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Essay on Gautam Buddha

An Introduction

Gautam Buddha is popularly called Lord Buddha or The Buddha. He was a great and religious leader of ancient India. He is regarded as the founder of Buddhism, which is one of the most followed religions in the world today.

The followers of Buddha are now called Buddhists which means the enlightened beings, the ones who have rediscovered the path to freedom starting from ignorance, craving to the cycle of rebirth and suffering. Buddha himself propagated it for nearly 45 years.

His teachings are based on his insights of suffering and dissatisfaction ending in a state called Nirvana.

Gautam Buddha is considered to be one of the greatest religious preachers in the world. He was the preacher of peace and harmony. In this Gautam Buddha essay, you will find one long and one short piece about the epic religious guru followed by many. Studying this piece will help you learn who Gautama Buddha was and what made him choose the path of spirituality. The long and short essay on Gautam Buddha will help students of Class 5 and above to write one on their own. These essays are specially designed so that you can have all the needed information about Gautam Buddha. This essay will help you to understand the life of Gautam Buddha in minimum words. Basically in a few words, this essay gives you a brief detail about Buddha.

Gautam Buddha, the messenger of peace, equality, and fraternity, was born in Lumbini in the 6th Century BC, the Terai region of Nepal. His real name was Siddhartha Gautam. He belonged to the royal family of Kapilavastu. His father was Suddhodhana, the ruler. Maya Devi, Gautam’s mother, died soon after giving birth to him. He was a thoughtful child with a broad mind. He was very disciplined and liked to question contemporary concepts to understand and gather more knowledge.

He wanted to devote his life to spirituality and meditation. This was what his father did not like about him. He went against his father’s wishes to find spirituality. His father was worried that someday, Gautam will leave his family to pursue his wishes. For this, Suddhodhana always guarded his son against the harshness surrounding him. He never let his son leave the palace anytime. When he was 18 years of age, Gautam was married to Yashodhara, a princess with magnificent beauty. They had a son named ‘Rahul’. Even though Siddhartha’s family was complete and happy, he did not find peace. His mind always urged him intending to find the truth beyond the walls.

As per the Buddhist manuscripts, when Siddhartha saw an old man, an ailing person, and a corpse, he understood that nothing in this material world is permanent. All the pleasures he enjoyed were temporary and someday, he had to leave them behind. His mind startled from the realization. He left his family, the throne, and the kingdom behind and started roaming in the forests and places aimlessly. All he wanted was to find the real truth and purpose of life. In his journey, he met with scholars and saints but nobody was able to quench his thirst for truth.

He then commenced meditation with the aim to suffer and then realized the ultimate truth sitting under a huge banyan tree after 6 years. It was in Bodh Gaya in Bihar. He turned 35 and was enlightened. His wisdom knew no boundaries. The tree was named Bodhi Vriksha. He was very satisfied with his newly found knowledge and gave his first speech on enlightenment in Sarnath. He found the ultimate truth behind the sorrows and troubles people face in the world. It was all due to their desires and attraction to earthly things.

A couple of centuries after he died, he came to be known as the Buddha which means the enlightened one. All the teachings of Buddha were compiled in the Vinaya. His teachings were passed to the Indo-Aryan community through oral traditions.

In his lecture, he mentioned the Noble Eightfold Path to conquer desires and attain full control. The first 3 paths described how one can gain physical control. The next 2 paths showed us how to achieve the fullest mental control. The last 2 paths were described to help people attain the highest level of intellect. These paths are described as Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration synchronously.

The title “Buddha” was used by several ancient groups and for each group, it had its meaning. The word Buddhism refers to a living being who has got enlightened and just got up from his phase of ignorance. Buddhism believes that there have been Buddhas in the past before Gautam Buddha and there will be Buddhas in the future also. The Buddhists celebrate the life of Gautam Buddha starting from his birth to his enlightenment and passage into Nirvana stage as well.

In his life, Gautam Buddha had done a lot of spiritual things and lived his life by going through so much. Each suffering and each liberation of his has turned into teachings.

Some of them are explained below:

Finding Liberation: the ultimate motive of our soul is to find liberation.

The Noble truth of Life: for salvation, you need to know about all the four Noble truths of your life.

Suffering is not a Joke:   each suffering leads you to experience a new you.

There are noble eightfold paths that you need to follow.

Death is final, the one who has taken birth will die surely and everything in life is impermeable, you are not going to have anything that will be permanent so focus on salvation rather than pleasing others.

He preached that only sacrifice cannot make a person happy and free from all the bonds he has in the world. He also defined the final goal as Nirvana. Even to this day, his preaching finds meaning and can be related to our sorrows. According to his teachings, the right way of thinking, acting, living, concentrating, etc can lead to such a state. He never asked anyone to sacrifice or pray all day to achieve such a state. This is not the way to gain such a mindful state.

He didn’t mention any god or an almighty controlling our fate. His teachings are the best philosophical thoughts one can follow. Gautam Buddha was his new name after gaining Nirvana and knowing the truth. He was sure that no religion can lead to Nirvana. Only the Noble Eightfold Path can be the way to achieve such a state. He breathed last in 483 BC in Kushinagar, now situated in Uttar Pradesh and his life became an inspiration.

Even after being in a happy family with a loving wife and son, he left his royal kingdom in search of the truth. No one was able to satisfy him with knowledge. He then attained his enlightenment under a banyan tree in Bodh Gaya. He described the Noble Eightfold Path that everyone should follow to get rid of sorrow and unhappiness. He died in 483 BC but his preaching is found to be still relevant to this date. This tells us how Siddhartha became Gautam Buddha. It also tells us about his valuable preaching and shows us the way to achieve Nirvana.

FAQs on Essay on Gautam Buddha

1. What made Siddhartha realize pleasures are Temporary?

When he first saw an ailing person, a corpse, and an old man, he realized worldly pleasures are temporary. He realized that all the pleasures that this world is running behind are fake. Nothing will stay forever, even the ones whom you love the most will leave you sooner or later, so you should not run behind these material pleasures. Focus on attaining salvation. Everyone who has taken birth will definitely leave one day, the thing that you have today will not be there tomorrow. There is only one soul for yourself. The body or the material things that you are proud of today will leave you tomorrow. Everything is not going to be the same.

2. What did he do to achieve Knowledge and Peace?

Gautam Buddha was more focused on achieving salvation, he wanted to know the truth of life. He wanted to have knowledge of all the things and peace along with Moksha. To receive knowledge and peace, Gautam Buddha left his home and his family behind. He wandered here and there aimlessly just to find peace in his life. Not only this, he talked with many scholars and saints so that he could receive the knowledge of everything that he was searching for. 

3. What did he Preach?

Gautam Buddha was the preacher of peace. In this essay, we are introduced to the preaching of Gautam Buddha. He has taught all about how to receive salvation and attain Nirvana without following any particular religion. Some of his preachings are :

Have respect for your life.

No lying and respect for honesty.

No sexual misconduct and at least you should respect the people of the same community and respect women as well. 

The path of sufferings, truth of causes; these factors will create a path of salvation for you. You need to believe in the reality of life and then move towards attaining the ultimate.

4. Does Gautam Buddha believe in God?

Buddhists actually don't believe in any dainty figure or God but according to them, there are some supernatural powers present in this universe that can help people or they can even encourage people to move toward enlightenment. Gautam Buddha, on seeing people dying and crying, realized that human life is nothing but suffering and all you need to do is get over this materialistic world and lead your life towards attaining salvation. Nothing is permanent nor even this body, so enlighten yourself towards the path of salvation.

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The Buddha (fl. circa 450 BCE) is the individual whose teachings form the basis of the Buddhist tradition. These teachings, preserved in texts known as the Nikāyas or Āgamas , concern the quest for liberation from suffering. While the ultimate aim of the Buddha’s teachings is thus to help individuals attain the good life, his analysis of the source of suffering centrally involves claims concerning the nature of persons, as well as how we acquire knowledge about the world and our place in it. These teachings formed the basis of a philosophical tradition that developed and defended a variety of sophisticated theories in metaphysics and epistemology.

1. Buddha as Philosopher

2. core teachings, 3. non-self, 4. karma and rebirth, 5. attitude toward reason, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

This entry concerns the historical individual, traditionally called Gautama, who is identified by modern scholars as the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teachings, there have been other buddhas in the past, and there will be yet more in the future. The title ‘Buddha’, which literally means ‘awakened’, is conferred on an individual who discovers the path to nirvana, the cessation of suffering, and propagates that discovery so that others may also achieve nirvana. This entry will follow modern scholarship in taking an agnostic stance on the question of whether there have been other buddhas, and likewise for questions concerning the superhuman status and powers that some Buddhists attribute to buddhas. The concern of this entry is just those aspects of the thought of the historical individual Gautama that bear on the development of the Buddhist philosophical tradition.

The Buddha will here be treated as a philosopher. To so treat him is controversial, but before coming to why that should be so, let us first rehearse those basic aspects of the Buddha’s life and teachings that are relatively non-controversial. Tradition has it that Gautama lived to age 80. Up until recently his dates were thought to be approximately 560–480 BCE, but many scholars now hold that he must have died around 405 BCE. He was born into a family of some wealth and power, members of the Śākya clan, in the area of the present border between India and Nepal. The story is that in early adulthood he abandoned his comfortable life as a householder (as well as his wife and young son) in order to seek a solution to the problem of existential suffering. He first took up with a number of different wandering ascetics ( śramanas ) who claimed to know the path to liberation from suffering. Finding their teachings unsatisfactory, he struck out on his own, and through a combination of insight and meditational practice attained the state of enlightenment ( bodhi ) which is said to represent the cessation of all further suffering. He then devoted the remaining 45 years of his life to teaching others the insights and techniques that had led him to this achievement.

Gautama could himself be classified as one of the śramanas . That there existed such a phenomenon as the śramanas tells us that there was some degree of dissatisfaction with the customary religious practices then prevailing in the Gangetic basin of North India. These practices consisted largely in the rituals and sacrifices prescribed in the Vedas. Among the śramanas there were many, including the Buddha, who rejected the authority of the Vedas as definitive pronouncements on the nature of the world and our place in it (and for this reason are called ‘heterodox’). But within the Vedic canon itself there is a stratum of (comparatively late) texts, the Upaniṣads , that likewise displays disaffection with Brahmin ritualism. Among the new ideas that figure in these (‘orthodox’) texts, as well as in the teachings of those heterodox śramanas whose doctrines are known to us, are the following: that sentient beings (including humans, non-human animals, gods, and the inhabitants of various hells) undergo rebirth; that rebirth is governed by the causal laws of karma (good actions cause pleasant fruit for the agent, evil actions cause unpleasant fruit, etc.); that continual rebirth is inherently unsatisfactory; that there is an ideal state for sentient beings involving liberation from the cycle of rebirth; and that attaining this state requires overcoming ignorance concerning one’s true identity. Various views are offered concerning this ignorance and how to overcome it. The Bhagavad Gītā (classified by some orthodox schools as an Upaniṣad ) lists four such methods, and discusses at least two separate views concerning our identity: that there is a plurality of distinct selves, each being the true agent of a person’s actions and the bearer of karmic merit and demerit but existing separately from the body and its associated states; and that there is just one self, of the nature of pure consciousness (a ‘witness’) and identical with the essence of the cosmos, Brahman or pure undifferentiated Being.

The Buddha agreed with those of his contemporaries embarked on the same soteriological project that it is ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering. What sets his teachings apart (at this level of analysis) lies in what he says that ignorance consists in: the conceit that there is an ‘I’ and a ‘mine’. This is the famous Buddhist teaching of non-self ( anātman ). And it is with this teaching that the controversy begins concerning whether Gautama may legitimately be represented as a philosopher. First there are those (e.g. Albahari 2006) who (correctly) point out that the Buddha never categorically denies the existence of a self that transcends what is empirically given, namely the five skandhas or psychophysical elements. While the Buddha does deny that any of the psychophysical elements is a self, these interpreters claim that he at least leaves open the possibility that there is a self that is transcendent in the sense of being non-empirical. To this it may be objected that all of classical Indian philosophy—Buddhist and orthodox alike—understood the Buddha to have denied the self tout court . To this it is sometimes replied that the later philosophical tradition simply got the Buddha wrong, at least in part because the Buddha sought to indicate something that cannot be grasped through the exercise of philosophical rationality. On this interpretation, the Buddha should be seen not as a proponent of the philosophical methods of analysis and argumentation, but rather as one who sees those methods as obstacles to final release.

