Sociology of religion is primarily the study of the practices, social structures, historical backgrounds, development, universal themes, and roles of religion in society; in this context, Buddhism is held as a religion that deals with salvation.

Sociology can be traced back to enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Its genesis is owed to various key movements in the philosophies of science and knowledge [7]. Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins within the generic gamut of philosophy and necessarily predates the field. The emergence of modern academic sociology has been catalyzed by factors such as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, and secularization, and bears a particularly strong interest in the emergence of the modern nation state – its constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means of surveillance. A manifest preference of modernity over enlightenment then is one of the chief distinguishing features of sociology.

Sociology acquired a keen diversified and expansionist tendency, in terms of topic as well as of methodology. Such a tendency is attributed to a protracted opposition to empiricism [7]. History is wrought with thriving debates marking the distinction between structure and agency and the relative supremacy of one over the other. Contemporary social theorists have tended toward the attempt to reconcile such quagmires. While postmodernist trends in recent years have seen a rise in highly abstracted theory, new quantitative data collection methods have also emerged, mostly for dealing with various ethnocentric issues. Despite being a derivative of sociology, the method of social research has quickly cut itself a niche in the very heart of social sciences as it has gained the repute of becoming a uniform analytical tool across myriad fields of social sciences. This, in turn, has bestowed on social science the status of an umbrella discipline, with a broad gamut, including diverse sciences dealing with every human phenomenon.

Scholars have argued that religion, as an aspect of human society, has been supported by both historians and anthropologists as being universal. Both primitive and civilized humans have sought to come to terms with unexplainable situations and experiences in everyday life [26]. Thus, religion has been associated with the human attempt to find purpose and meaning in life – both of self and the universe. In the past, religion had occupied a central place in human society and human thought. In the age of enlightenment and scientific rationalism, it was relegated to a secondary position, so much so that the secularization theorists had even predicted the demise of religion. However, in recent times, we see religion returning to the forefront of human concern. Religion, as a component of human behavior, is of utmost importance to the understanding of the evolution of society, and the various approaches involved to comprehend the entirety of the intellectual scope that study of religion prerequisites have made it difficult to describe or define sociology of religion in any unilateral sense of the term.

The study of religion in its social aspects and consequences emerged as part of the nineteenth-century nomothetic ambition. Sociologists of religion have in general been committed to a would-be scientific analysis of the role played by religion in the emergence, persistence, and evolution of social and cultural systems [13]. The sociology of religion is primarily the study of the practices, social structures, historical backgrounds, development, universal themes, and roles of religion in society [9]. Sociologists of religion attempt to explain the effects of society on religion and the effects of religion on society, in other words, their dialectical relationship [2]. The historical background and, therefore, the respective philosophy and theology of the era, and consecutively, the intellectual, scientific, and eventually the rationalist arguments help to understand the contemporary religious fields [4]. The trajectory through the functional and positivist approach of thinkers like Durkheim in classical sociology, to the more anthropological outlooks of Frazer and Tylor, to the rationalist arguments of Weber, finally arrives at the postmodern phenomena of secularism and globalization [9]. Peter Berger argued that the world was becoming increasingly secular, but has since recanted. He wrote that pluralism and globalization have changed the experience of faith for individuals around the world as dogmatic religion is now less important than is a personal quest for spirituality. Thomas Luckmann provides another fruitful analysis of the discipline, although he maintains that there is today an absence of developing theory in the sociology of religion. This absence of theory is both a conceptual and methodological problem [13].

Modern academic sociology began with the analysis of religion in Émile Durkheim’s 1897 study of suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, a foundational work of social research which served to distinguish sociology from other disciplines, such as psychology [26]. Religion, he argued, was an expression of social cohesion, and not imaginary, although he does deprive it of what many believers find essential [6]. Religion is very real; it is an expression of society itself, and indeed, there is no society that does not have religion. Individuals perceive a force greater than themselves, which is their social life, and give that perception a supernatural face. They then express themselves religiously in groups, which for Durkheim makes the symbolic power greater. Religion is an expression of their collective consciousness, which is the fusion of all of their individual consciousnesses, creating a reality of its own [6].

