Buddhismबौद्ध धर्म

Buddhism (Sanskrit and Pāli Buddha-dharma, Buddha-dhamma, “the teaching of the Awakened One”) is the religious and philosophical tradition founded by Siddhārtha Gautama, the Gautama Buddha, in north-eastern India in the fifth century BCE. Its starting point is the observation that life is pervaded by suffering or unsatisfactoriness (duḥkha); its diagnosis is that suffering arises from craving (tṛṣṇā) and ignorance; its promise is that suffering can end, in the state called nirvāṇa; and its method is a path of ethics, meditation and wisdom. Its most distinctive philosophical claims are that everything conditioned is impermanent, that nothing has a permanent self (anātman), and that all things arise in dependence on conditions (pratītyasamutpāda). Over two and a half millennia Buddhism spread from India across Asia — to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, to Central Asia, China, Korea and Japan, to Tibet and Mongolia — and in the twentieth century to the West, adapting to every culture it entered. In India itself, after fifteen centuries of brilliant philosophy — the Abhidharma analysts, the Madhyamaka dialectic of Nāgārjuna, the “mind-only” idealism of Vasubandhu and Asaṅga, the logic of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti — it almost vanished, before being revived in the twentieth century, above all by B. R. Ambedkar. Buddhism was the great challenger of the Brahmin schools, and their thousand-year debate shaped almost every idea in Indian philosophy.

Origins

The world of the śramaṇas

The Buddha lived in the Gaṅgā plain in the fifth century BCE (traditionally 563–483, but most scholars now prefer c. 480–400 BCE), in a time of rapid change: the growth of cities like Rājagṛha, Śrāvastī and Vārāṇasī, the rise of kingdoms (Magadha, Kosala) and republics (the Śākyas, the Licchavis), trade, coinage and new wealth. It was also a time of religious ferment. Alongside the Brahmin priests of the Vedic sacrifice, and the forest sages of the The Upaniṣads, wandered the śramaṇas (“strivers”) — renunciants who rejected the Vedas, the sacrifice and the authority of the Brahmins, and sought liberation through austerity, meditation and philosophy. The Buddhist texts list six rival teachers: the Jain Mahāvīra (Mahāvīra); the fatalist Makkhali Gosāla of the Ājīvikas; the materialist Ajita Kesakambalī (Cārvāka (Lokāyata)); the amoralist Pūraṇa Kassapa; the atomist Pakudha Kaccāyana; and the sceptic Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta, who refused to affirm or deny anything — “eel-wriggling”. The Buddha’s teaching was one answer among many to the questions they all shared: what is the self? what is karma? how can suffering end?

The Buddha’s life and teaching

Siddhārtha Gautama, a prince of the Śākya clan, renounced his family at twenty-nine, studied with meditation teachers, practised extreme austerities for six years, rejected them as useless, and, seated under a pipal tree at Bodh Gayā, attained awakening (bodhi) at about thirty-five. He taught for forty-five years across the Gaṅgā plain and died at about eighty at Kuśinagara. His life and teaching are told in detail on the Gautama Buddha page. What follows describes the tradition he founded.

Core teachings

The Four Noble Truths

The Buddha’s first sermon at Sārnāth, near Vārāṇasī, “Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma” (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta), announced the Four Noble Truths (ariya-sacca), structured like a physician’s diagnosis:

1. Duḥkha — suffering exists. “Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates of clinging are suffering.” Duḥkha means more than pain: it is the unsatisfactoriness of everything impermanent — the axle that does not fit its wheel.
2. Samudaya — suffering has an origin: craving (tṛṣṇā, Pāli taṇhā, “thirst”) — craving for sensual pleasure, for existence, and for non-existence.
3. Nirodha — suffering can cease: “the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, its giving up and relinquishing, freedom from it” — nirvāṇa.
4. Mārga — there is a path to its cessation: the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Middle Way and the Eightfold Path

The path is a middle way between sensual indulgence, which the Buddha had known as a prince, and self-mortification, which he had practised as an ascetic. It has eight factors, traditionally grouped in three:

• Wisdom (prajñā): right view, right intention.
• Ethical conduct (śīla): right speech, right action, right livelihood.
• Meditation (samādhi): right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

The three marks

All conditioned things share three marks (trilakṣaṇa): they are impermanent (anitya), unsatisfactory (duḥkha) and not-self (anātman). The Buddha’s second sermon, the “Discourse on the Characteristic of Not-Self” (Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta), applies these marks to the five aggregates (skandhas) that make up a person: material form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Is form permanent or impermanent? “Impermanent, Lord.” Is what is impermanent satisfactory or unsatisfactory? “Unsatisfactory.” Is what is impermanent, unsatisfactory and subject to change fit to be regarded as “this is mine, this I am, this is my self”? “No, Lord.” And so for each aggregate. See Anattā (No-Self).

