundation in Kamakura, a Buddhist library his teacher Sōen had called for, and he lived, researched and wrote there in his last years.
Source: matsugaoka-bunko.com