Buddhism


Buddhism, also known as Buddha-dharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and philosophy based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a śramaṇa and religious teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE. It is the world's fourth-largest religion, with about 320 million followers, known as Buddhists, who comprise 4.1% of the global population. It arose in the eastern Gangetic plain as a movement in the 5th century BCE, and gradually spread throughout much of Asia. Buddhism has subsequently played a major role in Asian culture and spirituality, eventually spreading to the West in the 20th century.
According to tradition, the Buddha instructed his followers in a path of cultivation that leads to awakening and full liberation from dukkha by attaining nirvana, the 'blowing out' of the passions. He regarded this path as a Middle Way between extreme asceticism and sensory indulgence, and also between the extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Teaching that dukkha arises alongside attachment or clinging, the Buddha advised meditation practices and ethical precepts rooted in non-harming. Widely observed teachings include the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the doctrines of dependent origination, karma, and the three marks of existence. Other commonly observed elements include the Triple Gem, the taking of monastic vows, and the cultivation of perfections.
The Buddhist canon is vast, with philosophical traditions and many different textual collections in different languages. Buddhist schools vary in their interpretation of the paths to liberation as well as the relative importance and "canonicity" assigned to various Buddhist texts, and their specific teachings and practices. Two major extant branches of Buddhism are generally recognised by scholars: Theravāda and Mahāyāna. The Theravada tradition emphasises the attainment of as a means of transcending the individual self and ending the cycle of death and rebirth, while the Mahayana tradition emphasises the Bodhisattva ideal, in which one works for the liberation of all sentient beings. Additionally, Vajrayāna, a body of teachings incorporating esoteric tantric techniques, may be viewed as a separate branch or tradition within Mahāyāna.
The Mahāyāna branch, which includes the traditions of Tiantai, Chan, Pure Land, Zen, Nichiren and Tendai, is the largest branch of Buddhism, being predominantly practised in Nepal, Bhutan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. The second-largest branch, Theravada, is followed mainly in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Tibetan Buddhism, a form of, is practised in the Himalayan states as well as in Mongolia and Russian Kalmykia and Tuva. Japanese Shingon also preserves the Vajrayana tradition as transmitted to China. Historically, until the early 2nd millennium, Buddhism was widely practised in the Indian subcontinent before declining there; it also had a foothold to some extent elsewhere in Asia, namely Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Etymology

The terms Buddhadharma and Bauddhadharma come from Sanskrit: बुद्ध धर्म and बौद्ध धर्म respectively. The term Dharmavinaya comes from Sanskrit: धर्मविनय, literally meaning "doctrines disciplines".
The Buddha was a Śramaṇa who lived in South Asia c. 6th or 5th century BCE. Followers of Buddhism, called Buddhists in English, referred to themselves as Sakyan-s or Sakyabhiksu in ancient India. Buddhist scholar Donald S. Lopez asserts they also used the term Bauddha, although the scholar Richard Cohen asserts that that term was used only by outsiders to describe Buddhists.