In the works of Karl Marx, religion is held as a significant hindrance to reason, inherently masking the truth and misguiding followers. He views social alienation as the heart of social inequality. The antithesis to this alienation is freedom. Thus, to propagate freedom means to present individuals with the truth and give them a choice to accept or deny it. Central to Marx’s theories is the oppressive economic situation in which he dwelt. Not only are workers exploited, but in the process they are being further detached from the products they helped create. By simply selling their work for wages, “workers simultaneously lose connection with the object of labor and become objects themselves. Workers are devalued to the level of a commodity – a thing…” [14]. From this objectification comes alienation. The common worker is told he or she is a replaceable tool, alienated to the point of extreme discontent. Here, in Marx’s eyes, religion enters. Capitalism utilizes our tendency toward religion as a tool or ideological state apparatus to justify this alienation.

Max Weber emphasizes the relationship between religion and the economic or social structure of society. For Weber, religion is best understood as it responds to the human need for theodicy and soteriology [3]. Human beings are troubled, he says, with the question of theodicy – the question of how the extraordinary power of a divine god may be reconciled with the imperfection of the world that he has created and rules over [5]. People need to know, for example, why there is undeserved good fortune and suffering in the world. Religion offers people soteriological answers, or answers that provide opportunities for salvation, for example, relief from suffering, and reassuring meaning [28]. The pursuit of salvation, like the pursuit of wealth, becomes a part of human motivation.

A religion of salvation may very well have its origin within socially privileged groups [3]. The charisma of the prophet is normally associated with a certain minimum of intellectual cultivation. But as a rule, salvation religion changes its character as soon as it has reached lay circles who are not particularly or professionally concerned with intellectualism, and more changes its character after it has reached into the lowest social strata to whom intellectualism is both economically and socially inaccessible. One characteristic element of this transformation, a product of the inevitable accommodation to the needs of the masses, may be formulated generally as the emergence of a personal, divine, or human-divine savior as the bearer of salvation, with the additional consequence that the religious relationship to this personality becomes the precondition of salvation [5]. One instance of this is the substitution for the Buddha ideal, namely, the exemplary intellectualist salvation into enlightenment (nirvana), by the ideal of a Bodhisattva, namely, a savior who has descended upon earth and has sacrificed his own entrance into Nirvana for the sake of saving his fellow humans [1]. In the Buddhist doctrine, any proletarian denunciation of wealth would have been equally alien to the Buddha, for whom the unconditional withdrawal from the world was absolute presupposition for salvation. Buddhism constitutes the most radical antithesis to every type of resentment religiosity [23].

The origin of Buddhism can be archeologically traced back to approximately 2,500 years, in the śrāmānic traditions of the Sākyā tribe in the foothills of Himalayas in present-day Nepal [8]. The values and teachings of Buddhism then were those that stood in opposition to the Hindu variety of differentiation and intolerance. Buddhism sought to assimilate all humans from diverse strata of the Indian culture of the Vedic-Brahmanic order [8]. The Buddhist ideologies were teachings of the “awakened one” or the Buddha, who imparted his knowledge and experience or Dharma into the community or Samgha of his followers [10]. These elements were characteristic of an inner awakening or liberation taught as lessons, which transcended material bondage to stratification, and thus provided a linear spiritual direction for those who subscribed to the teachings, removed from the dogmatized and heavily segregated history of Hindu traditions [1].

Buddhism passed through the political associations of its time with dynasties such as the Sākyā, Māuryā, and Śūnga, and reached its pinnacle through their support [8]. In this period between its genesis and the impending foreign invasions, of about 300 years, Buddhism became a systematized doctrinal practice. The decline and fall of the Māuryā dynasty brought an end to the assured association for Buddhist monastic institutions [3]. It was then that the scriptural traditions within the Buddhist framework started to acquire internal shapes, and the canons indoctrinated scholastic variations divided on linguistic lines. “Apart from the Theravāda recension of the Pāli canon and some fragments of the Sarvāstivādin Sanskrit canon nothing survives of what must have been a diverse body of literature. For most of the collections we only have the memory preserved in inscriptions referring to pitakas and nikāyas and an occasional reference in the extant literature” [8]. These facts led to the disintegration of Buddhism based on scriptural lineage, and the Mahāyāna and Hināyāna sects arose from it, and spread in every direction culminating in the fact that eventually certain areas became dominantly Mahāyāna or Hināyāna, of which the Mahāyāna tradition bore more ground-level acceptance. The Buddhist tradition has always encompassed a spiritual deconstruction of the self-conception to incorporate the idea of the bodhisattva path as the first aspiration to awakening, and the bodhisattva ideal also implied new ethical notions as themes in its own ethical speculation [8].

