Buddhism

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism rests on the teachings of one man, a śramaṇa and religious teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE and came to be called the Buddha, "the Awakened One". It is the world's fourth-largest religion, claiming about 320 million followers, or 4.1% of the global population. It began as a śramaṇa movement on the eastern Gangetic plain in the 5th century BCE. From there it spread across much of Asia, shaping the culture and spirituality of the continent before reaching the West in the 20th century.

  At its center sits a single word that resists easy translation: dukkha. It is often rendered as "suffering", but the source calls that inaccurate. Dukkha points instead to the unsatisfactory, insecure nature of all impermanent things, even pleasant ones. The Buddha taught that this dukkha arises alongside our craving and clinging. He pointed his followers toward a path of cultivation leading to awakening and to nirvana, the "blowing out" of the passions.

  Who was this teacher, and how much of his life can we actually verify? What exactly does a religion without a permanent self or an unchanging soul propose survives from one life to the next? Why did it split into the branches now called Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna? And how did a body of teachings first carried only by memory become a canon of tens of thousands of texts in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese?

• 2. The Contested Teacher

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  "Gautama" is the family name early texts give the Buddha, in the Pali form Gotama, though some texts offer Siddhartha as a surname. He was born in Lumbini in present-day Nepal and grew up in Kapilavastu, a town on the Ganges Plain near the modern Nepal-India border. His life unfolded in what is now Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Hagiographic legends name his father a king, Suddhodana, and his mother Queen Maya.

  Richard Gombrich treats the royal claim as dubious. The evidence points instead to the Shakya community, governed by a small oligarchy or republic-like council where rank did not exist and seniority mattered instead. Buddhist texts assert the Buddha called himself a kshatriya, a member of the warrior class, yet Gombrich notes little is known of his father, and no proof that the man even knew the term. Mahavira, whose teachings helped establish Jainism, was likewise claimed by his followers to be kshatriya.

  Moved by the suffering of life and death and its endless repetition through rebirth, Gautama set out to find liberation. The Pali Ariyapariyesanā-sutta, the "discourse on the noble quest", and its Chinese parallel at MĀ 204 record that he first studied under two meditation teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Ramaputta. From the first he learned the "sphere of nothingness", from the second the "sphere of neither perception nor non-perception". Finding both insufficient, he turned to severe asceticism, with strict fasting and forms of breath control.

  Asceticism also fell short, and Gautama turned to the meditative practice of dhyana. He sat beneath a Ficus religiosa, now called the Bodhi Tree, in the town of Bodh Gaya, and attained Bodhi, "Awakening". According to early texts such as the Mahāsaccaka-sutta, that insight reached into the workings of karma and his former lives, and ended the mental defilements, suffering, and rebirth. He founded a Sangha, taught the Dharma for the rest of his life, and died at the age of 80 in Kushinagar, achieving "final nirvana".

• 3. A World Without A Self

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  Anattā in Pali, anātman in Sanskrit, names one of Buddhism's most distinctive claims: there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in any phenomenon. The Buddha and philosophers who followed him, such as Vasubandhu and Buddhaghosa, argued the point by analysing a person through the five aggregates, then showing that none of these components can be permanent or absolute. The Anattalakkhana Sutta preserves this method of analysis.

  The no-self doctrine forces a strange question onto the theory of rebirth: if nothing fixed persists, what is reborn? Traditions disagree. Some assert there is no enduring self yet an inexpressible personality, pudgala, that migrates from life to life. The majority instead point to vijñāna, a person's consciousness, which keeps evolving but exists as a continuum and serves as the mechanistic basis of rebirth. Rebirth itself can occur, the texts say, in six realms: the good realms of heaven, demi-god, and human, and the evil realms of animal, hungry ghosts, and hellish.

  Karma, from the Sanskrit for "action" or "work", drives this cycle. Skilful deeds and unskilful deeds plant "seeds" in an unconscious receptacle called ālaya, which ripen later in this life or a future one. Intent, cetanā, is essential, and this emphasis marks a difference from Jainism, where karma accumulates with or without intent. A merit-transfer idea also developed, letting a person pass good karma to living family and ancestors. Bruce Reichenbach argues merit transfer was generally absent in early Buddhism and may have emerged with Mahayana.

  "Emptiness" or "voidness", Śūnyatā in Sanskrit, runs alongside no-self with many readings. Early Buddhism called the five aggregates void, hollow, and coreless, as in the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta. The idea becomes central in Mahāyāna, above all in Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka school and the Prajñāpāramitā sutras. There, emptiness holds that all phenomena lack svabhava, any "own-nature", and so are empty of being independent.

