In the 500's BC, during the later part of the Aryan period in India, the idea of reincarnation became very strong among Hindus. Most people believed that after you died, you would be reborn in another form, and then reborn again, and again, forever. But then people started to not like this idea. They didn’t want reincarnation to just go on and on forever. Wasn’t there any way to stop this; to get off the wheel of reincarnation and just be?
A young Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama Buddha had an idea. He thought that you could get off the wheel of reincarnation if you were good and pure enough. He refused to be a prince anymore, and tried to spend his life being good and pure so he could get off the wheel. Gautama Buddha had many followers during his lifetime, and after he died he had even more. Most of Buddha's followers tried to be good while still living their normal lives - working in the fields or as soldiers, getting married, taking care of their parents and their children. But some of his followers adopted a Jain idea of getting away from the world so they could work full-time on being good and pure. These people were called monks or nuns.
In the 300’s BC, one of the great Mauryan kings, Asoka, became a Buddhist, which helped Buddhism to succeed. Asoka convinced many other Indian people to become Buddhists.
At first, most Buddhists were in India. But by 500 AD Buddhism spread to China and other parts of East Asia. By the 600’s AD most of the Buddhists in India had gone back to being Hindus again. They still remembered Buddha, but as one of many Hindu gods.
In China, on the other hand, Buddhism got stronger and stronger. Soon most of the Buddhists were in China and not India. In China, as in India, most Buddhist people continued to lead more or less ordinary lives, but some Buddhist men and women left their jobs and their families in order to live in Buddhist monasteries as monks or nuns.
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