Another reason one sometimes encounters for denying that the Buddha is a philosopher is that he rejects the characteristically philosophical activity of theorizing about matters that lack evident practical application. On this interpretation as well, those later Buddhist thinkers who did go in for the construction of theories about the ultimate nature of everything simply failed to heed or properly appreciate the Buddha’s advice that we avoid theorizing for its own sake and confine our attention to those matters that are directly relevant to liberation from suffering. On this view the teaching of non-self is not a bit of metaphysics, just some practical advice to the effect that we should avoid identifying with things that are transitory and so bound to yield dissatisfaction. What both interpretations share is the assumption that it is possible to arrive at what the Buddha himself thought without relying on the understanding of his teachings developed in the subsequent Buddhist philosophical tradition.

This assumption may be questioned. Our knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings comes by way of texts that were not written down until several centuries after his death, are in languages (Pāli, and Chinese translations of Sanskrit) other than the one he is likely to have spoken, and disagree in important respects. The first difficulty may not be as serious as it seems, given that the Buddha’s discourses were probably rehearsed shortly after his death and preserved through oral transmission until the time they were committed to writing. And the second need not be insuperable either. (See, e.g., Cousins 2022.) But the third is troubling, in that it suggests textual transmission involved processes of insertion and deletion in aid of one side or another in sectarian disputes. Our ancient sources attest to this: one will encounter a dispute among Buddhist thinkers where one side cites some utterance of the Buddha in support of their position, only to have the other side respond that the text from which the quotation is taken is not universally recognized as authoritatively the word of the Buddha. This suggests that our record of the Buddha’s teaching may be colored by the philosophical elaboration of those teachings propounded by later thinkers in the Buddhist tradition.

Some scholars (e.g., Gombrich 2009, Shulman 2014) are more sanguine than others about the possibility of overcoming this difficulty, and thereby getting at what the Buddha himself had thought, as opposed to what later Buddhist philosophers thought he had thought. No position will be taken on this dispute here. We will be treating the Buddha’s thought as it was understood within the later philosophical tradition that he had inspired. The resulting interpretation may or may not be faithful to his intentions. It is at least logically possible that he believed there to be a transcendent self that can only be known by mystical intuition, or that the exercise of philosophical rationality leads only to sterile theorizing and away from real emancipation. What we can say with some assurance is that this is not how the Buddhist philosophical tradition understood him. It is their understanding that will be the subject of this essay.

The Buddha’s basic teachings are usually summarized using the device of the Four Nobles’ Truths:

• There is suffering.
• There is the origination of suffering.
• There is the cessation of suffering.
• There is a path to the cessation of suffering.

The first of these claims might seem obvious, even when ‘suffering’ is understood to mean not mere pain but existential suffering, the sort of frustration, alienation and despair that arise out of our experience of transitoriness. But there are said to be different levels of appreciation of this truth, some quite subtle and difficult to attain; the highest of these is said to involve the realization that everything is of the nature of suffering. Perhaps it is sufficient for present purposes to point out that while this is not the implausible claim that all of life’s states and events are necessarily experienced as unsatisfactory, still the realization that all (oneself included) is impermanent can undermine a precondition for real enjoyment of the events in a life: that such events are meaningful by virtue of their having a place in an open-ended narrative.

It is with the development and elaboration of (2) that substantive philosophical controversy begins. (2) is the simple claim that there are causes and conditions for the arising of suffering. (3) then makes the obvious point that if the origination of suffering depends on causes, future suffering can be prevented by bringing about the cessation of those causes. (4) specifies a set of techniques that are said to be effective in such cessation. Much then hangs on the correct identification of the causes of suffering. The answer is traditionally spelled out in a list consisting of twelve links in a causal chain that begins with ignorance and ends with suffering (represented by the states of old age, disease and death). Modern scholarship has established that this list is a later compilation. For the texts that claim to convey the Buddha’s own teachings give two slightly different formulations of this list, and shorter formulations containing only some of the twelve items are also found in the texts. But it seems safe to say that the Buddha taught an analysis of the origins of suffering roughly along the following lines: given the existence of a fully functioning assemblage of psychophysical elements (the parts that make up a sentient being), ignorance concerning the three characteristics of sentient existence—suffering, impermanence and non-self—will lead, in the course of normal interactions with the environment, to appropriation (the identification of certain elements as ‘I’ and ‘mine’). This leads in turn to the formation of attachments, in the form of desire and aversion, and the strengthening of ignorance concerning the true nature of sentient existence. These ensure future rebirth, and thus future instances of old age, disease and death, in a potentially unending cycle.

The key to escape from this cycle is said to lie in realization of the truth about sentient existence—that it is characterized by suffering, impermanence and non-self. But this realization is not easily achieved, since acts of appropriation have already made desire, aversion and ignorance deeply entrenched habits of mind. Thus the measures specified in (4) include various forms of training designed to replace such habits with others that are more conducive to seeing things as they are. Among these is training in meditation, which serves among other things as a way of enhancing one’s observational abilities with respect to one’s own psychological states. Insight is cultivated through the use of these newly developed observational powers, as informed by knowledge acquired through the exercise of philosophical rationality. There is a debate in the later tradition as to whether final release can be attained through theoretical insight alone, through meditation alone, or only by using both techniques. Ch’an, for instance, is based on the premise that enlightenment can be attained through meditation alone, whereas Theravāda advocates using both but also holds that analysis alone may be sufficient for some. (This disagreement begins with a dispute over how to interpret D I.77–84; see Cousins 2022, 81–6.) The third option seems the most plausible, but the first is certainly of some interest given its suggestion that one can attain the ideal state for humans just by doing philosophy.

The Buddha seems to have held (2) to constitute the core of his discovery. He calls his teachings a ‘middle path’ between two extreme views, and it is this claim concerning the causal origins of suffering that he identifies as the key to avoiding those extremes. The extremes are eternalism, the view that persons are eternal, and annihilationism, the view that persons go utterly out of existence (usually understood to mean at death, though a term still shorter than one lifetime is not ruled out). It will be apparent that eternalism requires the existence of the sort of self that the Buddha denies. What is not immediately evident is why the denial of such a self is not tantamount to the claim that the person is annihilated at death (or even sooner, depending on just how impermanent one takes the psychophysical elements to be). The solution to this puzzle lies in the fact that eternalism and annihilationism both share the presupposition that there is an ‘I’ whose existence might either extend beyond death or terminate at death. The idea of the ‘middle path’ is that all of life’s continuities can be explained in terms of facts about a causal series of psychophysical elements. There being nothing more than a succession of these impermanent, impersonal events and states, the question of the ultimate fate of this ‘I’, the supposed owner of these elements, simply does not arise.

This reductionist view of sentient beings was later articulated in terms of the distinction between two kinds of truth, conventional and ultimate. Each kind of truth has its own domain of objects, the things that are only conventionally real and the things that are ultimately real respectively. Conventionally real entities are those things that are accepted as real by common sense, but that turn out on further analysis to be wholes compounded out of simpler entities and thus not strictly speaking real at all. The stock example of a conventionally real entity is the chariot, which we take to be real only because it is more convenient, given our interests and cognitive limitations, to have a single name for the parts when assembled in the right way. Since our belief that there are chariots is thus due to our having a certain useful concept, the chariot is said to be a mere conceptual fiction. (This does not, however, mean that all conceptualization is falsification; only concepts that allow of reductive analysis lead to this artificial inflation of our ontology, and thus to a kind of error.) Ultimately real entities are those ultimate parts into which conceptual fictions are analyzable. An ultimately true statement is one that correctly describes how certain ultimately real entities are arranged. A conventionally true statement is one that, given how the ultimately real entities are arranged, would correctly describe certain conceptual fictions if they also existed. The ultimate truth concerning the relevant ultimately real entities helps explain why it should turn out to be useful to accept conventionally true statements (such as ‘King Milinda rode in a chariot’) when the objects described in those statements are mere fictions.

Using this distinction between the two truths, the key insight of the ‘middle path’ may be expressed as follows. The ultimate truth about sentient beings is just that there is a causal series of impermanent, impersonal psychophysical elements. Since these are all impermanent, and lack other properties that would be required of an essence of the person, none of them is a self. But given the right arrangement of such entities in a causal series, it is useful to think of them as making up one thing, a person. It is thus conventionally true that there are persons, things that endure for a lifetime and possibly (if there is rebirth) longer. This is conventionally true because generally speaking there is more overall happiness and less overall pain and suffering when one part of such a series identifies with other parts of the same series. For instance, when the present set of psychophysical elements identifies with future elements, it is less likely to engage in behavior (such as smoking) that results in present pleasure but far greater future pain. The utility of this convention is, however, limited. Past a certain point—namely the point at which we take it too seriously, as more than just a useful fiction—it results in existential suffering. The cessation of suffering is attained by extirpating all sense of an ‘I’ that serves as agent and owner.

The Buddha’s ‘middle path’ strategy can be seen as one of first arguing that since the word ‘I’ is a mere enumerative term like ‘pair’, there is nothing that it genuinely denotes; and then explaining that our erroneous sense of an ‘I’ stems from our employment of the useful fiction represented by the concept of the person. While the second part of this strategy only receives its full articulation in the later development of the theory of two truths, the first part can be found in the Buddha’s own teachings, in the form of several philosophical arguments for non-self. Best known among these is the argument from impermanence (S III.66–8), which has this basic structure:

It is the fact that this argument does not contain a premise explicitly asserting that the five skandhas (classes of psychophysical element) are exhaustive of the constituents of persons, plus the fact that these are all said to be empirically observable, that leads some to claim that the Buddha did not intend to deny the existence of a self tout court . There is, however, evidence that the Buddha was generally hostile toward attempts to establish the existence of unobservable entities. In the Pohapāda Sutta (D I.178–203), for instance, the Buddha compares someone who posits an unseen seer in order to explain our introspective awareness of cognitions, to a man who has conceived a longing for the most beautiful woman in the world based solely on the thought that such a woman must surely exist. And in the Tevijja Sutta (D I.235–52), the Buddha rejects the claim of certain Brahmins to know the path to oneness with Brahman, on the grounds that no one has actually observed this Brahman. This makes more plausible the assumption that the argument has as an implicit premise the claim that there is no more to the person than the five skandhas .

Premise (1) appears to be based on the assumption that persons undergo rebirth, together with the thought that one function of a self would be to account for diachronic personal identity. By ‘permanent’ is here meant continued existence over at least several lives. This is shown by the fact that the Buddha rules out the body as a self on the grounds that the body exists for just one lifetime. (This also demonstrates that the Buddha did not mean by ‘impermanent’ what some later Buddhist philosophers meant, viz., existing for just a moment; the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness represents a later development.) The mental entities that make up the remaining four types of psychophysical element might seem like more promising candidates, but these are ruled out on the grounds that these all originate in dependence on contact between sense faculty and object, and last no longer than a particular sense-object-contact event. That he listed five kinds of psychophysical element, and not just one, shows that the Buddha embraced a kind of dualism. But this strategy for demonstrating the impermanence of the psychological elements shows that his dualism was not the sort of mind-body dualism familiar from substance ontologies like those of Descartes and of the Nyāya school of orthodox Indian philosophy. Instead of seeing the mind as the persisting bearer of such transient events as occurrences of cognition, feeling and volition, he treats ‘mind’ as a kind of aggregate term for bundles of transient mental events. These events being impermanent, they too fail to account for diachronic personal identity in the way in which a self might be expected to.

