Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhism began with a man who refused to answer metaphysical questions — and became one of the most sophisticated philosophical traditions in history. The Gautama Buddha taught a practical path to the end of suffering; his followers, over the next fifteen centuries in India and then across Asia, built on it theories of mind, perception, logic, causation and language that still astonish philosophers.

The core: Four Truths, three marks

Everything Buddhist begins with the Four Noble Truths — suffering (dukkha), its origin in craving (taṇhā), its cessation (nirvāṇa), and the path (the Noble Eightfold Path) — and the three marks of all conditioned things: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and not-self (anattā). See Anattā (No-Self).

The deepest teaching is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda): nothing exists on its own; everything arises from conditions and ceases when they cease. Suffering too is conditioned — and therefore can end.

Against the Self

Buddhism defined itself against the Upanishadic ātman (see Ātman is Brahman). Look for a permanent self in the five aggregates — body, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness — and you will not find one; “self” is a name for a process, like “chariot” for an assembly of parts. This argument, and the Hindu and Jain replies, drove Indian philosophy for a thousand years. Its echo in the West is David Hume‘s bundle of perceptions — and Derek Parfit’s claim that personal identity “is not what matters”.

The great schools

Abhidharma

The first systematic Buddhist philosophy analysed experience into its ultimate constituents — momentary “dharmas” — producing catalogues of mental states and a theory of momentariness: everything exists for only an instant. The Theravāda Abhidhamma and the Sarvāstivāda (“all exists”) school debated whether past and future dharmas exist.

Madhyamaka: the Middle Way of emptiness

Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century CE) turned dependent origination against the Abhidharma itself: if everything arises in dependence, nothing has svabhāva — intrinsic, independent existence. All things are empty (śūnya) — including emptiness. This is not nihilism but the middle way between “is” and “is not”. His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā dismantles every philosophical view about the self-existence of things — causation, motion, time, the self, even nirvāṇa — and concludes that “there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa”.

Yogācāra: mind only

The brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (4th–5th century) taught that the external world as we experience it is a construction of consciousness (vijñapti-mātra, “representation only”). Their analysis of eight layers of consciousness, including a “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna) that holds karmic seeds, is a remarkable theory of the unconscious, centuries before Freud. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argue against external objects with dream arguments worthy of René Descartes.

Buddhist logic

Dignāga (c. 480–540) and Dharmakīrti (7th century) founded a Buddhist epistemology and logic of great rigour: only two sources of knowledge — perception (which grasps unique particulars) and inference (which works with universals, themselves conceptual constructions). Their theory of meaning by exclusion (apoha) — a word means “cow” by excluding non-cows — anticipates modern semantic debates.

Mahāyāna and the bodhisattva

From around the first century BCE, the Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle”) reshaped Buddhist ethics around the bodhisattva, who vows to attain awakening for the sake of all beings and postpones final nirvāṇa until all are saved. Its scriptures — the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, the Heart Sūtra (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”), the Diamond Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra — and Śāntideva’s poem The Way of the Bodhisattva (“For as long as space endures… may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world”) are among the treasures of world religious literature.

Across Asia

• Theravāda — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia: the Pāli Canon and the Buddhaghosa commentaries.
• Chinese Buddhism — the great translators (Kumārajīva, Xuanzang), the Tiantai and Huayan schools (“all in one, one in all” — Indra’s net of jewels each reflecting all the others), Pure Land, and Chan, which fused Buddhism with Daoist naturalness (see Daoism): sudden awakening, “no reliance on words”, the Sixth Patriarch Huineng.
• Zen in Japan — Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, kōans (“what is the sound of one hand?”), the tea ceremony and haiku.
• Tibetan Buddhism — Vajrayāna, the great monastic universities, Tsongkhapa’s synthesis, the Dalai Lamas.

Buddhism and the West

Arthur Schopenhauer hailed Buddhism as the confirmation of his pessimism; Friedrich Nietzsche respected it as more honest than Christianity but rejected it as “passive nihilism”; the Kyoto School (Nishida, Nishitani) brought Zen into dialogue with Heidegger; today, cognitive scientists study meditation, and philosophers (Evan Thompson, Mark Siderits, Jay Garfield) read Nāgārjuna beside Wittgenstein.

Where to begin

1. The Gautama Buddha page — the life and the core teaching.
2. The Dhammapada — 423 verses on the path.
3. The chariot argument in The Questions of King Milinda.
4. The Heart Sūtra — one page, the essence of emptiness.
5. Then Nāgārjuna.