Buddhism clearly arose as the salvation teaching of an intellectual stratum, originally recruited almost entirely from the privileged castes, especially the warrior caste, which proudly and aristocratically rejected the illusions of life, both here and hereafter [3]. The Buddhist monk (bhikshu) does not desire the world at all, not even a rebirth into paradise, nor to teach the person who does not desire salvation (nirvana). Precisely, this example of Buddhism demonstrates that the need for salvation and ethical religion has yet another source besides the social condition of the disprivileged and the rationalism of the citizens, who were conditioned by their practical situation of life [20]. This additional factor is intellectualism as such, more particularly the philosophical needs of the human mind as it is driven to reflect on ethical and religious questions, driven not by material need but by an inner need to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position toward it [1].

At the opposite extreme from economic ethics of this worldly religion stands the ultimate ethic of world-rejection, the mystical illuminative concentration of original ancient Buddhism [18]. Even this most world-rejecting ethic is rational, in the sense that it produces a constant self-control of all natural instinctive drives, though for purposes entirely different from those of inner-worldly asceticism. Salvation is sought, not from sin and suffering alone, but also from transitoriness as such; escape from the wheel of karma-causality into eternal rest is the goal pursued. This search is, and can only be, the highly individualized achievement of a particular person [17]. There is no predestination, no divine grace, no prayer, and no religious service. The karma-causality of the cosmic mechanism of compensation automatically rewards or punishes all single good or evil deeds. This retribution is always proportional, and hence always limited in time. So long as the individual is driven to action by the thirst for life, one must experience in full measure the fruits of one’s behavior in ever-new human existences. Whether their momentary situation is animal, heavenly, or hellish, one necessarily creates new chances in the future [20].

The achievement of salvation is possible for only a few, even for those who have resolved to live in propertyless, celibacy, and unemployment (for labor is end-oriented action), and hence in begging. These chosen few are required to wander ceaselessly – except at the time of heavy rains – freed from all personal ties to family and world, pursuing the goal of mystical illumination by fulfilling the commandments of the correct path (dharma). When such salvation is gained, the deep joy and tender, undifferentiated love characterizing such illumination provide the highest blessing possible in this existence, short of absorption into the eternal dreamless sleep (nirvana), the only state in which there is no suffering [18].

The decline of Buddhist traditions in India was marked by the Turkish conqueror Muhammad Ghūrī and the consequent destruction of the universities of Nālandā in 1197 and Vikramaśīla in 1203. After this, Buddhism became a walled-in philosophy that only survived in isolated pockets [20]. As the Turkish occupation spread in India, the Buddhist scholars escaped from Kashmir and Bihar into Nepal and Tibet [27]. Himalayan Buddhism of direct Indian ancestry remains only in Nepal, partly fused with the local Hindu traditions. Buddhism of Tibetan origin survives in the subcontinent mostly in Ladakh, Bhutan, and Sikkim [20].

The Buddhist revivalism only started as recent as the late nineteenth century through the Mahābodhi Society and Theosophical Society popularized in Sri Lanka by Henri S. Olcott. The most significant revivalist attempt at Buddhism in the new age was through the emancipatory ideals of equality and justice of Buddhism; B. R. Ambedkar took up the cause of the marginally excluded and exploited castes within Hinduism and provided them with a chance to liberate their social position through the indiscriminate spirituality of Buddhism [10]. The most detailed and persistent effort at rediscovering Buddhism has come primarily from the Western scholars, who have repeatedly attempted at reviving the Buddhist scriptures, including a modern critical edition of the complete Pāli canon and the recovery of original texts of the Sarvāstivāda canon. Japanese scholarship has also revived the Chinese canons between 1880 and 1929, and their productive critical research has placed Japan ahead of many more such attempts at the head of modern research into Indian Buddhism. The neo-Buddhists, as sects or groups who adopt the Buddhist teachings and philosophies, in Europe and America have also contributed to the global revivalism of Buddhism, through their critical and modernist stands [23].

