BuddhismBuddhism, like most other religions, arose in a particular place at a particular time, and its roots are found in forms and ideas that were part of the environment in which it developed. The most important of these regions during the Buddha's time was the Ganges Valley which flows west to east through most of northern India. It is here that the great religions of India were born and flourished. Only later did they spread south. During the time of the Buddha, around 500 BCE, this region was experiencing a period of vigorous religious development. As with most religions, the early years of Buddhism were shrouded in obscurity. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the Sangha, the order of Buddhist monks, survived the physical death, or Parinirvana, of the Buddha. But the period between this event and the re-emergence of Buddhism in the light of history around 250 BCE is somewhat unclear (Hawkins, 1999). Buddhist tradition holds that a meeting, or council, took place immediately after the Buddha's death. The major concern of this meeting was to stabilize the Buddhist scriptures by reaching agreement on the accepted scriptures as spoken by the Buddha. For various reasons, no such agreement appears to have been reached, although there was some general agreement on the Buddha's basic message. This meant that, to some extent, the interpretation of what was true Buddhist scripture and what was not was left to the discretion of the individual Buddhist. The study of Buddhism over the past century has been like the meeting of the blind men and the elephant in many ways. Students of Buddhism tend to focus on a small part of the tradition and assume that their conclusions hold true for the whole. Often the parts they seized look a bit like the elephant's tusks, a striking, but not representative, part of the whole animal. As a result, many erroneous and sweeping generalizations have been made about Buddhism, for example calling it "negative", "world denier", "pessimist", etc. The Buddha was born in the Terai lowlands, near the foothills of the Himalayas, just within the borders of present-day Nepal. His people were known as the Sakyas and for this reason the Buddha is sometimes called Sakyamuni or "the sage of the Sakyas ».'.