Free Buddhism Documentaries

For this short documentary from 1979, religious scholar Huston Smith wrote the script and narrates this look Tibetan Buddhism.

This 2003 documentary by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog covers the largest Buddhist ritual in Bodh Gaya, India which is the site of the Bodhi tree where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment.

Watch this interesting documentary on the life of enigmatic Chogyam Trungpa, who helped to bring Tibetan Buddhism to America in the 1970s and 1980s. He narrowly escaped Tibet and eventually made his way to the United States where he established many Shambhala Meditation Centers, along with Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

All of the world's great religions are practiced in India. It was in India that Buddha achieved enlightenment; it is in India that belief in reincarnation originated.

Buddhism began with Gotama the Buddha in the sixth century BCE and has developed two chief forms. Theravada (or Hinayana) is found especially in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand; Mahayana is found in Japan, China, Korea, and Indochina.

Leonard Cohen narrates an examination of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in this documentary on the ways this ancient text has been used to help cope with and understand the reality of death.

The Long Search was a 1977 BBC documentary television series spanning 13 episodes. Presented by theatre director Ronald Eyre, the series surveyed several major world religions, including Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic Christianity.

There has been considerable worldwide interest in Buddhism in Tibet. However, the fact that Tibetan Buddhism, its deities and mandalas, were all developed in the Indian University of Nalanda, is not known to many.

The tenets of Buddhism - equality and democracy, universal peace, steadfast love for all life and a secular practice that can help humanity to end suffering has attracted followers from all across the world to Buddha and Buddhism.

Join historian Bettany Hughes as she explores the different beliefs and practices that form the core of the Buddhist philosophy and investigates how Buddhism started and where it travelled to, through visits to seven of the most spectacular monuments built by Buddhists across the globe.