The Buddhist Spring
Pick a teaching from the Buddhist world and watch where it was born and how it traveled; pick a teacher and trace the cities of their life — from the awakening at Bodh Gayā across India, along the Silk Road into China, Tibet, and Japan, and into the modern world.
138 teachers · 5,273 works · 32,104 passages · 163 concepts
The teachings are presented across all of the Buddhist vehicles — the early schools, the Mahāyāna, and the Vajrayāna — without privileging any one tradition over another; the eight-spoked Dharma wheel that marks each place is the symbol shared by them all.
Trace a teacher's life-journey
Follow where a teacher lived and taught — pin by pin, in the order they traveled.
Watch an idea spread
Pick any combination of ideas to see every place they appear, lit up across the centuries.
The bedrock teachings shared across the Buddhist world — the Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, and the marks of all existence.
The training that leads from suffering to awakening — the Noble Eightfold Path, meditation, and the cultivation of mind.
How Buddhist thought maps what is real and the world it unfolds in — emptiness, dependent origination, and the two truths, together with karma, rebirth, the realms of existence, and the vast cycles of time.
The Great Vehicle and the Vajra Vehicle — the bodhisattva ideal, Buddha-nature, skillful means, and the tantric path.
The lived forms of Buddhist life — the precepts and monastic rule, giving, ritual, devotion, and the means of practice.
This is an example — you’re tracing the life of the Buddha (c. 5th century BCE), from his birth at Lumbinī and the awakening at Bodh Gayā to the first teaching at Sārnāth, the long years of wandering across the Ganges plain, and his passing at Kushinagar. Each pin is a place he lived; the line follows the order he traveled. Click any pin to read what happened there.
Now chart your own: trace a different teacher, or pick any idea above — the Four Noble Truths, emptiness, karma. Choose as many as you like.