• 4. The Map Of Liberation

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  Pratityasamutpada, "dependent arising", is Buddhism's theory of how being and existence relate. It asserts that nothing is independent except nirvana itself. Every physical and mental state depends on and arises from other pre-existing states. Causality, not a creator God nor the Vedic universal Self called Brahman, becomes the basis of what exists. The theory is spelled out as the Twelve Nidānas, a chain running from Avidyā, ignorance, through consciousness, the senses, craving, grasping, becoming, and birth, to old age and death. Break the links, Buddhism says, and the cycle ends.

  The Four Noble Truths give that escape its plainest shape. Dukkha is an innate characteristic of the cycle of grasping. Its origin, samudaya, lies in taṇhā, literally "thirst". Its cessation, nirodha, comes by letting go of that thirst. And the path, marga, leads to that confinement, classically the Noble Eightfold Path. Three marks of existence underlie it all: anicca, impermanence; dukkha, unsatisfactoriness; and anattā, non-self. Some schools add a fourth seal, that nirvana is peace.

  Nirvana literally means "blowing out, quenching, becoming extinguished". Early texts describe it as a state of restraint and self-control that ends the cycles of suffering tied to rebirth and redeath. Some texts map it as three gates: emptiness, realising no self exists; signlessness, realising nirvana cannot be perceived; and wishlessness, realising nirvana is the state of not even wishing for nirvana. Yet in traditional practice, most lay Buddhists have aimed not at nirvana but at merit, seeking better rebirths through good deeds and donations.

  The Noble Eightfold Path threads through all of this with eight factors: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. These group into three divisions of wisdom, moral virtue, and meditation. The path appears most famously in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the "discourse on the turning of the Dharma wheel". It embodies the Middle Way, which the Buddha set out in his first sermon as a course between asceticism and sense pleasure.

• 5. Refuge And The Robe

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  The "three jewels", triratna, are what every form of Buddhism reveres and takes refuge in: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The ancient formula repeated for taking refuge runs, "I go to the Buddha as refuge, I go to the Dhamma as refuge, I go to the Sangha as refuge." Harvey describes the act not as a hiding place but as a thought that purifies, uplifts, and strengthens the heart. Tibetan Buddhism sometimes adds a fourth refuge, in the lama.

  Dharma, the second jewel, is the Buddha's teaching, likened to a raft "for crossing over" to nirvana rather than something to hold on to. It also names the universal law and cosmic order, an everlasting principle, "the way that things really are". The Sangha, the third, is the monastic community of monks and nuns who follow Gautama Buddha's discipline. As Gethin puts it, "Without the Sangha there is no Buddhism." A separate sense, the āryasaṅgha or "noble Sangha", refers to those who have attained any stage of awakening, whether monastic or not.

  Vinaya is the specific code of conduct binding a Sangha. In the Theravadin tradition its Patimokkha lists 227 offences, including 75 rules of decorum for monks, each with penalties. The list is recited every fortnight when all monks gather. Monastic communities cut normal social ties and live as "islands unto themselves". Transgression can bring temporary or permanent expulsion.

  For laypeople the standard is lighter: the five precepts, the minimal standard of Buddhist morality. Each is undertaken as a training-precept, to abstain from killing breathing beings, from taking what is not given, from misconduct concerning sense-pleasures, from false speech, and from alcohol or drugs that open the door to heedlessness. The whole rests on ahimsa, non-harming. The Pali Canon recommends comparing oneself with others and, on that basis, not hurting them.

• 6. The Discipline Of Attention

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  Sati in Pali, smṛti in Sanskrit, literally means "recollection, remembering", and the training of this faculty of mindfulness sits at the center of Buddhist practice. The Indian philosopher Asanga defined it as "non-forgetting by the mind with regard to the object experienced. Its function is non-distraction." Rupert Gethin adds that sati is also an awareness of things in relation to things, and so of their relative value. Early discourses teach it through the four Satipaṭṭhānas and through Ānāpānasati, mindfulness of breathing.

  Meditation proper points toward samādhi and the practice of dhyāna, the Pali jhāna. Samādhi is a calm, undistracted, unified state of awareness, defined by Asanga as "one-pointedness of mind on the object to be investigated". Beyond the four jhānas lie four formless attainments: the realm of infinite space, the realm of infinite consciousness, the realm of nothingness, and the realm of neither perception nor non-perception. There is no scholarly agreement on the origin of dhyāna. Bronkhorst sees the four dhyānas as a Buddhist invention, while Alexander Wynne argues the Buddha learned dhyāna from Brahmanical teachers.

  The Buddha paired two mutually supportive qualities, samatha, "calm", and vipassanā, insight, which he compared in SN 35.245 to "a swift pair of messengers" delivering the message of nibbana. The Four Ways to Arahantship Sutta says one may develop calm then insight, insight then calm, or both at once. Damien Keown describes vipassanā as the generation of penetrating, critical insight, paññā.