No-self

The doctrine of no-self (anātman, Pāli anattā) is Buddhism’s most radical and most debated claim. It denies the existence of a permanent, unchanging, independent self or soul — the ātman of the Upaniṣads, which Yājñavalkya and Uddālaka identified with Brahman. What we call a “person” is a constantly changing process of physical and mental events, causally connected, to which we give a name. The classic illustration is the chariot in the Questions of King Milinda (The Questions of King Milinda): the monk Nāgasena shows the Greek king Menander that “chariot” is only a convenient designation for wheels, axle, pole and frame assembled; “Nāgasena”, likewise, is only a name for the aggregates. The Buddha did not say there is no person at all — he spoke of himself and others, taught karma and rebirth — but that the person is not a self in the sense of an unchanging essence.

Dependent origination

The deepest teaching, which the Buddha is said to have realised on the night of his awakening, is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda, Pāli paṭicca-samuppāda): “When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.” Nothing exists independently; everything arises from conditions and passes away when they cease. Applied to suffering, it yields the twelve links (nidānas): ignorance → mental formations → consciousness → name-and-form → six sense bases → contact → feeling → craving → clinging → becoming → birth → ageing-and-death. Break the chain at ignorance, or at craving, and it collapses. “Whoever sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; whoever sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination” (Majjhima Nikāya 28). See Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination).

Karma and rebirth

The Buddha accepted the doctrines of Karma and rebirth (Saṃsāra) common to his age, but transformed karma by locating it in intention (cetanā): “It is intention, monks, that I call karma.” This raised the question that would occupy Buddhist philosophers for centuries: if there is no self, who is reborn? The answer was that rebirth is the continuation of a causal stream, like a flame passed from one candle to another — neither the same nor different.

Nirvāṇa

Nirvāṇa (Pāli nibbāna, “blowing out”, “extinguishing”) is the end of suffering — the extinction of the “three fires” of greed, hatred and delusion, and thus of rebirth. The Buddha described it mostly negatively — “the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned” (Udāna 8.3) — and refused to say whether an awakened one exists after death: the question, he said, does not apply, as it makes no sense to ask in which direction a fire has gone when it goes out. See Nirvāṇa.

The unanswered questions

The Buddha famously refused to answer ten (or fourteen) metaphysical questions — whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite; whether the soul is the same as the body; whether the Tathāgata exists after death. In the parable of the poisoned arrow (Cūḷamāluṅkya Sutta), a man wounded by an arrow who refuses treatment until he knows who shot it, his caste, his name, his height, the wood of the bow and the feathers of the arrow, would die first. So it is with these questions: they “do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, direct knowledge, awakening, nirvāṇa”.

The community

The Buddha founded the Saṅgha, the community of monks (bhikṣus) and — after the pleading of his aunt and foster-mother Mahāprajāpatī and the intercession of his disciple Ānanda — of nuns (bhikṣuṇīs), governed by the monastic code (Vinaya). With the Buddha and the Dharma, the Saṅgha is one of the Three Jewels in which every Buddhist takes refuge. The Therīgāthā, verses of the early nuns, is among the oldest collections of women’s poetry in the world.

The canon and the councils

After the Buddha’s death, according to tradition, a First Council at Rājagṛha recited his teachings: his attendant Ānanda recited the discourses (sūtras), and Upāli the monastic rules (vinaya). The teachings were transmitted orally for centuries. The Pāli Canon of the Theravāda school, written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, is the only complete early canon to survive in an Indian language; it is divided into three “baskets” (Tipiṭaka): the Vinaya (discipline), the Sutta (discourses, in five collections — Dīgha, Majjhima, Saṃyutta, Aṅguttara and Khuddaka Nikāyas, the last including the The Dhammapada) and the Abhidhamma (systematic philosophy). Parallel early collections survive in Chinese and Tibetan translation.

A Second Council at Vaiśālī (c. a century after the Buddha) disputed points of monastic discipline, and soon after the community split into the Sthaviras (“elders”) and the Mahāsāṅghikas (“great community”), the first of the eighteen or more early schools.

Aśoka

The emperor Aśoka of the Maurya dynasty (r. c. 268–232 BCE), horrified by the slaughter of his conquest of Kaliṅga, embraced Buddhism and proclaimed in rock and pillar edicts across his empire a politics of dhamma: non-violence, tolerance of all sects, welfare for humans and animals. He sent missions abroad — his son Mahinda and daughter Saṅghamittā to Sri Lanka — and built stūpas over the Buddha’s relics. His lion capital at Sārnāth is now the emblem of India, and the wheel of dhamma on it sits at the centre of the national flag.