In the West, however, postmodern paradigms of Buddhism have undergone some important changes in the last few decades; in other words, Buddhism has cross-pollinated with modernity with inspiration from the processes of detraditionalization, demythologization, and psychologization [19]. It also provides insight into the three overlapping constitutive discourses of modernity: western theism, scientific rationalism, and romanticism including its successors [15]. However, despite being theologically disconnected with Buddhism, these discourses offer to illustrate the historicity and hybridity of the doctrine, as well as provide paradigmatic explanations for the spread of its spiritual message all over the world through the past few decades.

The hybridity of Buddhist modernism, its protean nature, its discarding of much that is traditional, and its often radical reworking of doctrine and practice naturally invite questions of authenticity, legitimacy, and definition [15]. What seems to be the order here is that Buddhism being a relatively liberal and egalitarian conception instills a sense of inner peace through its spiritual teachings, whereas modernity encourages isolated individuality and increased competition between the isolated individuals, thus creating a spiritual vacuum within the system. Buddhism, if considered for the sake of the argument, as a sermon provides an escape from the never-ending rat race of the postmodern world, where no one ever rests, sleeps, or stops, and offers a peaceful meditative alternative realization that transcends the material matters of this world [22]. This particular alternative of Buddhist teaching is what gave the Western world – where inner-spirituality was already on the decline and individuality based compensation on its pinnacle – the creation of the Zen or, in other words, the Western implementation of Buddhist teachings, wherein some elements of Buddhism were adapted with the modern realities to merge and create a suitable alternative that fitted the psyche of those who subscribed to it [15]. Thus, globalization and decentering of legitimacy contextual to the time-space recurrence of Buddhism as a philosophy will pertain to the debate that Buddhism as a spiritual guide shall face revivalism whenever there would arise a need for global folk religion that surpasses the politicization that the other major religious systems of the world face [25].

Buddhism is the most consistent doctrine of salvation produced by the intellectualism of noble lay educated Indian strata [11]. Its cool and proud emancipation of the individual from life as such, which in effect stood the individual on one’s own feet, could never become a mass religion of salvation. Buddhism’s influence beyond the circle of the educated was due to the tremendous prestige traditionally enjoyed by the śrāmānic members, who possessed magical and idolatrous charisma. As soon as Buddhism became a missionizing folk religion, it accordingly transformed into a savior religion based on karma compensation, with hopes for the world beyond guaranteed by devotional techniques, cultic and sacramental grace, and deeds of mercy [15]. Naturally, Buddhism also tended to accept purely magical notions.

In India, Buddhism took its place among the upper strata, by a renewed philosophy of salvation based on the Vedas [12], and it met competition from Hinduistic salvation religions, especially the various forms of Vishnuism, from Tantristic magic, and from orgiastic mystery religions, notably the bhakti piety (love of god). In Tibet, Buddhism became the purely monastic religion of a theocracy which controlled the laity by churchly powers of a thoroughly magical character. In East Asia, original Buddhism underwent striking transformation as it competed and entered into diverse combinations with Chinese Taoism, thus, which was specifically concerned with this world and the ancestral cult and which become a typical mass religion of grace and salvation [11].

Although Buddhism has been called a museum piece primarily preserved at Nalanda, Kushinagar, Ajanta, Ellora, Sarnath, Sanchi, and Bodhgaya, one cannot overlook the fact that Buddhism’s middle path and culture of wisdom have been reflected in the lives of ordinary Indians and that Buddhism is coming alive again in India, as mentioned earlier [12]. Even though worldwide there has been a rapid growth of interest in Buddhism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, His Holiness the Dalai Lama does not see any special significance in this phenomenon, especially the tendency toward sectarianism among new practitioners in the West. His Holiness sees this as a disturbing development. Religion, he asserts, should never become a source of conflict [24].

 Bodhisattva

 Dharma

 Karma

 Nālandā

 Nirvana