Buddhism

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Buddhism is the family of traditions descended from the teaching of Siddhārtha Gautama, called the Buddha — “the awakened one” — who lived and taught in the plains of northern India in roughly the fifth century BCE. At its center is a diagnosis and a cure: that ordinary existence is shot through with dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, and that there is a way to its ending. The tradition states the cure as four truths — that there is suffering, that it arises from craving, that it can cease, and that a path leads to its cessation — and as the eightfold path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

What the early texts hold distinguishes Buddhism sharply from the religious world around it. Where the Vedic traditions that became Hinduism affirmed an eternal self, the ātman, the Buddha taught anattā: that no permanent self can be found in or behind experience, only a stream of changing processes. To this he joined anicca, the impermanence of all conditioned things, and the doctrine of dependent origination — that everything arises in dependence on conditions, nothing standing on its own. Liberation, nirvāṇa, is the extinguishing of the craving that binds a being to the round of rebirth; the word names a blowing-out, and the texts are careful not to describe what remains.

The Buddha and the turning of the wheel

The figure at the source of all this is a prince of the Śākya clan, born at Lumbinī in the Himalayan foothills of what is now southern Nepal. The hagiography is precise in its geography even where chronology fails it: he renounced palace life, undertook years of severe austerity, abandoned that extreme for what the tradition calls the middle way between indulgence and self-mortification, and woke to the nature of things while seated beneath a pipal tree at Bodh Gayā — the bodhi tree, the tree of awakening. He delivered his first teaching in the Deer Park at Sārnāth, near Vārāṇasī, an act the canon names the setting in motion of the wheel of the Dharma. He taught for some four decades across the Gangetic plain and died — passed into parinirvāṇa, the final extinction beyond rebirth — at Kuśinagara. These four sites became the great places of pilgrimage, and the Mahābodhi Temple at Bodh Gayā still marks the spot of the awakening.

His teaching has always been transmitted as the Buddha’s discovery rather than his invention: in the canonical image he is one who finds an ancient overgrown road and walks it again, a physician who has diagnosed a universal sickness and prescribed its remedy. The earliest formula of the path opens with the Four Noble Truths, set out in the medical register of a diagnosis — the symptom (dukkha), its cause (taṇhā, craving or thirst), its cessation (nirodha), and the therapy (magga, the path). The fourth truth unfolds as the Noble Eightfold Path, conventionally gathered under three trainings: wisdom (right view and right intention), ethical conduct (right speech, right action, right livelihood), and mental cultivation (right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration). The eight are not steps taken in sequence but facets of a single integrated discipline, ripening together.

The marks of existence and dependent arising

Three characteristics — the tilakkhaṇa in Pali — describe every conditioned thing. All such things are impermanent (anicca), arising and passing without rest; all are unsatisfactory (dukkha), unable to deliver the lasting security the mind reaches for; and all are without self (anattā), empty of any abiding owner or core. The third is the most radical and the most contested. Against the ātman of the Upaniṣadic schools, the Buddha analyzed the apparent person into five bundles — the skandhas of form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness — and showed that none of them, nor anything behind them, is the self one assumes. What is taken for an enduring “I” is a process, a succession of dependently arisen events misread as a thing.

The engine beneath this analysis is pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination: the principle that whatever arises does so in dependence on conditions, and ceases when those conditions cease. Its canonical formula runs in a twelvefold chain from ignorance through craving and grasping to birth, aging, and death, each link conditioning the next and so turning the wheel of saṃsāra, the beginningless round of rebirth. Karma — intentional action and its ripening — is what propels a being through that round; it is not a cosmic ledger imposed from outside but the natural fruition of the deeds that condition each new becoming. To see dependent arising clearly is, in the tradition’s terms, to see the Dharma itself; and to cut the chain at its root, extinguishing the ignorance and craving that sustain it, is nirvāṇa — the end of the process of rebirth and of the suffering bound up with it.

