Buddhism

← Encyclopedia

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 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 historical record is thinner than the tradition’s own chronology. The Buddha’s dates are debated by perhaps a century, and the discourses attributed to him were transmitted orally for generations before being written down, the Pali canon reaching fixed form in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE. Scholarship treats the earliest stratum as recoverable in outline rather than in exact words. From a single community the religion branched widely: the Theravāda of South and Southeast Asia, holding to the older canon; the Mahāyāna of East Asia, with its expanded scriptures and its ideal of the bodhisattva who delays liberation for the sake of all beings; and the tantric Vajrayāna that took root above all in Tibet.

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 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. The resemblances to other contemplative traditions are real and worth tracing. They are not identities — Buddhism means its terms precisely, and anattā in particular refuses the eternal soul that most of those traditions keep. Where they place a self at the center of the search, the Buddha placed its absence.

→ In the library: The Dhammapada (Müller, 1881) · Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896)

→ Related: Hinduism · Tibetan Buddhism · Taoism · Confucianism