Buddhist philosophy


Buddhist philosophy is the ancient Indian philosophical system that developed within the religio-philosophical tradition of Buddhism. It comprises all the philosophical investigations and systems of rational inquiry that developed among various schools of Buddhism in ancient India following the parinirvāṇa of Gautama Buddha, as well as the further developments which followed the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia.
Buddhism combines both philosophical reasoning and the practice of meditation. The Buddhist religion presents a multitude of Buddhist paths to liberation; and with the expansion of early Buddhism from ancient India to Sri Lanka and subsequently to East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhist thinkers have covered topics as varied as cosmology, ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of time, and soteriology in their analysis of these paths.
Pre-sectarian Buddhism was based on empirical evidence gained by the sense organs, and the Buddha seems to have retained a skeptical distance from certain metaphysical questions, refusing to answer them because they were not conducive to liberation but led instead to further speculation. However, he was also claimed to have affirmed theories with metaphysical implications, such as dependent arising, karma, and rebirth.
Particular points of Buddhist philosophy have often been the subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism, as well as between representative thinkers of Buddhist schools and Hindu or Jain philosophers. These elaborations and disputes gave rise to various early Buddhist schools of Abhidharma, the Mahāyāna movement, and scholastic traditions such as Prajñāpāramitā, Sarvāstivāda, Mādhyamaka, Sautrāntika, Vaibhāṣika, Buddha-nature, Yogācāra, and more. One recurrent theme in Buddhist philosophy has been the desire to find a Middle Way between philosophical views seen as extreme.

Historical phases of Buddhist philosophy

splits the development of Indian Buddhist philosophy into three phases:
  1. The phase of the pre-sectarian Buddhist doctrines derived from oral traditions that originated during the life of Gautama Buddha, and are common to all later schools of Buddhism.
  2. The second phase concerns non-Mahāyāna "scholastic" Buddhism, as evident in the Abhidharma texts beginning in the 3rd century BCE, that feature scholastic reworking and schematic classification of material in the early Buddhist texts. The Abhidhamma philosophy of the Theravāda school belongs to this phase.
  3. The third phase concerns Mahāyāna Buddhism, beginning in the late first century CE. This movement emphasizes the path of a bodhisattva and includes various schools of thought, such as Prajñāpāramitā, Mādhyamaka, Sautrāntika, Buddha-nature, and Yogācāra.
Various elements of these three phases are incorporated and/or further developed in the philosophy and worldview of the various sects of Buddhism that then emerged.

Philosophical orientation

is an Indian religion and dhārma that encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs, and spiritual practices based on teachings attributed to Gautama Buddha, but diversified since then in a wide variety of schools and traditions. Buddhism originated in ancient India, from where the Buddhadhārma spread from the northeastern region of the Indian subcontinent throughout Central Asia, East Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Maritime Southeast Asia. Philosophy in ancient India was aimed primarily at spiritual liberation and had soteriological goals. In his study of the Mādhyamaka and Sautrāntika schools of Buddhist philosophy in ancient India, Peter Deller Santina writes:
For the Indian Buddhist philosophers, the teachings of Gautama Buddha were not meant to be taken on faith alone, but to be confirmed by logical analysis and inquiry of the world. The early Buddhist texts mention that a person becomes a follower of the Buddha's teachings after having pondered them over with wisdom and the gradual training also requires that a disciple "investigate" and "scrutinize" the teachings. The Buddha also expected his disciples to approach him as a teacher in a critical fashion and scrutinize his actions and words, as shown in the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta.
Some Buddhist thinkers even argued that systems of rational reflection and philosophical analysis were a central practice which was necessary for the attainment of insight during meditation. Thus, Mahāyāna philosophers like Prajñakaragupta argue that one is not a yogi "merely because of meditation"; rather, one must meditate, listen to the teachings, and understand them by "reflecting through rational inquiry". Only through this method, which combined rational reflection and the practice of meditation, will the wisdom that leads to enlightenment arise.