Another argument for non-self, which might be called the argument from control (S III.66–8), has this structure:

Premise (1) is puzzling. It appears to presuppose that the self should have complete control over itself, so that it would effortlessly adjust its state to its desires. That the self should be thought of as the locus of control is certainly plausible. Those Indian self-theorists who claim that the self is a mere passive witness recognize that the burden of proof is on them to show that the self is not an agent. But it seems implausibly demanding to require of the self that it have complete control over itself. We do not require that vision see itself if it is to see other things. The case of vision suggests an alternative interpretation, however. We might hold that vision does not see itself for the reason that this would violate an irreflexivity principle, to the effect that an entity cannot operate on itself. Indian philosophers who accept this principle cite supportive instances such as the knife that cannot cut itself and the finger-tip that cannot touch itself. If this principle is accepted, then if the self were the locus of control it would follow that it could never exercise this function on itself. A self that was the controller could never find itself in the position of seeking to change its state to one that it deemed more desirable. On this interpretation, the first premise seems to be true. And there is ample evidence that (2) is true: it is difficult to imagine a bodily or psychological state over which one might not wish to exercise control. Consequently, given the assumption that the person is wholly composed of the psychophysical elements, it appears to follow that a self of this description does not exist.

These two arguments appear, then, to give good reason to deny a self that might ground diachronic personal identity and serve as locus of control, given the assumption that there is no more to the person than the empirically given psychophysical elements. But it now becomes something of a puzzle how one is to explain diachronic personal identity and agency. To start with the latter, does the argument from control not suggest that control must be exercised by something other than the psychophysical elements? This was precisely the conclusion of the Sāṃkhya school of orthodox Indian philosophy. One of their arguments for the existence of a self was that it is possible to exercise control over all the empirically given constituents of the person; while they agree with the Buddha that a self is never observed, they take the phenomena of agency to be grounds for positing a self that transcends all possible experience.

This line of objection to the Buddha’s teaching of non-self is more commonly formulated in response to the argument from impermanence, however. Perhaps its most dramatic form is aimed at the Buddha’s acceptance of the doctrines of karma and rebirth. It is clear that the body ceases to exist at death. And given the Buddha’s argument that mental states all originate in dependence on sense-object contact events, it seems no psychological constituent of the person can transmigrate either. Yet the Buddha claims that persons who have not yet achieved enlightenment will be reborn as sentient beings of some sort after they die. If there is no constituent whatever that moves from one life to the next, how could the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this life? This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that rebirth is governed by karma, something that functions as a kind of cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so as a result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result from evil past deeds. Such a system of reward and punishment could be just only if the recipient of pleasant or unpleasant karmic fruit is the same person as the agent of the good or evil action. And the opponent finds it incomprehensible how this could be so in the absence of a persisting self.

It is not just classical Indian self-theorists who have found this objection persuasive. Some Buddhists have as well. Among these Buddhists, however, this has led to the rejection not of non-self but of rebirth. (Historically this response was not unknown among East Asian Buddhists, and it is not rare among Western Buddhists today.) The evidence that the Buddha himself accepted rebirth and karma seems quite strong, however. The later tradition would distinguish between two types of discourse in the body of the Buddha’s teachings: those intended for an audience of householders seeking instruction from a sage, and those intended for an audience of monastic renunciates already versed in his teachings. And it would be one thing if his use of the concepts of karma and rebirth were limited to the former. For then such appeals could be explained away as another instance of the Buddha’s pedagogical skill (commonly referred to as upāya ). The idea would be that householders who fail to comply with the most basic demands of morality are not likely (for reasons to be discussed shortly) to make significant progress toward the cessation of suffering, and the teaching of karma and rebirth, even if not strictly speaking true, does give those who accept it a (prudential) reason to be moral. But this sort of ‘noble lie’ justification for the Buddha teaching a doctrine he does not accept fails in the face of the evidence that he also taught it to quite advanced monastics (e.g., A III.33). And what he taught is not the version of karma popular in certain circles today, according to which, for instance, an act done out of hatred makes the agent somewhat more disposed to perform similar actions out of similar motives in the future, which in turn makes negative experiences more likely for the agent. What the Buddha teaches is instead the far stricter view that each action has its own specific consequence for the agent, the hedonic nature of which is determined in accordance with causal laws and in such a way as to require rebirth as long as action continues. So if there is a conflict between the doctrine of non-self and the teaching of karma and rebirth, it is not to be resolved by weakening the Buddha’s commitment to the latter.

The Sanskrit term karma literally means ‘action’. What is nowadays referred to somewhat loosely as the theory of karma is, speaking more strictly, the view that there is a causal relationship between action ( karma ) and ‘fruit’ ( phala ), the latter being an experience of pleasure, pain or indifference for the agent of the action. This is the view that the Buddha appears to have accepted in its most straightforward form. Actions are said to be of three types: bodily, verbal and mental. The Buddha insists, however, that by action is meant not the movement or change involved, but rather the volition or intention that brought about the change. As Gombrich (2009) points out, the Buddha’s insistence on this point reflects the transition from an earlier ritualistic view of action to a view that brings action within the purview of ethics. For it is when actions are seen as subject to moral assessment that intention becomes relevant. One does not, for instance, perform the morally blameworthy action of speaking insultingly to an elder just by making sounds that approximate to the pronunciation of profanities in the presence of an elder; parrots and prelinguistic children can do as much. What matters for moral assessment is the mental state (if any) that produced the bodily, verbal or mental change. And it is the occurrence of these mental states that is said to cause the subsequent occurrence of hedonically good, bad and neutral experiences. More specifically, it is the occurrence of the three ‘defiled’ mental states that brings about karmic fruit. The three defilements ( kleśa s) are desire, aversion and ignorance. And we are told quite specifically (A III.33) that actions performed by an agent in whom these three defilements have been destroyed do not have karmic consequences; such an agent is experiencing their last birth.

Some caution is required in understanding this claim about the defilements. The Buddha seems to be saying that it is possible to act not only without ignorance, but also in the absence of desire or aversion, yet it is difficult to see how there could be intentional action without some positive or negative motivation. To see one’s way around this difficulty, one must realize that by ‘desire’ and ‘aversion’ are meant those positive and negative motives respectively that are colored by ignorance, viz. ignorance concerning suffering, impermanence and non-self. Presumably the enlightened person, while knowing the truth about these matters, can still engage in motivated action. Their actions are not based on the presupposition that there is an ‘I’ for which those actions can have significance. Ignorance concerning these matters perpetuates rebirth, and thus further occasions for existential suffering, by facilitating a motivational structure that reinforces one’s ignorance. We can now see how compliance with common-sense morality could be seen as an initial step on the path to the cessation of suffering. While the presence of ignorance makes all action—even that deemed morally good—karmically potent, those actions commonly considered morally evil are especially powerful reinforcers of ignorance, in that they stem from the assumption that the agent’s welfare is of paramount importance. While recognition of the moral value of others may still involve the conceit that there is an ‘I’, it can nonetheless constitute progress toward dissolution of the sense of self.

This excursus into what the Buddha meant by karma may help us see how his middle path strategy could be used to reply to the objection to non-self from rebirth. That objection was that the reward and punishment generated by karma across lives could never be deserved in the absence of a transmigrating self. The middle path strategy generally involves locating and rejecting an assumption shared by a pair of extreme views. In this case the views will be (1) that the person in the later life deserves the fruit generated by the action in the earlier life, and (2) that this person does not deserve the fruit. One assumption shared by (1) and (2) is that persons deserve reward and punishment depending on the moral character of their actions, and one might deny this assumption. But that would be tantamount to moral nihilism, and a middle path is said to avoid nihilisms (such as annihilationism). A more promising alternative might be to deny that there are ultimately such things as persons that could bear moral properties like desert. This is what the Buddha seems to mean when he asserts that the earlier and the later person are neither the same nor different (S II.62; S II.76; S II.113). Since any two existing things must be either identical or distinct, to say of the two persons that they are neither is to say that strictly speaking they do not exist.

This alternative is more promising because it avoids moral nihilism. For it allows one to assert that persons and their moral properties are conventionally real. To say this is to say that given our interests and cognitive limitations, we do better at achieving our aim—minimizing overall pain and suffering—by acting as though there are persons with morally significant properties. Ultimately there are just impersonal entities and events in causal sequence: ignorance, the sorts of desires that ignorance facilitates, an intention formed on the basis of such a desire, a bodily, verbal or mental action, a feeling of pleasure, pain or indifference, and an occasion of suffering. The claim is that this situation is usefully thought of as, for instance, a person who performs an evil deed due to their ignorance of the true nature of things, receives the unpleasant fruit they deserve in the next life, and suffers through their continuing on the wheel of saṃsāra. It is useful to think of the situation in this way because it helps us locate the appropriate places to intervene to prevent future pain (the evil deed) and future suffering (ignorance).

It is no doubt quite difficult to believe that karma and rebirth exist in the form that the Buddha claims. It is said that their existence can be confirmed by those who have developed the power of retrocognition through advanced yogic technique. But this is of little help to those not already convinced that meditation is a reliable means of knowledge. What can be said with some assurance is that karma and rebirth are not inconsistent with non-self. Rebirth without transmigration is logically possible.

When the Buddha says that a person in one life and the person in another life are neither the same nor different, one’s first response might be to take ‘different’ to mean something other than ‘not the same’. But while this is possible in English given the ambiguity of ‘the same’, it is not possible in the Pāli source, where the Buddha is represented as unambiguously denying both numerical identity and numerical distinctness. This has led some to wonder whether the Buddha does not employ a deviant logic. Such suspicions are strengthened by those cases where the options are not two but four, cases of the so-called tetralemma ( catuṣkoṭi ). For instance, when the Buddha is questioned about the post-mortem status of the enlightened person or arhat (e.g., at M I.483–8) the possibilities are listed as: (1) the arhat continues to exist after death, (2) does not exist after death, (3) both exists and does not exist after death, and (4) neither exists nor does not exist after death. When the Buddha rejects both (1) and (2) we get a repetition of ‘neither the same nor different’. But when he goes on to entertain, and then reject, (3) and (4) the logical difficulties are compounded. Since each of (3) and (4) appears to be formally contradictory, to entertain either is to entertain the possibility that a contradiction might be true. And their denial seems tantamount to affirmation of excluded middle, which is prima facie incompatible with the denial of both (1) and (2). One might wonder whether we are here in the presence of the mystical.

There were some Buddhist philosophers who took ‘neither the same nor different’ in this way. These were the Personalists ( Pudgalavādins ), who were so called because they affirmed the ultimate existence of the person as something named and conceptualized in dependence on the psychophysical elements. They claimed that the person is neither identical with nor distinct from the psychophysical elements. They were prepared to accept, as a consequence, that nothing whatever can be said about the relation between person and elements. But their view was rejected by most Buddhist philosophers, in part on the grounds that it quickly leads to an ineffability paradox: one can say neither that the person’s relation to the elements is inexpressible, nor that it is not inexpressible. The consensus view was instead that the fact that the person can be said to be neither identical with nor distinct from the elements is grounds for taking the person to be a mere conceptual fiction. Concerning the persons in the two lives, they understood the negations involved in ‘neither the same nor different’ to be of the commitmentless variety, i.e., to function like illocutionary negation. If we agree that the statement ‘7 is green’ is semantically ill-formed, on the grounds that abstract objects such as numbers do not have colors, then we might go on to say, ‘Do not say that 7 is green, and do not say that it is not green either’. There is no contradiction here, since the illocutionary negation operator ‘do not say’ generates no commitment to an alternative characterization.

There is also evidence that claims of type (3) involve parameterization. For instance, the claim about the arhat would be that there is some respect in which they can be said to exist after death, and some other respect in which they can be said to no longer exist after death. Entertaining such a proposition does not require that one believe there might be true contradictions. And while claims of type (4) would seem to be logically equivalent to those of type (3) (regardless of whether or not they involve parameterization), the tradition treated this type as asserting that the subject is beyond all conceptualization. To reject the type (4) claim about the arhat is to close off one natural response to the rejections of the first three claims: that the status of the arhat after death transcends rational understanding. That the Buddha rejected all four possibilities concerning this and related questions is not evidence that he employed a deviant logic.