The Three Jewels

A Buddhist is, by the oldest definition, one who takes refuge in the Three Jewels — the triratna: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. The Buddha is the awakened teacher, and the proof that awakening is possible; the Dharma is both the truth he discovered and the body of teaching that points toward it; the Saṅgha is the community that preserves and walks the path, in its primary sense the order of monks and nuns, and in a wider sense the whole assembly of practitioners. The ordained community took shape during the Buddha’s lifetime, with a nun’s order established alongside the monks’, and its discipline — the Vinaya — became one of the three divisions of the canon. To go for refuge is the act that makes one a follower; the Three Jewels are the structure within which the whole tradition, in all its later branchings, locates itself.

Councils, canon, and the spread across Asia

The historical record is thinner than the tradition’s own chronology. The Buddha’s dates are debated by perhaps a century — the inherited reckoning placed his death around 480 BCE, while the symposium on “The Dating of the Historical Buddha” held at Göttingen in 1988 unsettled that consensus, with many scholars since favoring a death some decades later — and the discourses attributed to him were transmitted orally for generations before being written down, the Pali canon reaching fixed written form in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE. Scholarship treats the earliest stratum as recoverable in outline rather than in exact words.

The community organized itself through a series of councils that gathered to recite and fix the teaching and to resolve disputes of doctrine and discipline. The most consequential for the religion’s later geography was the council convened around 250 BCE at Pāṭaliputra under the patronage of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka, presided over by the elder Moggaliputta Tissa. Aśoka, whose edicts carved into rock and pillar across the subcontinent record a ruler turned to the Dharma after the carnage of his Kaliṅga war, dispatched missions outward in the wake of that council — to the Greek kingdoms of the west, named in his thirteenth rock edict, and above all to Sri Lanka, where his son Mahinda is remembered as carrying the teaching that took permanent root on the island. From that single community the religion branched across Asia along three broad lines.

The Theravāda — “the way of the elders” — carried the Pali canon south and east into Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, holding to the older scriptures and to the centrality of the monastic arhat, the one who reaches liberation by walking the path to its end.

The Mahāyāna — the “great vehicle” — arose around the turn of the era with a vast new literature of sūtras in Sanskrit and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, and with an enlarged aspiration: the path of the bodhisattva, who vows to attain full buddhahood for the sake of all beings and declines final liberation until none are left behind. Its philosophical spine was the doctrine of emptiness, śūnyatā, given its decisive formulation by Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka school — the claim that all things, lacking any independent self-nature, are empty in exactly the way the early teaching of dependent arising implies. The Mahāyāna’s compact scriptures, the Heart Sūtra and the Diamond Sūtra among the most beloved, carried this vision across Central Asia along the trade routes and into China, where it met and transformed the native currents of Taoism and Confucianism, and from there into Korea and Japan. The meditation schools of Chan and Zen and the devotional Pure Land traditions are among its East Asian flowerings.

The Vajrayāna — the “diamond” or “thunderbolt vehicle” — emerged from the tantric Buddhism of the great Pāla-era monastic universities of eastern India, Nālandā and Vikramaśīla among them, where the Mahāsiddhas, the “great accomplished ones,” crystallized a path of consecration, visualization, mantra, and the recognition of awakening as the innate condition of mind. Carried across the Himalayas during the later diffusion of the Dharma by figures such as the Bengali scholar-monk Atiśa, it took root above all in Tibet, and in distinct local forms in the Kathmandu Valley as Newar Buddhism and in Japan as the Shingon school. The Vajrayāna does not replace the earlier vehicles so much as build atop them: it takes the bodhisattva’s aim and emptiness as its ground and adds a body of methods held to bring the fruit of the path within a single lifetime.

Practice as the heart of the path

Practitioners across these schools have understood the path as something done rather than merely believed — ethical restraint, meditative cultivation, and the insight those disciplines are meant to ripen. The two classical poles of meditation are śamatha, the calming and gathering of the mind, and vipassanā, the insight that sees the three marks directly in experience; the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna elaborate these into the cultivation of compassion, the deity-yogas of the tantric path, and the direct-recognition methods of traditions like Zen and the Tibetan Great Perfection. What unites them is the conviction that the Dharma is verified by doing it: the teaching is a raft for crossing, not a possession to be carried once the far shore is reached.