The Buddha and early Buddhism

is devoted primarily to awakening or enlightenment, Nirvāṇa, and liberation from all causes of suffering due to the existence of sentient beings in saṃsāra through the threefold trainings. Classical Indian Buddhism emphasized the importance of the individual's self-cultivation in the process of liberation from the defilements which keep us bound to the cycle of rebirth. According to the standard Buddhist scholastic understanding, liberation arises when the proper elements are cultivated and when the mind has been purified of its attachment to fetters and hindrances that produce unwholesome mental factors.

The Buddha

Scholarly opinion varies as to whether Gautama Buddha himself was engaged in philosophical inquiry. Siddartha Gautama was a north Indian Śramaṇa, whose teachings are preserved in the Pāli Nikayas and in the Āgamas as well as in other surviving fragmentary textual collections, collectively known as the early Buddhist texts. Dating these texts is difficult, and there is disagreement on how much of this material goes back to a single religious founder. While the focus of the Buddha's teachings is about attaining the highest good of nirvāṇa, they also contain an analysis of the source of human suffering, the nature of personal identity, and the process of acquiring knowledge about the world.

The Middle Way

The Buddha defined his teaching as "the Middle Way". In the Dharmacakrapravartana Sūtra, this is used to refer to the fact that his teachings steer a middle course between the extremes of asceticism and bodily denial and sensual hedonism or indulgence. Many Śramaṇa ascetics of the Buddha's time placed much emphasis on a denial of the body, using practices such as fasting, to liberate the mind from the body. Gautama Buddha, however, realized that the mind was embodied and causally dependent on the body, and therefore that a malnourished body did not allow the mind to be trained and developed. Thus, Buddhism's main concern is not with luxury or poverty, but instead with the human response to circumstances.
Another related teaching of the historical Buddha is "the teaching through the middle", which claims to be a metaphysical middle path between the extremes of eternalism and annihilationism, as well as the extremes of existence and non-existence. This idea would become central to later Buddhist metaphysics, as all Buddhist philosophies would claim to steer a metaphysical middle course.

Basic teachings

Apart from the middle way, certain basic teachings appear in many places throughout these early Buddhist texts, so older studies by various scholars conclude that the Buddha must at least have taught some of these key teachings:
According to N. Ross Reat, all of these doctrines are shared by the Pāli Canon of Theravāda Buddhism and the Śālistamba Sūtra belonging to the Mahāsāṃghika school. A recent study by Bhikkhu Analayo concludes that the Theravādin Majjhima Nikāya and the Sarvāstivādin Madhyama Āgama contain mostly the same major Buddhist doctrines. Richard G. Salomon, in his study of the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, has confirmed that their teachings are "consistent with non-Mahayana Buddhism, which survives today in the Theravada school of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, but which in ancient times was represented by eighteen separate schools."
However, some scholars such as Schmithausen, Vetter, and Bronkhorst argue that critical analysis reveals discrepancies among these various doctrines. They present alternative possibilities for what was taught in earliest Buddhism and question the authenticity of certain teachings and doctrines. For example, some scholars think that the doctrine of karma was not central to the teachings of the historical Buddha, while others disagree with this position. Likewise, there is scholarly disagreement on whether insight into the true nature of reality was seen as liberating in earliest Buddhism or whether it was a later addition. according to Vetter and Bronkhorst, dhyāna constituted the original "liberating practice", while discriminating insight into transiency as a separate path to liberation was a later development. Scholars such as Bronkhorst and Carol Anderson also think that the Four Noble Truths may not have been formulated in earliest Buddhism but as Anderson writes "emerged as a central teaching in a slightly later period that still preceded the final redactions of the various Buddhist canons."
According to some scholars, the philosophical outlook of earliest Buddhism was primarily negative, in the sense that it focused on what doctrines to reject and let go of more than on what doctrines to accept. Only knowledge that is useful in attaining liberation is valued. According to this theory, the cycle of philosophical upheavals that in part drove the diversification of Buddhism into its many schools and sects only began once Buddhists began attempting to make explicit the implicit philosophy of the Buddha and the early texts.