The Buddha’s response to questions like those concerning the arhat is sometimes cited in defense of a different claim about his attitude toward rationality. This is the claim that the Buddha was essentially a pragmatist, someone who rejects philosophical theorizing for its own sake and employs philosophical rationality only to the extent that doing so can help solve the practical problem of eliminating suffering. The Buddha does seem to be embracing something like this attitude when he defends his refusal to answer questions like that about the arhat , or whether the series of lives has a beginning, or whether the living principle ( jīva ) is identical with the body. He calls all the possible views with respect to such questions distractions insofar as answering them would not lead to the cessation of the defilements and thus to the end of suffering. And in a famous simile (M I.429) he compares someone who insists that the Buddha answer these questions to someone who has been wounded by an arrow but will not have the wound treated until they are told who shot the arrow, what sort of wood the arrow is made of, and the like.

Passages such as these surely attest to the great importance the Buddha placed on sharing his insights to help others overcome suffering. But this is consistent with the belief that philosophical rationality may be used to answer questions that lack evident connection with pressing practical concerns. And on at least one occasion the Buddha does just this. Pressed to give his answers to the questions about the arhat and the like, the Buddha first rejects all the possibilities of the tetralemma, and defends his refusal on the grounds that such theories are not conducive to liberation from saṃsāra . But when his questioner shows signs of thereby losing confidence in the value of the Buddha’s teachings about the path to the cessation of suffering, the Buddha responds with the example of a fire that goes out after exhausting its fuel. If one were asked where this fire has gone, the Buddha points out, one could consistently deny that it has gone to the north, to the south, or in any other direction. This is so for the simple reason that the questions ‘Has it gone to the north?’, ‘Has it gone to the south?’, etc., all share the false presupposition that the fire continues to exist. Likewise the questions about the arhat and the like all share the false presupposition that there is such a thing as a person who might either continue to exist after death, cease to exist at death, etc. (Anālayo 2018, 41) The difficulty with these questions is not that they try to extend philosophical rationality beyond its legitimate domain, as the handmaiden of soteriologically useful practice. It is rather that they rest on a false presupposition—something that is disclosed through the employment of philosophical rationality.

A different sort of challenge to the claim that the Buddha valued philosophical rationality for its own sake comes from the role played by authority in Buddhist soteriology. For instance, in the Buddhist tradition one sometimes encounters the claim that only enlightened persons such as the Buddha can know all the details of karmic causation. And to the extent that the moral rules are thought to be determined by the details of karmic causation, this might be taken to mean that our knowledge of the moral rules is dependent on the authority of the Buddha. Again, the subsequent development of Buddhist philosophy seems to have been constrained by the need to make theory compatible with certain key claims of the Buddha. For instance, one school developed an elaborate form of four-dimensionalism, not because of any deep dissatisfaction with presentism, but because they believed the non-existence of the past and the future to be incompatible with the Buddha’s alleged ability to cognize past and future events. And some modern scholars go so far as to wonder whether non-self functions as anything more than a sort of linguistic taboo against the use of words like ‘I’ and ‘self’ in the Buddhist tradition (Collins 1982: 183). The suggestion is that just as in some other religious traditions the views of the founder or the statements of scripture trump all other considerations, including any views arrived at through the free exercise of rational inquiry, so in Buddhism as well there can be at best only a highly constrained arena for the deployment of philosophical rationality.

Now it could be that while this is true of the tradition that developed out of the Buddha’s teachings, the Buddha himself held the unfettered use of rationality in quite high esteem. This would seem to conflict with what he is represented as saying in response to the report that he arrived at his conclusions through reasoning and analysis alone: that such a report is libelous, since he possesses a number of superhuman cognitive powers (M I.68). But at least some scholars take this passage to be not the Buddha’s own words but an expression of later devotionalist concerns (Gombrich 2009: 164). Indeed one does find a spirited discussion within the tradition concerning the question whether the Buddha is omniscient, a discussion that may well reflect competition between Buddhism and those Brahmanical schools that posit an omniscient creator. And at least for the most part the Buddhist tradition is careful not to attribute to the Buddha the sort of omniscience usually ascribed to an all-perfect being: the actual cognition, at any one time, of all truths. Instead a Buddha is said to be omniscient only in the much weaker sense of always having the ability to cognize any individual fact relevant to the soteriological project, viz. the details of their own past lives, the workings of the karmic causal laws, and whether a given individual’s defilements have been extirpated. Moreover, these abilities are said to be ones that a Buddha acquires through a specific course of training, and thus ones that others may reasonably aspire to as well. The attitude of the later tradition seems to be that while one could discover the relevant facts on one’s own, it would be more reasonable to take advantage of the fact that the Buddha has already done all the epistemic labor involved. When we arrive in a new town we could always find our final destination through trial and error, but it would make more sense to ask someone who already knows their way about.

The Buddhist philosophical tradition grew out of earlier efforts to systematize the Buddha’s teachings. Within a century or two of the death of the Buddha, exegetical differences led to debates concerning the Buddha’s true intention on some matter, such as that between the Personalists and others over the status of the person. While the parties to these debates use many of the standard tools and techniques of philosophy, they were still circumscribed by the assumption that the Buddha’s views on the matter at hand are authoritative. In time, however, the discussion widened to include interlocutors representing various Brahmanical systems. Since the latter did not take the Buddha’s word as authoritative, Buddhist thinkers were required to defend their positions in other ways. The resulting debate (which continued for about nine centuries) touched on most of the topics now considered standard in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language, and was characterized by considerable sophistication in philosophical methodology. What the Buddha would have thought of these developments we cannot say with any certainty. What we can say is that many Buddhists have believed that the unfettered exercise of philosophical rationality is quite consistent with his teachings.

• Albahari, Miri, 2006, Analytical Buddhism , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• –––, 2014, ‘Insight Knowledge of No Self in Buddhism: An Epistemic Analysis,’ Philosophers’ Imprint , 14(1), available online .
• Anālayo, Bhikkhu, 2018, Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current research , Cambridge, MA: Wisdom.
• Collins, Stephen, 1982, Selfless Persons , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cousins, L. S., 2022, Meditations of the Pali Tradition: Illuminating Buddhist Doctrine, History, and Practice, edited by Sarah Shaw, Boulder, CO: Shambala.
• Gethin, Rupert, 1998, The Foun dations of Buddhism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gombrich, Richard F., 1996, How Buddhism Began , London: Athlone.
• –––, 2009, What the Buddha Thought , London: Equinox.
• Gowans, Christopher, 2003, Philosophy of the Buddha , London: Routledge.
• Harvey, Peter, 1995, The Selfless Mind , Richmond, UK: Curzon.
• Jayatilleke, K.N., 1963, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Rahula, Walpola, 1967, What the Buddha Taught , 2 nd ed., London: Unwin.
• Ronkin, Noa, 2005, Early Buddhist Metaphysics , London: Routledge.
• Ruegg, David Seyfort, 1977, ‘The Uses of the Four Positions of the Catuṣkoṭi and the Problem of the Description of Reality in Mahāyāna Buddhism,’ Journal of Indian Philosophy , 5: 1–71.
• Siderits, Mark, 2021, Buddhism As Philosophy , 2nd edition, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Smith, Douglass and Justin Whitaker, 2016, ‘Reading the Buddha as a Philosopher,’ Philosophy East and West , 66: 515–538.

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• The Pali Tipitaka , Pali texts
• Ten Philosophical Questions to Ask About Buddhism , a series of talks by Richard P. Hayes
• Access to Insight , Readings in Theravada Buddhism
• Buddhanet , Buddha Dharma Education Association

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Siddhartha Gautama

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Siddhartha Gautama (better known as the Buddha, l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE) was, according to legend, a Hindu prince who renounced his position and wealth to seek enlightenment as a spiritual ascetic, attained his goal and, in preaching his path to others, founded Buddhism in India in the 6th-5th centuries BCE.

The events of his life are largely legendary, but he is considered an actual historical figure and a younger contemporary of Mahavira (also known as Vardhamana , l. c. 599-527 BCE) who established the tenets of Jainism shortly before Siddhartha's time.

According to Buddhist texts, a prophecy was given at Siddhartha's birth that he would become either a powerful king or great spiritual leader. His father, fearing he would become the latter if he were exposed to the suffering of the world, protected him from seeing or experiencing anything unpleasant or upsetting for the first 29 years of his life. One day (or over the course of a few) he slipped through his father's defenses and saw what Buddhists refer to as the Four Signs:

• An aged man
• A religious ascetic

Through these signs, he realized that he, too, could become sick, would grow old, would die, and would lose everything he loved. He understood that the life he was living guaranteed he would suffer and, further, that all of life was essentially defined by suffering from want or loss. He therefore followed the example of the religious ascetic, tried different teachers and disciplines, and finally attained enlightenment through his own means and became known as the Buddha (“awakened” or “enlightened” one).

Afterwards, he preached his “middle way” of detachment from sense objects and renunciation of ignorance and illusion through his Four Noble Truths , the Wheel of Becoming, and the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. After his death , his disciples preserved and developed his teachings until they were spread from India to other countries by the Mauryan king Ashoka the Great (r. 268-232 BCE). From the time of Ashoka on, Buddhism has continued to flourish and, presently, is one of the major world religions.

Historical Background

Siddhartha was born in Lumbini (in modern-day Nepal) during a time of social and religious transformation. The dominant religion in India at the time was Hinduism ( Sanatan Dharma , “Eternal Order”) but a number of thinkers of the period had begun to question its validity and the authority of the Vedas (the Hindu scriptures) as well as the practices of the priests.

On a practical level, critics of orthodox Hinduism claimed that the religion was not meeting the needs of the people. The Vedas were said to have been received directly from the universe and could not be questioned, but these scriptures were all in Sanskrit , a language the people could not understand, and were interpreted by the priests to encourage acceptance of one's place in life – no matter how difficult or impoverished – while they themselves continued to live well from temple donations.

On a theological level, people began to question the entire construct of Hinduism. Hinduism taught that there was a supreme being, Brahman, who had not only created the universe but was the universe itself. Brahman had established the divine order, maintained this order, and had delivered the Vedas to enable human beings to participate in this order with understanding and clarity.

It was understood that the human soul was immortal and that the goal of life was to perform one's karma (action) in accordance with one's dharma (duty) in order to break free from the cycle of rebirth and death ( samsara ) and attain union with the oversoul ( atman ). It was also understood that the soul would be incarnated in physical bodies multiple times, over and over, until one finally attained this liberation.

The Hindu priests of the time defended the faith, which included the caste system, as part of the divine order but, as new ideas began to circulate, more people questioned whether that order was divine at all when all it seemed to offer was endless rounds of suffering. Scholar John M. Koller comments:

From a religious perspective, new ways of faith and practice challenged the established Vedic religion. The main concern dominating religious thought and practice at the time of the Buddha was the problem of suffering and death. Fear of death was an especially acute problem, because death was seen as an unending series of deaths and rebirths. Although the Buddha's solution to the problem was unique, most religious seekers at this time were engaged in the search for a way to obtain freedom from suffering and repeated death. (46)

Many schools of thought arose at this time in response to this need. Those which supported orthodox Hindu thought were known as astika (“there exists”), and those which rejected the Vedas and the Hindu construct were known as nastika (“there does not exist”). Among the nastika schools which survived the time and developed were Charvaka , Jainism, and Buddhism.

Early Life & Renunciation

Siddhartha Gautama grew up in this time of transition and reform but, according to the famous Buddhist legend concerning his youth, would not have been aware of any of it. When he was born, it was prophesied that he would become a great king or spiritual leader and his father, hoping for the former, hid his son away from anything that might be distressing. Siddhartha's mother died within a week of his birth, but he had no awareness of this, and his father did not want him to experience anything else as he grew which might inspire him to adopt a spiritual path.

Siddhartha lived among the luxuries of the palace , was married, had a son, and lacked for nothing as the heir-apparent of his father until his experience with the Four Signs. Whether he saw the aged man, sick man, dead man, and ascetic in rapid succession on a single ride in his carriage (or chariot , depending on the version), or over four days, the story relates how, with each one of the first three, he asked his driver, “Am I, too, subject to this?” His coachman responded, telling him how everyone aged, everyone was subject to illness, and everyone died.

Reflecting upon this, Siddhartha understood that everyone he loved, every fine object, all his grand clothes, his horses, his jewels would one day be lost to him – could be lost to him at any time on any day – because he was subject to age, illness, and death just like everyone else. The idea of such tremendous loss was unbearable to him but, he noticed, the religious ascetic – just as doomed as anyone – seemed at peace and so asked him why he seemed so content. The ascetic told him he was pursuing the path of spiritual reflection and detachment, recognizing the world and its trappings as illusion, and was therefore unconcerned with loss as he had already given everything away.