The textual tradition and modern scholarship

Buddhism’s scriptures are not a single canon but a family of canons in several languages. The Pali Tipiṭaka (“three baskets”) — the Sutta Piṭaka of discourses, the Vinaya Piṭaka of monastic discipline, and the Abhidhamma Piṭaka of scholastic systematization — is the only early Indic canon to survive intact in an Indic language and remains the scriptural authority of the Theravāda. The Mahāyāna sūtras survive in vast Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan collections, and the Tibetan canon divides into the Kangyur of the Buddha’s word and the Tengyur of commentary.

The recovery of these texts for Western readers was the work of the great Orientalist translation projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the public-domain literature hosted here reflects that history. Friedrich Max Müller’s Dhammapada, in the tenth volume of the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford, 1881), rendered the most widely loved verse anthology of the early canon; T. W. Rhys Davids’ Buddhist Suttas in the same series (Oxford, 1881) carried the Mahāparinibbāna, the account of the Buddha’s last days, into English. Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series, Cambridge, 1896) remains, more than a century on, among the finest single-volume readers of Pali Buddhism. The Mahāyāna entered English through the forty-ninth volume of the Sacred Books of the East, the Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (Oxford, 1894), which gathered the Sukhāvatī-vyūha Pure Land sūtras and the Vajracchedikā under Müller and J. Takakusu; and Edwin Arnold’s verse life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia (London, 1879), did more than any scholarly volume to bring the Buddha’s story to a popular Anglophone audience. The Pali Text Society, founded by Rhys Davids in 1881, undertook the editing of the entire Pali canon in Roman script (https://www.palitextsociety.org/), an institutional achievement without parallel in the academic study of any non-European religion.

That founding generation of translation came wrapped in the assumptions of its age. Recent scholarship has shown how much of the early Western reception read Buddhism through Victorian rationalism, Protestant modernism, and — in the Tibetan and Zen materials especially — through Theosophy. Donald S. Lopez’s Prisoners of Shangri-La (University of Chicago, 1998, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3636542.html) traced how W. Y. Evans-Wentz refracted the Tibetan death-text he titled the Tibetan Book of the Dead through a Hermetic-Theosophical lens that bore little resemblance to its function within Tibetan practice, a reading further documented by Bryan J. Cuevas. The standard modern introductions — Rupert Gethin’s The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998, https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-foundations-of-buddhism-9780192892232) and Peter Harvey’s An Introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2013, https://www.cambridge.org/9780521676748) — present the tradition with the historical and philological care that the Orientalist editions lacked, and the freely licensed translations of the early discourses at SuttaCentral (https://suttacentral.net/) make the Pali and parallel canons available to readers in a form the founders of the field could not have imagined.

What the comparison sees, and where it stops

The comparative eye notices familiar shapes: the contemplative stilling of the mind, the suspicion that the ordinary self is a kind of mistake, the goal stated in terms of what falls away rather than what is gained. There are affinities to trace with the meditative interiority of the Hindu yogic schools with which Buddhism shares its Indic ground, and with the apophatic mysticisms that speak of liberation as an emptying. But where those traditions place a self at the center of the search — an ātman, a soul, an inmost witness that the discipline is meant to free or to find — anattā removes it. The Buddha’s whole path is built not on securing a self against loss but on seeing, clearly enough that craving lets go, that there was never such a self to secure.

→ In the library: The Dhammapada (Müller, 1881) · Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896) · Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49 — Müller et al., 1894) · The Light of Asia (Arnold, 1879)

→ Related: Hinduism · Buddha · Mahayana · Buddhism Theravada · Tibetan Buddhism · Tibetan Vajrayana · Zen Buddhism Rinzai Soto · Buddhist Madhyamaka · Nagarjuna · Karma · Reincarnation · Meditation · Mahasiddha Tradition · Taoism · Confucianism