The schools of Indian Buddhism

Abhidharma

The first systematic Buddhist philosophy was the Abhidharma (“higher teaching”), which analysed all experience into its ultimate constituents, called dharmas — momentary events of matter and mind, each with its own characteristic. The Theravāda Abhidhamma lists 82 or so ultimate realities in four categories: consciousness, mental factors, matter and nirvāṇa. The Sarvāstivāda (“all exists”) school of north-west India held that dharmas exist in the past, present and future — to explain how past karma can bear fruit and how we can know the past; the Sautrāntika (“those who rely on the sūtras”) held that only present dharmas exist, and that they last only a moment (momentariness, kṣaṇikavāda). The great synthesis is Vasubandhu‘s Abhidharmakośa (4th–5th century). In the Theravāda world, Buddhaghosa‘s Visuddhimagga (5th century) became the definitive summary. See Theravāda and the Abhidharma.

The Mahāyāna

From around the first century BCE, new scriptures appeared that claimed to be the Buddha’s word, revealing a “Great Vehicle” (Mahāyāna) superior to the “Lesser Vehicle” (Hīnayāna, a polemical term) of the earlier schools. Their ideal is not the arhat, who attains nirvāṇa for himself, but the bodhisattva, who vows to attain buddhahood for the sake of all beings, and postpones final nirvāṇa until all are saved. The central virtues are compassion (karuṇā) and wisdom (prajñā), and the bodhisattva’s path consists of the six (or ten) perfections (pāramitās): generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtras teach that all dharmas are empty; the The Heart Sūtra compresses this into “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. The Lotus Sūtra teaches that there is only one vehicle and that the Buddha, eternal, only appeared to die; the Vimalakīrti Sūtra features a layman who out-argues the Buddha’s disciples and answers the question of non-duality with “a thunderous silence”; the Pure Land sūtras describe the paradise of the Buddha Amitābha, where devotees are reborn by faith; the Laṅkāvatāra teaches mind-only and the “womb of the Buddha” (tathāgatagarbha) in every being.

Madhyamaka

Madhyamaka, “the Middle Way school”, was founded by Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century CE), whose Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”) turned the Buddha’s dependent origination against the Abhidharma itself. If everything arises in dependence, nothing has svabhāva — intrinsic, independent existence; everything is empty (śūnya). Emptiness is not nothingness but dependent origination itself; it is the middle way between the extremes of existence and non-existence. Through a relentless dialectic, Nāgārjuna reduced every philosophical position — about causation, motion, time, the self, the Buddha, even nirvāṇa — to absurdity, concluding that “there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa”. His followers — Āryadeva, Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti (7th century), Śāntideva — divided over method, and Madhyamaka became the dominant philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism. See Śūnyatā (Emptiness).

Yogācāra

Yogācāra, “the practice of yoga”, also called Vijñānavāda (“doctrine of consciousness”) or Cittamātra (“mind-only”), was founded by the half-brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (4th–5th century). It argued that the external world as we experience it is a construction of consciousness: there are only “representations” (vijñapti-mātra). Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argue that we have no reason to believe in external objects — dreams show that experiences can occur without them. Yogācāra described eight consciousnesses, including a “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna) that carries the seeds of karma from life to life — a theory of the unconscious that has fascinated modern psychologists — and three natures of experience: the imagined, the dependent and the perfected.

Buddhist logic and epistemology

Dignāga (c. 480–540) and Dharmakīrti (7th century) founded the pramāṇa tradition of Buddhist epistemology and logic. They accepted only two means of knowledge: perception, which grasps unique, momentary particulars (svalakṣaṇa), free of concepts; and inference, which works with universals (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) — which are mental constructions, not real things. Their theory of meaning, apoha (“exclusion”), held that the word “cow” does not refer to a real universal “cowness” but excludes everything that is not a cow. Dharmakīrti’s arguments for momentariness (whatever exists is causally efficient; whatever is causally efficient changes) and against a creator God were the main targets of Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā philosophers for centuries.

Vajrayāna

From around the sixth or seventh century, tantric Buddhism, the Vajrayāna (“diamond vehicle”), developed rituals, mantras, maṇḍalas, deity yoga and esoteric practices that promised awakening in a single lifetime. Its masters, the mahāsiddhas, included wandering yogis and yoginīs; its texts, the Buddhist tantras, became central to Tibetan Buddhism.

