page_title: Missionary
section_title: Buddhist missions
hierarchical_section_title: Missionary / Missionaries by religion / Buddhist missions
context_page_description: A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to promote their faith or perform ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin missionem, meaning "act of sending" or mittere, meaning "to send". The word was used in light of its biblical usage; in the Latin translation of the Bible, Christ uses the word when sending the disciples to preach the gospel in his name. The term is most commonly used for Christian missions, but can be used for any creed or ideology.
context_section_description: The first Buddhist missionaries were called "Dharma Bhanaks", and some see a missionary charge in the symbolism behind the Buddhist wheel, which is said to travel all over the earth bringing Buddhism with it. The Emperor Ashoka was a significant early Buddhist missioner. In the 3rd century BCE, Dharmaraksita—among others—was sent out by emperor Ashoka to proselytize the Buddhist tradition through the Indian Maurya Empire, but also into the Mediterranean as far as Greece. Gradually, all India and the neighboring island of Ceylon were converted. Then Buddhism spread eastward and southeastward to the present lands of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
  Buddhism was spread among the Turkic people during the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE into modern-day Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, eastern and coastal Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. It was also taken into China brought by Kasyapa Matanga in the 2nd century CE, Lokaksema and An Shigao translated Buddhist sutras into Chinese. Dharmarakṣa was one of the greatest translators of Mahayana Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. Dharmaraksa came to the Chinese capital of Luoyang in 266 CE, where he made the first known translations of the Lotus Sutra and the Dasabhumika Sutra, which were to become some of the classic texts of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. Altogether, Dharmaraksa translated around 154 Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna sutras, representing most of the important texts of Buddhism available in the Western Regions. His proselytizing is said to have converted many to Buddhism in China, and made Chang'an, present-day Xi'an, a major center of Buddhism. Buddhism expanded rapidly, especially among the common people, and by 381 most of the people of northwest China were Buddhist. Winning converts also among the rulers and scholars, by the end of the T'ang Dynasty Buddhism was found everywhere in China.
  Marananta brought Buddhism to the Korean Peninsula in the 4th century. Seong of Baekje, known as a great patron of Buddhism in Korea, built many temples and welcomed priests bringing Buddhist texts directly from India. In 528, Baekje officially adopted Buddhism as its state religion. He sent tribute missions to Liang in 534 and 541, on the second occasion requesting artisans as well as various Buddhist works and a teacher. According to Chinese records, all these requests were granted. A subsequent mission was sent in 549, only to find the Liang capital in the hands of the rebel Hou Jing, who threw them in prison for lamenting the fall of the capital. He is credited with having sent a mission in 538 to Japan that brought an image of Shakyamuni and several sutras to the Japanese court. This has traditionally been considered the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan. An account of this is given in Gangōji Garan Engi. First supported by the Soga clan, Buddhism rose over the objections of the pro-Shinto Mononobe and Buddhism entrenched itself in Japan with the conversion of Prince Shotoku Taishi. When in 710 Emperor Shomu established a new capital at Nara modeled after the capital of China, Buddhism received official support and began to flourish.
  Padmasambhava, The Lotus Born, was a sage guru from Oḍḍiyāna who is said to have transmitted Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan and Tibet and neighbouring countries in the 8th century.
  The use of missions, councils, and monastic institutions influenced the emergence of Christian missions and organizations, which developed similar structures in places that were formerly Buddhist missions.
  During the 19th and 20th centuries, Western intellectuals such as Schopenhauer, Henry David Thoreau, Max Müller, and esoteric societies such as the Theosophical Society of H.P. Blavatsky and the Buddhist Society, London spread interest in Buddhism. Writers such as  Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac,   in the West, and the hippie generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a re-discovery of Buddhism. During the 20th and 21st centuries Buddhism has again been propagated by missionaries into the West such as the Dalai Lama and monks includin
caption: Central Asian Buddhist monk teaching a Chinese monk. Bezeklik, 9th-10th century; although Albert von Le Coq (1913) assumed the blue-eyed, red-haired monk was a Tocharian,[41] modern scholarship has identified similar Caucasian figures of the same cave temple (No. 9) as ethnic Sogdians,[42] an Eastern Iranian people who inhabited Turfan as an ethnic minority community during the phases of Tang Chinese (7th-8th century) and Uyghur rule (9th-13th century).[43]
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