The Buddha

Details of the Buddha's life are mentioned in many Early Buddhist Texts but are inconsistent. His social background and life details are difficult to prove, and the precise dates are uncertain, although the 5th century BCE seems to be the best estimate.
Early texts have the Buddha's family name as "Gautama", while some texts give Siddhartha as his surname. He was born in Lumbini, present-day Nepal and grew up in Kapilavastu, a town in the Ganges Plain, near the modern Nepal–India border, and he spent his life in what is now modern Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Some hagiographic legends state that his father was a king named Suddhodana and his mother was Queen Maya. Scholars such as Richard Gombrich consider this a dubious claim because a combination of evidence suggests he was born in the Shakya community, which was governed by a small oligarchy or republic-like council where there were no ranks but where seniority mattered instead. Some of the stories about the Buddha, his life, his teachings, and claims about the society he grew up in may have been invented and interpolated at a later time into the Buddhist texts.
Various details about the Buddha's background are contested in modern scholarship. For example, Buddhist texts assert that Buddha described himself as a kshatriya, but Gombrich writes that little is known about his father and there is no proof that his father even knew the term kshatriya.
According to early texts such as the Pali Ariyapariyesanā-sutta and its Chinese parallel at MĀ 204, Gautama was moved by the suffering of life and death, and its endless repetition due to rebirth. He thus set out on a quest to find liberation from suffering. Early texts and biographies state that Gautama first studied under two teachers of meditation, namely Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Ramaputta, learning meditation and philosophy, particularly the meditative attainment of "the sphere of nothingness" from the former, and "the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception" from the latter.
Finding these teachings to be insufficient to attain his goal, he turned to the practice of severe asceticism, which included a strict fasting regime and various forms of breath control. This too fell short of attaining his goal, and then he turned to the meditative practice of dhyana. He famously sat in meditation under a Ficus religiosa tree—now called the Bodhi Tree—in the town of Bodh Gaya and attained "Awakening".
According to various early texts like the Mahāsaccaka-sutta, and the Samaññaphala Sutta, on awakening, the Buddha gained insight into the workings of karma and his former lives, as well as achieving the ending of the mental defilements, the ending of suffering, and the end of rebirth in saṃsāra. This event also brought certainty about the Middle Way as the right path of spiritual practice to end suffering. As a fully enlightened Buddha, he attracted followers and founded a Sangha. He spent the rest of his life teaching the Dharma he had discovered, and then died, achieving "final nirvana", at the age of 80 in Kushinagar, India.
The Buddha's teachings were propagated by his followers, which in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE became various Buddhist schools of thought, each with its own basket of texts containing different interpretations and authentic teachings of the Buddha; these over time evolved into many traditions of which the more well known and widespread in the modern era are Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism.

Worldview

The term "Buddhism" is an occidental neologism, commonly used as a translation for the Dharma of the Buddha, fójiào in Chinese, bukkyō in Japanese, nang pa sangs rgyas pa'i chos in Tibetan, buddhadharma in Sanskrit, buddhaśāsana in Pali.

Four Noble Truths – ''dukkha'' and its ending

The Four Noble Truths, or the truths of the Noble Ones, express the basic orientation of Buddhism: everything is impermanent, yet we crave and cling to impermanent states and things, which is dukkha, "incapable of satisfying" and painful. This keeps us caught in saṃsāra, metaphysically interpreted as the endless cycle of repeated rebirth, dukkha and dying again, also interpreted as a psychological cycle of repetitious rebirth of the ego.
But there is a way to liberation from this endless cycle to the state of nirvana, namely following the Noble Eightfold Path.
The truth of dukkha is the basic insight that life in this mundane world, with its clinging and craving to impermanent states and things is dukkha, and unsatisfactory. Dukkha can be translated as "incapable of satisfying", "the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena"; or "painful". Dukkha is most commonly translated as "suffering", but this is inaccurate, since it refers not to episodic suffering, but to the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of temporary states and things, including pleasant but temporary experiences. We expect happiness from states and things which are impermanent, and therefore cannot attain real happiness.
The Four Noble Truths are:
  • dukkha is an innate characteristic of the perpetual cycle of grasping at things, ideas and habits
  • samudaya : dukkha is caused by, or arises with, taṇhā
  • nirodha : dukkha can be ended or contained by the confinement or letting go of taṇhā
  • marga is the path leading to the confinement of taṇhā and dukkha, classically the Noble Eightfold Path but also summarised in other paths to liberation

    Three marks of existence

Buddhism teaches that the idea that anything is permanent or that there is self in any being is ignorance or misperception, and that this is the primary source of clinging and dukkha.
Ignorance is countered by insight ; most schools of Buddhism, therefore, teach three marks of existence, which fundamentally characterise all phenomena:
  • Anicca: impermanence
  • Dukkha: unsatisfactoriness
  • Anattā: non-self; living things have no permanent immanent soul or essence
Some schools describe four characteristics or "four seals of the Dharma", adding to the above