Siddhartha knew that his father would never allow him to follow this path and, further, he had a wife and son he was responsible for who would also try to prevent him. At the same time, though, the thought of accepting a life he knew he would ultimately lose and suffer for was unbearable. One night, after looking at all of the precious objects he was attached to and his sleeping wife and son, he walked out of the palace, left his fine clothes, put on the robes of an ascetic, and departed for the woods. In some versions of the story, he is assisted by supernatural means while, in others, he simply leaves.

Criticism of the Four Signs Tale

Criticism of this story often includes the objection that Siddhartha could not possibly have gone 29 years without ever becoming sick, seeing an older person, or being aware of death, but this is explained by scholars in two ways:

• the story is symbolic of the conditions which cause/relieve suffering
• the story is an artificial construct to give Buddhism an illustrious past

Koller addresses the first point, writing :

Most likely the truth of the legend of the four signs is symbolic rather than literal. In the first place, they may symbolize existential crises in Siddhartha's life occasioned by experiences with sickness, old age, death, and renunciation. More important, these four signs symbolize his coming to a deep and profound understanding of the true reality of sickness, old age, death, and contentment and his conviction that peace and contentment are possible despite the fact that everyone experiences old age, sickness, and death. (49)

Scholars Robert E. Buswell, Jr. and Donald S. Lopez, Jr. address the second point noting that the story of the Four Signs was written over 100 years after Buddha's death and that early Buddhists were “motivated in part by the need to demonstrate that what the Buddha taught was not the innovation of an individual, but rather the rediscovery of a timeless truth” in order to give the belief system the same claim to ancient, divine origins held by Hinduism and Jainism (149).

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The story may or may not be true, but it hardly matters because it has come to be accepted as truth. It appears first in full in the Lalitavistara Sutra (c. 3rd century CE) and, before that, may have undergone extensive revision via oral tradition. The symbolic meaning seems obvious and the claim it was written to enhance the standing of Buddhist thought, which had to contend with the established faiths of Hinduism and Jainism for adherents, also seems probable.

Ascetic Life & Enlightenment

Siddhartha at first sought out the famous teacher Arada Kalama with whom he studied until he had mastered all Kamala knew, but the “attainment of nothingness” he gained did nothing to free him from suffering. He then became a student of the master Udraka Ramaputra who taught him how to suppress his desires and attain a state “neither conscious nor unconscious”, but this did not satisfy him as it, also, did not address the problem of suffering. He subjected himself to the harshest ascetic disciplines, most likely following a Jain model, eventually eating only a grain of rice a day, but, still, he could not find what he was looking for.

In one version of his story, at this point he stumbles into a river, barely strong enough to keep his head above water, and receives direction from a voice on the wind. In the more popular version, he is found in the woods by a milkmaid named Sujata, who mistakes him for a tree spirit because he is so emaciated, and offers him some rice milk. The milk revives him, and he ends his asceticism and goes to nearby village of Bodh Gaya where he seats himself on a bed of grass beneath a Bodhi tree and vows to remain there until he understands the means of living without suffering.

Deep in a meditative state, Siddhartha contemplated his life and experiences. He thought about the nature of suffering and fully recognized its power came from attachment. Finally, in a moment of illumination, he understood that suffering was caused by the human insistence on permanent states of being in a world of impermanence. Everything one was, everything one thought one owned, everything one wanted to gain, was in a constant state of flux. One suffered because one was ignorant of the fact that life itself was change and one could cease suffering by recognizing that, since this was so, attachment to anything in the belief it would last was a serious error which only trapped one in an endless cycle of craving, striving, rebirth, and death. His illumination was complete, and Siddhartha Gautama was now the Buddha, the enlightened one.

Tenets & Teachings

Although he could now live his life in contentment and do as he pleased, he chose instead to teach others the path of liberation from ignorance and desire and assist them in ending their suffering. He preached his first sermon at the Deer Park at Sarnath at which he introduced his audience to his Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. The Four Noble Truths are:

• Life is suffering
• The cause of suffering is craving
• The end of suffering comes with an end to craving
• There is a path which leads one away from craving and suffering

The fourth truth directs one toward the Eightfold Path, which serves as a guide to live one's life without the kind of attachment that guarantees suffering:

• Right Intention
• Right Speech
• Right Action
• Right Livelihood
• Right Effort
• Right Mindfulness
• Right Concentration

By recognizing the Four Noble Truths and following the precepts of the Eightfold Path, one is freed from the Wheel of Becoming which is a symbolic illustration of existence. In the hub of the wheel sit ignorance, craving, and aversion which drive it. Between the hub and the rim of the wheel are six states of existence: human, animal, ghosts, demons, deities, and hell-beings. Along the rim of the wheel are depicted the conditions which cause suffering such as body-mind, consciousness, feeling, thirst, grasping among many others which bind one to the wheel and cause one to suffer.

In recognizing the Four Noble Truths and following the Eightfold Path, one will still experience loss, feel pain, know disappointment but it will not be the same as the experience of duhkha , translated as “suffering” which is unending because it is fueled by the soul's ignorance of the nature of life and of itself. One can still enjoy all aspects of life in pursuing the Buddhist path, only with the recognition that these things cannot last, it is not in their nature to last, because nothing in life is permanent.

Buddhists compare this realization to the end of a dinner party. When the meal is done, one thanks one's host for the pleasant time and goes home; one does not fall to the floor crying and lamenting the evening's end. The nature of the dinner party is that it has a beginning and an ending, it is not a permanent state, and neither is anything else in life. Instead of mourning the loss of something that one could never hope to have held onto, one should appreciate what one has experienced for what it is – and let it go when it is over.

Buddha called his teaching the Dharma which means “cosmic law ” in this case (not “duty” as in Hinduism) as it is based entirely on the concept of undeniable consequences for one's thoughts which form one's reality and dictate one's actions. As the Buddhist text Dhammapada puts it:

Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it. Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. (I.1-2)

The individual is ultimately responsible for his or her level of suffering because, at any point, one can choose not to engage in the kinds of attachments and thought processes which cause suffering. Buddha would continue to teach his message for the rest of his life before dying at Kushinagar where, according to Buddhists, he attained nirvana and was released from the cycle of rebirth and death after being served a meal by one Cunda, a student, who some scholars claim may have poisoned him, perhaps accidentally.

Before dying of dysentery, he requested his remains be placed in a stupa at a crossroads, but his disciples divided them between themselves and had them interred in eight (or ten) stupas corresponding to important sites in Buddha's life. When Ashoka the Great embraced Buddhism, he had the relics disinterred and then reinterred in 84,000 stupas across India.

He then sent missionaries to other countries to spread Buddha's message where it was received so well that Buddhism became more popular in countries like Sri Lanka, China , Thailand, and Korea than it was in India - a situation which, actually, is ongoing – and Buddhist thought developed further after that. Today, the efforts of Siddhartha Gautama are appreciated worldwide by those who have embraced his message and still follow his example of appreciating, without clinging, to the beauty of life.

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Bibliography

• Baird, F. E. & Heimbeck, R. S. Philosophic Classics: Asian Philosophy. Routledge, 2005.
• Buddha. The Dhammapada. Royal Classics, 2020.
• Burtt, E. A. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. Berkley, 2000.
• Buswell, R. E. jr & Lopez, D. S. jr. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Keay, J. India: A History. Grove Press, 2010.
• Koller, J. M. Asian Philosophies. Prentice Hall, 2007.
• Long, J. D. Historical Dictionary of Hinduism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.
• Long, J. D. Jainism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris, 2009.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Buddhism and buddhist art.

Portrait of Shun'oku Myōha

Unidentified artist Japanese

Fasting Buddha Shakyamuni

Reliquary in the Shape of a Stupa

Standing Buddha Offering Protection

Buddha Maitreya (Mile)

Buddha Maitreya (Mile) Altarpiece

Buddha Offering Protection

Head of Buddha

Buddha, probably Amitabha

Pensive bodhisattva

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion

Buddha Shakyamuni or Akshobhya, the Buddha of the East

Enthroned Buddha Attended by the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani

The Bodhisattva Padmapani Lokeshvara

Buddha Vairocana (Dari)

Buddha Amoghasiddhi with Eight Bodhisattvas

Death of the Historical Buddha (Nehan-zu)

Cup Stand with the Eight Buddhist Treasures

Seated Buddha

Vidya Dehejia Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

February 2007

The fifth and fourth centuries B.C. were a time of worldwide intellectual ferment. It was an age of great thinkers, such as Socrates and Plato, Confucius and Laozi. In India , it was the age of the Buddha, after whose death a religion developed that eventually spread far beyond its homeland.

Siddhartha, the prince who was to become the Buddha, was born into the royal family of Kapilavastu, a small kingdom in the Himalayan foothills. His was a divine conception and miraculous birth, at which sages predicted that he would become a universal conqueror, either of the physical world or of men’s minds. It was the latter conquest that came to pass. Giving up the pleasures of the palace to seek the true purpose of life, Siddhartha first tried the path of severe asceticism, only to abandon it after six years as a futile exercise. He then sat down in yogic meditation beneath a bodhi tree until he achieved enlightenment. He was known henceforth as the Buddha , or “Enlightened One.”

His is the Middle Path, rejecting both luxury and asceticism. Buddhism proposes a life of good thoughts, good intentions, and straight living, all with the ultimate aim of achieving nirvana, release from earthly existence. For most beings, nirvana lies in the distant future, because Buddhism, like other faiths of India, believes in a cycle of rebirth. Humans are born many times on earth, each time with the opportunity to perfect themselves further. And it is their own karma—the sum total of deeds, good and bad—that determines the circumstances of a future birth. The Buddha spent the remaining forty years of his life preaching his faith and making vast numbers of converts. When he died, his body was cremated, as was customary in India.

The cremated relics of the Buddha were divided into several portions and placed in relic caskets that were interred within large hemispherical mounds known as stupas. Such stupas constitute the central monument of Buddhist monastic complexes. They attract pilgrims from far and wide who come to experience the unseen presence of the Buddha. Stupas are enclosed by a railing that provides a path for ritual circumambulation. The sacred area is entered through gateways at the four cardinal points.

In the first century B.C., India’s artists, who had worked in the perishable media of brick, wood, thatch, and bamboo, adopted stone on a very wide scale. Stone railings and gateways, covered with relief sculptures, were added to stupas. Favorite themes were events from the historic life of the Buddha, as well as from his previous lives, which were believed to number 550. The latter tales are called jatakas and often include popular legends adapted to Buddhist teachings.

In the earliest Buddhist art of India, the Buddha was not represented in human form. His presence was indicated instead by a sign, such as a pair of footprints, an empty seat, or an empty space beneath a parasol.

In the first century A.D., the human image of one Buddha came to dominate the artistic scene, and one of the first sites at which this occurred was along India’s northwestern frontier. In the area known as Gandhara , artistic elements from the Hellenistic world combined with the symbolism needed to express Indian Buddhism to create a unique style. Youthful Buddhas with hair arranged in wavy curls resemble Roman statues of Apollo; the monastic robe covering both shoulders and arranged in heavy classical folds is reminiscent of a Roman toga. There are also many representations of Siddhartha as a princely bejeweled figure prior to his renunciation of palace life. Buddhism evolved the concept of a Buddha of the Future, Maitreya, depicted in art both as a Buddha clad in a monastic robe and as a princely bodhisattva before enlightenment. Gandharan artists made use of both stone and stucco to produce such images, which were placed in nichelike shrines around the stupa of a monastery. Contemporaneously, the Kushan-period artists in Mathura, India, produced a different image of the Buddha. His body was expanded by sacred breath ( prana ), and his clinging monastic robe was draped to leave the right shoulder bare.

A third influential Buddha type evolved in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India, where images of substantial proportions, with serious, unsmiling faces, were clad in robes that created a heavy swag at the hem and revealed the left shoulder. These southern sites provided artistic inspiration for the Buddhist land of Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of India, and Sri Lankan monks regularly visited the area. A number of statues in this style have been found as well throughout Southeast Asia.

