Buddhism

What it is

The tradition founded on the teaching of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha — the awakened one — concerning the nature of suffering and its cessation.

Its diagnostic core is the Four Noble Truths: that unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) is a feature of existence; that it arises from craving; that it can cease; and that there is a path to its cessation. The path is the Eightfold Path — right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration — grouped into ethics, meditation and wisdom.

Three marks characterise all conditioned things: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-self. The last is the most distinctive and the most disputed: there is no permanent, unchanging self to be found in or behind experience, and the search for one is part of the problem.

Dependent origination holds that phenomena arise in dependence on conditions, with nothing existing independently — the doctrinal basis for anattā and, in Mahāyāna, for emptiness.

Where it came from

The Buddha was born in what is now Nepal and taught in the Ganges plain. Traditional dating placed him at 563–483 BCE; most scholars now favour a later range, roughly 480–400 BCE.

The tradition divided over centuries into three great vehicles:

Theravāda — "the way of the elders" — preserved in Pāli, dominant in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. Emphasis on the monastic path and the arahant who attains liberation.

Mahāyāna — "the great vehicle" — emerging around the first century CE, dominant in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Its distinctive commitment is the bodhisattva: one who postpones final liberation to work for the liberation of all beings. It contains Pure Land, which is the most widely practised Buddhism on earth and works by devotion rather than meditation; Chan and Zen; Tiantai; and Nichiren.

Vajrayāna — the tantric vehicle, dominant in Tibet, Mongolia and the Himalaya, treated under Tibetan practice.

How it is practised

Not, for most Buddhists in most of history, by meditating. This is the correction that most surprises Western readers and it is well established.

The overwhelming majority of Buddhist practice across two and a half millennia has consisted of: taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha; keeping the five precepts; dāna, giving — particularly the support of monastics, which is the central lay activity; merit-making for a better rebirth; chanting; devotion at shrines and stūpas; and pilgrimage.

Meditation was a specialist monastic pursuit, and even within monasteries a minority of monks practised it seriously. The mass lay meditation movement is a twentieth-century development, whose origins in colonial Burma are described under vipassanā.

What we can and cannot say

We can say Buddhist modernism is a real phenomenon and most Westerners have encountered it rather than Buddhism. The scholar David McMahan has traced how the Buddhism presented in the West — meditation-centred, compatible with science, psychologically framed, light on ritual, cosmology, merit and often on rebirth itself — was constructed in the colonial encounter, by Asian reformers and Western sympathisers together, partly to answer missionary criticism.

That version is not fake. It is a genuine modern development within the tradition, held by real Buddhists. It is also not what a village in Sri Lanka or a temple in Taiwan is doing.

We can say the "religion without beliefs" framing does not survive contact with the texts. The canonical tradition holds rebirth, karma across lifetimes, realms of existence, gods (who exist but are not liberated and cannot liberate you), and supernormal powers. Secular Buddhists argue these are cultural accretions; traditional Buddhists disagree; the argument is real and unresolved.

We can say Buddhism has been used to justify violence, and the "uniquely peaceful religion" assumption is false. Sri Lanka's civil war involved Buddhist nationalist mobilisation, and militant monastic organisations have promoted anti-Muslim agitation there. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist movements and prominent monks — Ashin Wirathu most visibly — promoted the anti-Rohingya campaign that produced what United Nations investigators described as genocide. Japanese Zen institutions supported the war effort, as Zen at War documents.

These facts are not obscure and they are routinely omitted from Western presentations. A tradition is not tested by whether its adherents behave badly — all of them do — but the exemption Buddhism is granted in Western discourse is not earned.

We cannot say what the Buddha taught with certainty. The Pāli Canon was transmitted orally for centuries before being written, contains material of different periods, and scholars disagree about which layers are earliest.

Further reading

• Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (1998) — the best single introduction.
• David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008).
• Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.), Buddhist Warfare (2010).