The great universities

Buddhist learning in India was concentrated in monastic universities, of which the greatest was Nālandā in Bihar, flourishing from the fifth to the twelfth century. At its height it had thousands of monks and teachers, a library said to occupy a nine-storey building, and students from China, Korea, Tibet and Southeast Asia. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied there in the seventh century and described it in detail. Vikramaśīla, Odantapurī, Valabhī and Taxila were other great centres.

Decline in India

Buddhism declined in India from about the eighth century and had largely disappeared by the thirteenth. The causes were many: the dependence of Buddhism on monasteries and royal patronage, which made it vulnerable when patronage shifted; the revival of devotional Hinduism and the absorption of the Buddha into Hinduism as an avatāra of Viṣṇu; the philosophical attacks of Kumārila, Śaṅkara and the Nyāya philosophers; the growing similarity of tantric Buddhism and Hindu tantra; and finally the destruction of the great monasteries during the Turkic invasions — Nālandā was sacked around 1193 by the forces of Bakhtiyār Khaljī, and its monks killed or scattered. Buddhism survived in the Himalayan regions — Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal — and in Sri Lanka.

Buddhism across Asia

• Theravāda (“the teaching of the elders”) spread to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE and later to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, preserving the Pāli Canon and the arhat ideal.
• Chinese Buddhism began in the first century CE; great translators like Kumārajīva (344–413) and Xuanzang (602–664) brought Indian texts into Chinese; schools like Tiantai, Huayan (with its image of Indra’s net — an infinite net of jewels, each reflecting all the others), Pure Land and Chan developed. Chan, fused with Daoist naturalness (see Daoism), taught sudden awakening, “a special transmission outside the scriptures, not depending on words”, and the Sixth Patriarch Huineng’s Platform Sūtra.
• Korean and Japanese Buddhism followed; Chan became Zen in Japan, where Dōgen (1200–1253) wrote the Shōbōgenzō and the Rinzai school developed the kōan (“What is the sound of one hand?”).
• Tibetan Buddhism began in the seventh and eighth centuries, inheriting the late Indian synthesis of Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, logic and Vajrayāna, preserved in the vast Tibetan canon (Kangyur and Tengyur), and organised into the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug schools; Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) founded the Gelug, the school of the Dalai Lamas.

Modern Buddhism and its return to India

In the nineteenth century, scholars like Eugène Burnouf and T. W. Rhys Davids (founder of the Pali Text Society) and the Theosophists Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky brought Buddhism to Western attention, and the Sri Lankan reformer Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933) campaigned to restore Bodh Gayā to Buddhist control. Edwin Arnold’s poem The Light of Asia (1879) made the Buddha’s life famous in English.

In India, the decisive revival came from B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution and leader of the Dalits, who concluded that Hinduism could not be reformed from within. On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur, he and about half a million followers converted to Buddhism, taking twenty-two vows that rejected Hindu gods and caste; his The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) presented a rational, ethical, socially engaged Buddhism, sometimes called Navayāna. Today there are some eight million Buddhists in India, most of them Ambedkarite. The Dalai Lama’s exile in Dharamsala since 1959 also made India the centre of Tibetan Buddhism.

In the twentieth century Buddhism spread to Europe and America through Zen (D. T. Suzuki, Shunryū Suzuki), Tibetan teachers, and the Vipassanā movement (S. N. Goenka), and influenced philosophers, psychologists and scientists. Contemporary philosophers — Mark Siderits, Jay Garfield, Evan Thompson, Jonardon Ganeri — engage Buddhist arguments on personal identity, consciousness and metaphysics; Derek Parfit’s view of personal identity has often been compared with the Buddha’s.

Buddhism and Western philosophy

Buddhism’s arguments have striking Western parallels. Its no-self doctrine anticipates David Hume‘s “bundle theory” of the self (“I can never catch myself at any time without a perception”) and Parfit’s reductionism. Dependent origination resembles process philosophy and some readings of Heraclitus. Nāgārjuna’s dialectic has been compared with Zeno, Hume, Kant’s antinomies, Hegel, Wittgenstein and Derrida. Yogācāra resembles Berkeley’s idealism and Husserl’s phenomenology. Arthur Schopenhauer admired Buddhism above all religions; Friedrich Nietzsche respected it as more honest than Christianity but rejected it as “passive nihilism”.

Buddhism in conversation

The Four Noble Truths are a doctor’s prescription: the illness, its cause, the cure, and the medicine. The poisoned arrow is the classic answer to idle metaphysics. And the chariot shows in one image what “no-self” means: not that you don’t exist, but that you are a process with a name.