The succeeding Gupta period, from the fourth to the sixth century A.D., in northern India, sometimes referred to as a Golden Age, witnessed the creation of an “ideal image” of the Buddha. This was achieved by combining selected traits from the Gandharan region with the sensuous form created by Mathura artists. Gupta Buddhas have their hair arranged in tiny individual curls, and the robes have a network of strings to suggest drapery folds (as at Mathura) or are transparent sheaths (as at Sarnath). With their downward glance and spiritual aura, Gupta Buddhas became the model for future generations of artists, whether in post-Gupta and Pala India or in Nepal , Thailand , and Indonesia. Gupta metal images of the Buddha were also taken by pilgrims along the Silk Road to China .

Over the following centuries there emerged a new form of Buddhism that involved an expanding pantheon and more elaborate rituals. This later Buddhism introduced the concept of heavenly bodhisattvas as well as goddesses, of whom the most popular was Tara. In Nepal and Tibet , where exquisite metal images and paintings were produced, new divinities were created and portrayed in both sculpture and painted scrolls. Ferocious deities were introduced in the role of protectors of Buddhism and its believers. Images of a more esoteric nature , depicting god and goddess in embrace, were produced to demonstrate the metaphysical concept that salvation resulted from the union of wisdom (female) and compassion (male). Buddhism had traveled a long way from its simple beginnings.

Dehejia, Vidya. “Buddhism and Buddhist Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/budd/hd_budd.htm (February 2007)

Further Reading

Dehejia, Vidya. Indian Art . London: Phaidon, 1997.

Mitter, Partha. Indian Art . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Additional Essays by Vidya Dehejia

• Dehejia, Vidya. “ Hinduism and Hindu Art .” (February 2007)
• Dehejia, Vidya. “ Recognizing the Gods .” (February 2007)
• Dehejia, Vidya. “ South Asian Art and Culture .” (February 2007)

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The life of the Buddha

Although born a prince, he realized that conditioned experiences could not provide lasting happiness or protection from suffering. After a long spiritual search he went into deep meditation, where he realized the nature of mind. He achieved the state of unconditional and lasting happiness: the state of enlightenment, of buddhahood. This state of mind is free from disturbing emotions and expresses itself through fearlessness, joy and active compassion. For the rest of his life, the Buddha taught anyone who asked how they could reach the same state.

Buddha’s early life

India at the time of the Buddha was very spiritually open. Every major philosophical view was present in society, and people expected spirituality to influence their daily lives in positive ways.

At this time of great potential, Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, was born into a royal family in what is now Nepal, close to the border with India. Growing up, the Buddha was exceptionally intelligent and compassionate. Tall, strong, and handsome, the Buddha belonged to the Warrior caste. It was predicted that he would become either a great king or spiritual leader. Since his parents wanted a powerful ruler for their kingdom, they tried to prevent Siddharta from seeing the unsatisfactory nature of the world. They surrounded him with every kind of pleasure. He was given five hundred attractive ladies and every opportunity for sports and excitement. He completely mastered the important combat training, even winning his wife, Yasodhara, in an archery contest.

Suddenly, at age 29, he was confronted with impermanence and suffering. On a rare outing from his luxurious palace, he saw someone desperately sick. The next day, he saw a decrepit old man, and finally a dead person. He was very upset to realize that old age, sickness and death would come to everyone he loved. Siddharta had no refuge to offer them.

The next morning the prince walked past a meditator who sat in deep absorption. When their eyes met and their minds linked, Siddhartha stopped, mesmerized. In a flash, he realized that the perfection he had been seeking outside must be within mind itself. Meeting that man gave the future Buddha a first and enticing taste of mind, a true and lasting refuge, which he knew he had to experience himself for the good of all.

Buddha’s enlightenment

The Buddha decided he had to leave his royal responsibilities and his family in order to realize full enlightenment. He left the palace secretly, and set off alone into the forest. Over the next six years, he met many talented meditation teachers and mastered their techniques. Always he found that they showed him mind’s potential but not mind itself. Finally, at a place called Bodhgaya, the future Buddha decided to remain in meditation until he knew mind’s true nature and could benefit all beings. After spending six days and nights cutting through mind’s most subtle obstacles, he reached enlightenment on the full moon morning of May, a week before he turned thirty-five.

At the moment of full realization, all veils of mixed feelings and stiff ideas dissolved and Buddha experienced the all-encompassing here and now. All separation in time and space disappeared. Past, present, and future, near and far, melted into one radiant state of intuitive bliss. He became timeless, all-pervading awareness. Through every cell in his body he knew and was everything. He became Buddha , the Awakened One.

After his enlightenment, Buddha traveled on foot throughout northern India. He taught constantly for forty-five years. People of all castes and professions, from kings to courtesans, were drawn to him. He answered their questions, always pointing towards that which is ultimately real.

Throughout his life, Buddha encouraged his students to question his teachings and confirm them through their own experience. This non-dogmatic attitude still characterizes Buddhism today.

History of Buddhism and the Life of Buddha Essay

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History of Buddhism and the life of Buddha

Basic teachings of buddhism, the uniqueness of theravada buddhism.

Buddhism originated from the northern part of India in 5 th BC. It was founded by Buddha Shakyamuni in 624 BC, while he was working and living in Lumbini (Eckel, 2010). Buddhism is an Asiatic religion that has managed to spread across various parts of the globe. Buddhism has three major divisions in South East Asia, North Asia, and Japan. Buddhists consider Buddha as their religious leader. Over the years, Buddhism has developed a number of concepts that play a crucial role in explaining its teachings.

A good example is the concept of karma, which argues that people’s destiny depends on the nature and effect of their actions (Eckel, 2010). Research has also established that there are various types of Buddhism practiced by people across the world.

One of the common types of this religion is Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes on personal salvation through individual efforts (Eckel, 2010). It is one of the most conservative forms of Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism adheres to Pali scriptures and the non-theistic ideal of self-purification to nirvana. It is very dominant in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia (Eckel, 2010).

The life of Buddha was characterized by loyal treatment. He was born in a loyal family called Shakya to Queen Mayadevi and King Shuddhodana. His second name, Shakyamuni, means the “Able One.” This meaning influenced him to start Buddhism because he believed he had the ability to provide people with the right spiritual guidance (Eckel, 2010).

Buddha’s mother believed that her son’s religious duties were prophesied to her when she was pregnant. She believed that Buddha was already anointed to become a spiritual leader, as evidenced by the fact that she did not experience any pain during his birth. The birth of Buddha was a big delight to elders in his community, as they felt that it was a fulfillment of everyone’s dreams (Eckel, 2010).

As a result of various life experiences, Buddha became more enlightened by learning the value of meditation and various ways of influencing people. Buddha took the opportunity of being a member of the loyal family to influence the development of Buddhism. He was already in an influential position; thus, getting followers was not a hard task. One of the factors that contributed to the speedy development of Buddhism was its inspirational teachings (Eckel, 2010).

Buddhism is a religion represented by many groups, especially in Asia. The groups acknowledge a range of principles that idolize Buddha. Buddha teaches that life is characterized by various forms of suffering caused by different human aspirations. Suffering often ends when people stop pursuing their desires (Eckel, 2010). This means that the good and bad things that people experience in life result from the nature of desires pursued.

People who pursue positive and inspirational desires tend to have a fulfilling life, while those who go after misinformed desires endure a lot of pain (Eckel, 2010). Additionally, Buddha teaches that the enlightenment obtained through acceptable conduct, wisdom, and meditation often releases one from various desires, as well as suffering and rebirth (Eckel, 2010).

According to the basic teachings of Buddhism, people should consider the effects of their actions (Eckel, 2010). Theravada Buddhism teaches that people should make individual efforts to ensure that they play their part towards achieving the common good (Eckel, 2010).

With over 100 million followers across the world, Theravada Buddhism is definitely unique compared to other schools of Buddhism. Due to its huge presence in southern Asia, this doctrine is also known among its adherents as Southern Buddhism (Eckel, 2010). One of the most unique elements of Theravada Buddhism is its highly conservative nature. Up to date, it still adheres to the customary teachings introduced by the Buddha.

In addition, they also hold the teachings of earlier elders in high regard, as they form the basis of its numerous teachings. Another element that makes Theravada Buddhism be unique is the practical nature of its teachings (Eckel, 2010). Unlike the other Buddhism schools, teachings of Theravada are realizable owing to the fact that they deal with just the concept of suffering. According to the teachings, people should strive towards liberating themselves from suffering associated with various life challenges.

The basic principles of Theravada Buddhism also make it different from other types of religion (Eckel, 2010). There are three principles that guide the conduct of the numerous adherents of Theravada Buddhism, namely wisdom, morality, and mental training. According to this type of Buddhism, it is immoral for people to tolerate acts such as abortion and euthanasia, as they compromise the value of life.

Followers of Theravada Buddhism understand the need to utilize knowledge and experience with common sense and insight (Eckel, 2010). In addition, the theory of mental development encourages people to adopt a culture of meditation, as it helps one to deal with distress, disappointments, and find happiness. Unlike all the other types of Buddhism, Theravada focuses a lot on the need for people to understand the nature of things and the importance of appreciation (Eckel, 2010).

Eckel, M.D. (2010). Buddhism . New York: The Rosen Publishing Group.

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Who Was Buddha?

Buddha, born with the name Siddhartha Gautama, was a teacher, philosopher and spiritual leader who is considered the founder of Buddhism . He lived and taught in the region around the border of modern-day Nepal and India sometime between the 6th to 4th century B.C.

The name Buddha means "one who is awakened" or "the enlightened one." While scholars agree that Buddha did in fact exist, the specific dates and events of his life are still debated.

According to the most widely known story of his life, after experimenting with different teachings for years, and finding none of them acceptable, Siddhartha Gautama spent a fateful night in deep meditation beneath a tree. During his meditation, all of the answers he had been seeking became clear, and he achieved full awareness, thereby becoming Buddha.

Buddha was born in the 6th century B.C., or possibly as early as 624 B.C., according to some scholars. Other researchers believe he was born later, even as late as 448 B.C. And some Buddhists believe Gautama Buddha lived from 563 B.C. to 483 B.C.

But virtually all scholars believe Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini in present-day Nepal. He belonged to a large clan called the Shakyas.

In 2013, archaeologists working in Lumbini found evidence of a tree shrine that predated other Buddhist shrines by some 300 years, providing new evidence that Buddha was probably born in the 6th century B.C.

Siddhartha Gautama

Siddhartha ("he who achieves his aim") Gautama grew up the son of a ruler of the Shakya clan. His mother died seven days after giving birth.

A holy man, however, prophesied great things for the young Siddhartha: He would either be a great king or military leader or he would be a great spiritual leader.

To protect his son from the miseries and suffering of the world, Siddhartha's father raised him in opulence in a palace built just for the boy and sheltered him from knowledge of religion, human hardship and the outside world.

According to legend, he married at the age of 16 and had a son soon thereafter, but Siddhartha's life of worldly seclusion continued for another 13 years.

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Siddhartha in the Real World

The prince reached adulthood with little experience of the world outside the palace walls, but one day he ventured out with a charioteer and was quickly confronted with the realities of human frailty: He saw a very old man, and Siddhartha's charioteer explained that all people grow old.

Questions about all he had not experienced led him to take more journeys of exploration, and on these subsequent trips he encountered a diseased man, a decaying corpse and an ascetic. The charioteer explained that the ascetic had renounced the world to seek release from the human fear of death and suffering.

Siddhartha was overcome by these sights, and the next day, at age 29, he left his kingdom, his wife and his son to follow a more spiritual path, determined to find a way to relieve the universal suffering that he now understood to be one of the defining traits of humanity.

The Ascetic Life

For the next six years, Siddhartha lived an ascetic life, studying and meditating using the words of various religious teachers as his guide.

He practiced his new way of life with a group of five ascetics, and his dedication to his quest was so stunning that the five ascetics became Siddhartha's followers. When answers to his questions did not appear, however, he redoubled his efforts, enduring pain, fasting nearly to starvation and refusing water.