  The four Brahma-viharas offer a different register of meditation, directions believed to lead toward rebirth in the heavenly Brahma realm. They are loving-kindness, mettā, active good will toward all; compassion, karuṇā, which identifies others' suffering as one's own; empathetic joy, muditā, gladness at others' happiness; and equanimity, upekkhā, even-mindedness that treats everyone impartially. Tantric traditions add another method again, visualising a Buddha or deity and identifying oneself with it, a practice called deity yoga whose highest form, anuttarayogatantra, divides into a Generation Stage and a Completion Stage.

• 7. From Memory To Canon

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  For centuries Buddhism kept no scripture at all. Like all Indian religions it began as an oral tradition, the Buddha's words passed from one generation to the next. The earliest texts moved through Middle Indo-Aryan languages called Prakrits, such as Pali, carried by communal recitation and other mnemonic techniques. The first Buddhist canonical texts were likely written down in Sri Lanka about 400 years after the Buddha died. Scholarly commentaries with named authors appeared in India around the 2nd century CE.

  Unlike the Bible for Christianity or the Quran for Islam, Buddhism has no single agreed canon. The general belief is that the corpus is vast, and the numbers bear it out. The Chinese Buddhist canon includes 2184 texts in 55 volumes. The Tibetan canon holds 1108 texts all claimed to be the Buddha's words, plus another 3461 by revered Indian scholars. In 1900 over 40,000 manuscripts, mostly Buddhist, were discovered in the Dunhuang cave in China alone.

  The early schools each built their own Tripiṭakas, "Triple Baskets", divided into the Vinaya Pitaka on monastic rule, the Sutta Pitaka of discourses, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka of commentary. The Pāli Tipitaka of the Theravada School is the only complete collection of Buddhist texts surviving in an Indic language. The Mahāyāna sūtras, which that tradition holds are original teachings of the Buddha, were probably first composed around the 1st century BCE or 1st century CE. Among the later philosophical treatises, the most famous in verse is Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamika-karikā, "Root Verses on the Middle Way".

  During the Gupta Empire a new class of sacred literature, the Tantras, began to develop, and by the 8th century it was influential across India and beyond. These texts drew on a Mahāyāna framework but also borrowed deities and material from Śaiva and Pancharatra traditions and local spirit worship of yaksha and nāga. Their features included widespread use of mantras, meditation on the subtle body, worship of fierce deities, and transgressive practices.

• 8. Roots And Branches

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  Iron Age India around the middle of the first millennium BCE gave Buddhism its soil, in a period of ferment called the "Second urbanisation", marked by growing towns and trade and the composition of the Upanishads. The term Śramaṇa names several Indian religious movements parallel to but separate from the Vedic religion, among them Buddhism, Jainism, and the Ājīvika. According to Martin Wiltshire, the Śramaṇa tradition evolved over two phases, the Paccekabuddha of individual ascetics and the Savaka of disciples, and Buddhism and Jainism finally emerged from these. These movements broke with the Brahmanic tradition over Atman, Brahman, and the authority of the Vedas.

  Indian Buddhism is often divided into five periods: Early or pre-sectarian Buddhism, Nikaya or Sectarian Buddhism, Early Mahayana, Late Mahayana, and the Vajrayana "Tantric Age". The reliability of the earliest sources is disputed. Lambert Schmithausen distinguishes three scholarly positions, from confidence in the substantial authenticity of the Nikayic materials, held by A. K. Warder and Richard Gombrich, through scepticism, held by Ronald Davidson, to a cautious optimism shared by J.W. de Jong, Johannes Bronkhorst, and Donald Lopez.

  Scholars generally agree, following Mitchell, that Gautama Buddha must have taught something close to the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, nirvana, the three marks, the five aggregates, dependent origination, karma, and rebirth. N. Ross Reat notes these doctrines are shared by the Theravada Pali texts and the Mahasamghika school's Śālistamba Sūtra. Richard Salomon found the early Gandharan manuscripts consistent with non-Mahayana Buddhism, which in ancient times was represented by eighteen separate schools.

  Today two major branches are recognised. Theravāda emphasises attaining nirvāṇa to transcend the self and end saṃsāra, and is followed mainly in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Mahāyāna, the largest branch, emphasises the Bodhisattva ideal of working to liberate all sentient beings, and includes the Tiantai, Chan, Pure Land, Zen, Nichiren, and Tendai traditions across Nepal, Bhutan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Vajrayāna, incorporating esoteric tantric techniques, is sometimes treated as a separate branch. Its Tibetan form is practised in the Himalayan states and in Mongolia and the Russian regions of Kalmykia and Tuva, while Japanese Shingon preserves the Vajrayana transmitted to China.