Whatever he tried, Siddhartha could not reach the level of insight he sought, until one day when a young girl offered him a bowl of rice. As he accepted it, he suddenly realized that corporeal austerity was not the means to achieve inner liberation, and that living under harsh physical constraints was not helping him achieve spiritual release.

So he had his rice, drank water and bathed in the river. The five ascetics decided that Siddhartha had given up the ascetic life and would now follow the ways of the flesh, and they promptly left him.

The Buddha Emerges

That night, Siddhartha sat alone under the Bodhi tree, vowing to not get up until the truths he sought came to him, and he meditated until the sun came up the next day. He remained there for several days, purifying his mind, seeing his entire life, and previous lives, in his thoughts.

During this time, he had to overcome the threats of Mara, an evil demon, who challenged his right to become the Buddha. When Mara attempted to claim the enlightened state as his own, Siddhartha touched his hand to the ground and asked the Earth to bear witness to his enlightenment, which it did, banishing Mara.

And soon a picture began to form in his mind of all that occurred in the universe, and Siddhartha finally saw the answer to the questions of suffering that he had been seeking for so many years. In that moment of pure enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.

Armed with his new knowledge, the Buddha was initially hesitant to teach, because what he now knew could not be communicated to others in words. According to legend, it was then that the king of gods, Brahma, convinced Buddha to teach, and he got up from his spot under the Bodhi tree and set out to do just that.

About 100 miles away, he came across the five ascetics he had practiced with for so long, who had abandoned him on the eve of his enlightenment. Siddhartha encouraged them to follow a path of balance instead of one characterized by either aesthetic extremism or sensuous indulgence. He called this path the Middle Way.

To them and others who had gathered, he preached his first sermon (henceforth known as Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma) , in which he explained the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, which became the pillars of Buddhism.

The ascetics then became his first disciples and formed the foundation of the Sangha, or community of monks. Women were admitted to the Sangha, and all barriers of class, race, sex and previous background were ignored, with only the desire to reach enlightenment through the banishment of suffering and spiritual emptiness considered.

For the remainder of his years, Buddha traveled, preaching the Dharma (the name given to his teachings) in an effort to lead others along the path of enlightenment.

Buddha died around the age of 80, possibly of an illness from eating spoiled meat or other food. When he died, it is said that he told his disciples that they should follow no leader, but to "be your own light."

The Buddha is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in world history, and his teachings have affected everything from a variety of other faiths (as many find their origins in the words of the Buddha) to literature to philosophy, both within India and to the farthest reaches of the world.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Buddha
• Birth Year: 563
• Birth City: Lumbini
• Birth Country: Nepal
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Buddha was a spiritual teacher in Nepal during the 6th century B.C. Born Siddhartha Gautama, his teachings serve as the foundation of the Buddhist religion.
• Nacionalities
• Nepalese (Nepal)
• Death Year: 483
• Death Country: India

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Buddha Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/religious-figures/buddha
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 13, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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in Sanskrit. We practice being mindful of all the things that we use to torture ourselves with. We become mindful by abandoning our expectations about the way we think things should be and, out of our mindfulness, we begin to develop awareness about the way things really are. We begin to develop the insight that things are really quite simple, that we can handle ourselves, and our relationships, very well as soon as we stop being so manipulative and complex. . It has become equated with a sort of eastern version of heaven. Actually, nirvana simply means cessation. It is the cessation of passion, aggression and ignorance; the cessation of the struggle to prove our existence to the world, to survive. We don't have to struggle to survive after all. We have already survived. We survive now; the struggle was just an extra complication that we added to our lives because we had lost our confidence in the way things are. We no longer need to manipulate things as they are into things as we would like them to be. , © BDEA/BuddhaNet. All Rights Reserved. Subscribe Online Courses Magazine | Feature Who Is The Buddha? The life story of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama The Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama, was born around 567 B.C.E., in a small kingdom just below the Himalayan foothills. His father was a chief of the Shakya clan. It is said that twelve years before his birth the brahmins prophesied that he would become either a universal monarch or a great sage. To prevent him from becoming an ascetic, his father kept him within the confines of the palace. Gautama grew up in princely luxury, shielded from the outside world, entertained by dancing girls, instructed by brahmins, and trained in archery, swordsmanship, wrestling, swimming, and running. When he came of age he married Gopa, who gave birth to a son. He had, as we might say today, everything. And yet, it was not enough. Something—something as persistent as his own shadow—drew him into the world beyond the castle walls. There, in the streets of Kapilavastu, he encountered three simple things: a sick man , an old man , and a corpse being carried to the burning grounds. Nothing in his life of ease had prepared him for this experience. When his charioteer told him that all beings are subject to sickness, old age, and death, he could not rest. As he returned to the palace, he passed a wandering ascetic walking peacefully along the road, wearing the robe and carrying the single bowl of a sadhu. He then resolved to leave the palace in search of the answer to the problem of suffering. After bidding his wife and child a silent farewell without waking them, he rode to the edge of the forest. There, he cut his long hair with his sword and exchanged his fine clothes for the simple robes of an ascetic. Finding Liberation With these actions Siddhartha Gautama joined a whole class of men who had dropped out of Indian society to find liberation. There were a variety of methods and teachers , and Gautama investigated many—atheists, materialists, idealists, and dialecticians. The deep forest and the teeming marketplace were alive with the sounds of thousands of arguments and opinions, unlike in our time. Gautama finally settled down to work with two teachers. From Arada Kalama, who had three hundred disciples, he learned how to discipline his mind to enter the sphere of nothingness. But even though Arada Kalama asked him to remain and teach as an equal, he recognized that this was not liberation, and left. Next Siddhartha learned how to enter the concentration of mind which is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness from Udraka Ramaputra. But neither was this liberation and Siddhartha left his second teacher. For six years Siddhartha along with five companions practiced austerities and concentration. He drove himself mercilessly, eating only a single grain of rice a day, pitting mind against body. His ribs stuck through his wasted flesh and he seemed more dead than alive. The Middle Path His five companions left him after he made the decision to take more substantial food and to abandon asceticism. Then, Siddhartha entered a village in search of food.  There, a woman named Sujata offered him a dish of milk and a separate vessel of honey. His strength returned, Siddhartha washed himself in the Nairanjana River, and then set off to the Bodhi tree. He spread a mat of kusha grass underneath, crossed his legs and sat. He sat, having listened to all the teachers, studied all the sacred texts and tried all the methods. Now there was nothing to rely on, no one to turn to, nowhere to go. He sat solid and unmoving and determined as a mountain, until finally, after six days, his eye opened on the rising morning star, so it is said, and he realized that what he had been looking for had never been lost, neither to him nor to anyone else. Therefore there was nothing to attain, and no longer any struggle to attain it. “Wonder of wonders,” he is reported to have said, “this very enlightenment is the nature of all beings, and yet they are unhappy for lack of it.” So it was that Siddhartha Gautama woke up at the age of thirty-five, and became the Buddha, the Awakened One, known as Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakyas. For seven weeks he enjoyed the freedom and tranquillity of liberation. At first he had no inclination to speak about his realization. He felt would be too difficult for most people to understand. But when, according to legend, Brahma, chief of the three thousand worlds, requested that the Awakened One teach, since there were those “whose eyes were only a little clouded over,” the Buddha agreed. The First Noble Truth Shakyamuni’s two former teachers, Udraka and Arada Kalama, had both died only a few days earlier, and so he sought the five ascetics who had left him. When they saw him approaching the Deer Park in Benares they decided to ignore him, since he had broken his vows. Yet they found something so radiant about his presence that they rose, prepared a seat, bathed his feet and listened as the Buddha turned the wheel of the dharma, the teachings, for the first time. Related: What are The Four Noble Truths? The First Noble Truth of the Buddha stated that all life, all existence, is characterized by duhkha.  The Sanskrit word meaning suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness. Even moments of happiness have a way of turning into pain when we hold onto them, or, once they have passed into memory, they twist the present as the mind makes an inevitable, hopeless attempt to recreate the past. The teaching of the Buddha is based on direct insight into the nature of existence. Ir is a radical critique of wishful thinking and the myriad tactics of escapism—whether through political utopianism, psychological therapeutics, simple hedonism, or (and it is this which primarily distinguishes Buddhism from most of the world’s religions) the theistic salvation of mysticism. Suffering is true Duhkha is Noble, and it is true. It is a foundation, a stepping stone, to be comprehended fully, not to be escaped from or explained. The experience of duhkha, of the working of one’s mind, leads to the Second Noble Truth, the origin of suffering, traditionally described as craving, thirsting for pleasure, but also and more fundamentally a thirst for continued existence, as well as nonexistence. Examination of the nature of this thirst leads to the heart of the Second Noble Truth, the idea of the “self,” or “I,” with all its desires, hopes, and fears, and it is only when this self is comprehended and seen to be insubstantial that the Third Noble Truth, the cessation of suffering, is realized. The first sangha The five ascetics who listened to the Buddha ‘s first discourse in the Deer Park became the nucleus of a community, a sangha , of men (women were to enter later) who followed the way the Buddha had described in his Fourth Noble Truth, the Noble Eightfold Path. These bhikshus , or monks, lived simply, owning a bowl, a robe, a needle, a water strainer, and a razor, since they shaved their heads as a sign of having left home. They traveled around northeastern India, practicing meditation alone or in small groups, begging for their meals. Related: The Noble Eightfold Path The Buddha’s teaching, however, was not only for the monastic community. Shakyamuni had instructed them to bring it to all: “Go ye, O bhikshus, for the gain of the many, the welfare of the many, in compassion for the world, for the good, for the gain, for the welfare of gods and men.” For the next forty-nine years Shakyamuni walked through the villages and towns of India, speaking in the vernacular, using common figures of speech that everyone could understand. He taught a villager to practice mindfulness while drawing water from a well, and when a distraught mother asked him to heal the dead child she carried in her arms, he did not perform a miracle, but instead instructed her to bring him a mustard seed from a house where no one had ever died. She returned from her search without the seed, but with the knowledge that death is universal. Death and Impermanence As the Buddha’s fame spread, kings and other wealthy patrons donated parks and gardens for retreats.  The Buddha accepted these, but he continued to live as he had ever since his twenty-ninth year: as a wandering sadhu, begging his own meal, spending his days in meditation. Only now there was one difference. Almost every day, after his noon meal, the Buddha taught. None of these discourses, or the questions and answers that followed, were recorded during the Buddha’s lifetime. The Buddha died in the town of Kushinagara, at the age of eighty, having eaten a meal of pork or mushrooms. Some of the assembled monks were despondent, but the Buddha, lying on his side, with his head resting on his right hand, reminded them that everything is impermanent, and advised them to take refuge in themselves and the dharma—the teaching. He asked for questions a last time. There were none. Then he spoke his final words: “Now then, bhikshus, I address you: all compound things are subject to decay; strive diligently.” The first rainy season after the Buddha’s parinirvana , it is said that five hundred elders gathered at a mountain cave near Rajagriha, where they held the First Council. Ananda, who had been the Buddha’s attendant, repeated all the discourses, or sutras , he had heard, and Upali recited the two hundred fifty monastic rules, the Vinaya , while Mahakashyapa recited the Abhidharma , the compendium of Buddhist psychology and metaphysics.  These three collections, which were written on palm leaves a few centuries later and known as the Tripitaka (literally “three baskets”), became the basis for all subsequent versions of the Buddhist canon. Adapted from How the Swans Came to the Lake (Shambhala Publications). Thank you for subscribing to Tricycle! As a nonprofit, we depend on readers like you to keep Buddhist teachings and practices widely available. Subscribe now to read this article and get immediate access to everything else. Already a subscriber? Log in . Subscribe Today Tricycle is more than a magazine. Subscribe for access to video teachings, monthly films, e-books, and our 30-year archive. 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CORE - Early Buddhism and Gandhara Age of the Sage - Transmitting the Wisdoms of the Ages - Buddhism World History Encyclopedia - Buddhism IndiaNetzone - Buddhism Stanford University - Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies - Introduction to Buddhism Asia Society - The Origins of Buddhism Brown University Library - Basic Concepts of Tibetan Buddhism Cultural India - Indian Religions - Buddhism Buddhism - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11) Buddhism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) Table Of Contents The teacher known as the Buddha lived in northern India sometime between the mid-6th and the mid-4th centuries before the Common Era. In ancient India the title buddha referred to an enlightened being who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance and achieved freedom from suffering. According to the various traditions of Buddhism, buddhas have existed in the past and will exist in the future. Some Buddhists believe that there is only one buddha for each historical age, others that all beings will become buddhas because they possess the buddha nature ( tathagatagarbha ). Recent News The historical figure referred to as the Buddha (whose life is known largely through legend) was born on the northern edge of the Ganges River basin, an area on the periphery of the ancient civilization of North India, in what is today southern Nepal . He is said to have lived for 80 years. His family name was Gautama (in Sanskrit ) or Gotama (in Pali ), and his given name was Siddhartha (Sanskrit: “he who achieves his aim”) or Siddhattha (in Pali). He is frequently called Shakyamuni , “the sage of the Shakya clan.” In Buddhist texts he is most commonly addressed as Bhagavat (often translated as “Lord”), and he refers to himself as the Tathagata , which can mean both “one who has thus come” and “one who has thus gone.” Traditional sources on the date of his death—or, in the language of the tradition, his “passage into nirvana ”—range from 2420 to 290 bce . Scholarship in the 20th century limited that range considerably, with opinion generally divided between those who believed he lived from about 563 to 483 bce and those who believed he lived about a century later. Information about his life derives largely from Buddhist texts, the earliest of which were produced shortly before the beginning of the Common Era and thus several centuries after his death. According to the traditional accounts, however, the Buddha was born into the ruling Shakya clan and was a member of the Kshatriya , or warrior, caste . His mother, Maha Maya , dreamt one night that an elephant entered her womb, and 10 lunar months later, while she was strolling in the garden of Lumbini , her son emerged from under her right arm. His early life was one of luxury and comfort, and his father protected him from exposure to the ills of the world, including old age , sickness, and death. At age 16 he married the princess Yashodhara, who would eventually bear him a son. At 29, however, the prince had a profound experience when he first observed the suffering of the world while on chariot rides outside the palace. He resolved then to renounce his wealth and family and live the life of an ascetic . During the next six years, he practiced meditation with several teachers and then, with five companions, undertook a life of extreme self-mortification. One day, while bathing in a river, he fainted from weakness and therefore concluded that mortification was not the path to liberation from suffering. Abandoning the life of extreme asceticism , the prince sat in meditation under a tree and received enlightenment, sometimes identified with understanding the Four Noble Truths . For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his message throughout northeastern India, established orders of monks and nuns, and received the patronage of kings and merchants. At the age of 80, he became seriously ill. He then met with his disciples for the last time to impart his final instructions and passed into nirvana. His body was then cremated and the relics distributed and enshrined in stupas (funerary monuments that usually contained relics), where they would be venerated. The Buddha’s place within the tradition, however, cannot be understood by focusing exclusively on the events of his life and time (even to the extent that they are known). Instead, he must be viewed within the context of Buddhist theories of time and history. Among these theories is the belief that the universe is the product of karma , the law of the cause and effect of actions. The beings of the universe are reborn without beginning in six realms as gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and hell beings. The cycle of rebirth, called samsara (literally “wandering”), is regarded as a domain of suffering, and the Buddhist’s ultimate goal is to escape from that suffering. The means of escape remains unknown until, over the course of millions of lifetimes, a person perfects himself, ultimately gaining the power to discover the path out of samsara and then revealing that path to the world. A person who has set out to discover the path to freedom from suffering and then to teach it to others is called a bodhisattva . A person who has discovered that path, followed it to its end, and taught it to the world is called a buddha. Buddhas are not reborn after they die but enter a state beyond suffering called nirvana (literally “passing away”). Because buddhas appear so rarely over the course of time and because only they reveal the path to liberation from suffering, the appearance of a buddha in the world is considered a momentous event. The story of a particular buddha begins before his birth and extends beyond his death. It encompasses the millions of lives spent on the path toward enlightenment and Buddhahood and the persistence of the buddha through his teachings and his relics after he has passed into nirvana. The historical Buddha is regarded as neither the first nor the last buddha to appear in the world. According to some traditions he is the 7th buddha, according to another he is the 25th, and according to yet another he is the 4th. The next buddha, Maitreya , will appear after Shakyamuni’s teachings and relics have disappeared from the world. Sites associated with the Buddha’s life became important pilgrimage places, and regions that Buddhism entered long after his death—such as Sri Lanka , Kashmir , and Burma (now Myanmar )—added narratives of his magical visitations to accounts of his life. Although the Buddha did not leave any written works, various versions of his teachings were preserved orally by his disciples. In the centuries following his death, hundreds of texts (called sutras ) were attributed to him and would subsequently be translated into the languages of Asia . The Buddha’s message The teaching attributed to the Buddha was transmitted orally by his disciples, prefaced by the phrase “evam me sutam” (“thus have I heard”); therefore, it is difficult to say whether or to what extent his discourses have been preserved as they were spoken. They usually allude to the place and time they were preached and to the audience to which they were addressed. Buddhist councils in the first centuries after the Buddha’s death attempted to specify which teachings attributed to the Buddha could be considered authentic. The Buddha based his entire teaching on the fact of human suffering and the ultimately dissatisfying character of human life. Existence is painful. The conditions that make an individual are precisely those that also give rise to dissatisfaction and suffering. Individuality implies limitation ; limitation gives rise to desire; and, inevitably, desire causes suffering, since what is desired is transitory. Living amid the impermanence of everything and being themselves impermanent, human beings search for the way of deliverance, for that which shines beyond the transitoriness of human existence—in short, for enlightenment. The Buddha’s doctrine offered a way to avoid despair. By following the “path” taught by the Buddha, the individual can dispel the “ignorance” that perpetuates this suffering. According to the Buddha of the early texts, reality , whether of external things or the psychophysical totality of human individuals, consists of a succession and concatenation of microelements called dhammas (these “components” of reality are not to be confused with dhamma meaning “law” or “teaching”). The Buddha departed from traditional Indian thought in not asserting an essential or ultimate reality in things. Moreover, he rejected the existence of the soul as a metaphysical substance, though he recognized the existence of the self as the subject of action in a practical and moral sense. Life is a stream of becoming, a series of manifestations and extinctions. The concept of the individual ego is a popular delusion; the objects with which people identify themselves—fortune, social position, family, body, and even mind—are not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman , then nothing is self. To make clear the concept of no-self ( anatman ), Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents ( khandhas ) of human existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms ( rupa ), (2) feelings or sensations ( vedana ), (3) ideations ( sanna ), (4) mental formations or dispositions ( sankhara ), and (5) consciousness ( vinnana ). Human existence is only a composite of the five aggregates, none of which is the self or soul. A person is in a process of continuous change, and there is no fixed underlying entity. The belief in rebirth, or samsara , as a potentially endless series of worldly existences in which every being is caught up was already associated with the doctrine of karma (Sanskrit: karman ; literally “act” or “deed”) in pre-Buddhist India, and it was accepted by virtually all Buddhist traditions. According to the doctrine, good conduct brings a pleasant and happy result and creates a tendency toward similar good acts, while bad conduct brings an evil result and creates a tendency toward similar evil acts. Some karmic acts bear fruit in the same life in which they are committed, others in the immediately succeeding one, and others in future lives that are more remote. This furnishes the basic context for the moral life. The acceptance by Buddhists of the teachings of karma and rebirth and the concept of the no-self gives rise to a difficult problem: how can rebirth take place without a permanent subject to be reborn? Indian non-Buddhist philosophers attacked this point in Buddhist thought, and many modern scholars have also considered it to be an insoluble problem. The relation between existences in rebirth has been explained by the analogy of fire, which maintains itself unchanged in appearance and yet is different in every moment—what may be called the continuity of an ever-changing identity. Essay on Buddhism Students are often asked to write an essay on Buddhism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic. Let’s take a look… 100 Words Essay on Buddhism Introduction to buddhism. Buddhism is a religion and philosophy that emerged from the teachings of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) around 2,500 years ago in India. It emphasizes personal spiritual development and the attainment of a deep insight into the true nature of life. Key Beliefs of Buddhism Buddhism’s main beliefs include the Four Noble Truths, which explain suffering and how to overcome it, and the Noble Eightfold Path, a guide to moral and mindful living. Buddhist Practices Buddhist practices like meditation and mindfulness help followers to understand themselves and the world. It encourages love, kindness, and compassion towards all beings. Impact of Buddhism Buddhism has greatly influenced cultures worldwide, promoting peace, non-violence, and harmony. It’s a path of practice and spiritual development leading to insight into the true nature of reality. 250 Words Essay on Buddhism The four noble truths. At the heart of Buddhism lie the Four Noble Truths. The first truth recognizes the existence of suffering (Dukkha). The second identifies the cause of suffering, primarily desire or attachment (Samudaya). The third truth, cessation (Nirodha), asserts that ending this desire eliminates suffering. The fourth, the path (Magga), outlines the Eightfold Path as a guide to achieve this cessation. The Eightfold Path The Eightfold Path, as prescribed by Buddha, is a practical guideline to ethical and mental development with the goal of freeing individuals from attachments and delusions; ultimately leading to understanding, compassion, and enlightenment (Nirvana). The path includes Right Understanding, Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. Buddhists practice meditation and mindfulness to achieve clarity and tranquility of mind. They follow the Five Precepts, basic ethical guidelines to refrain from harming living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxication. Buddhism is a path of practice and spiritual development leading to insight into the true nature of reality. It encourages individuals to lead a moral life, be mindful and aware of thoughts and actions, and to develop wisdom and understanding. The ultimate goal is the attainment of enlightenment and liberation from the cycle of rebirth and death. 500 Words Essay on Buddhism Introduction. Buddhism, a religion and philosophy that emerged from the teachings of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), has become a spiritual path followed by millions worldwide. It is a system of thought that offers practical methodologies and profound insights into the nature of existence. The Life of Buddha The Four Noble Truths are the cornerstone of Buddhism. They outline the nature of suffering (Dukkha), its origin (Samudaya), its cessation (Nirodha), and the path leading to its cessation (Magga). These truths present a pragmatic approach, asserting that suffering is an inherent part of existence, but it can be overcome by following the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path, as taught by Buddha, is a practical guideline to ethical and mental development with the goal of freeing individuals from attachments and delusions, ultimately leading to understanding, compassion, and enlightenment. It includes Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. Buddhist Schools of Thought Buddhism and modern science. The compatibility of Buddhism with modern science has been a topic of interest in recent years. Concepts like impermanence, interconnectedness, and the nature of consciousness in Buddhism resonate with findings in quantum physics, neuroscience, and psychology. This convergence has led to the development of fields like neurodharma and contemplative science, exploring the impact of meditation and mindfulness on the human brain. Buddhism, with its profound philosophical insights and practical methodologies, continues to influence millions of people worldwide. Its teachings provide a framework for understanding the nature of existence, leading to compassion, wisdom, and ultimately, liberation. As we delve deeper into the realms of modern science, the Buddhist worldview continues to offer valuable perspectives, underscoring its enduring relevance in our contemporary world. Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here . Happy studying! One Comment Leave a reply cancel reply. Utility Menu GA4 Tracking Code Introduction Buddhism in America The Buddhist Experience Issues for Buddhists in America The Path of Awakening Prince Siddhartha: Renouncing the World Becoming the “Buddha”: The Way of Meditation The Dharma: The Teachings of the Buddha The Sangha: The Buddhist Community The Three Treasures The Expansion of Buddhism As Buddhism spread through Asia, it formed distinct streams of thought and practice: the Theravada ("The Way of the Elders" in South and Southeast Asia), the Mahayana (the “Great Vehicle” in East Asia), and the Vajrayana (the “Diamond Vehicle” in Tibet), a distinctive and vibrant form of Mahayana Buddhism that now has a substantial following. ... Read more about The Expansion of Buddhism Theravada: The Way of the Elders Mahayana: The Great Vehicle Vajrayana: The Diamond Vehicle Buddhists in the American West Discrimination and Exclusion East Coast Buddhists At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions The 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, held at that year's Chicago World’s Fair, gave Buddhists from Sri Lanka and Japan the chance to describe their own traditions to an audience of curious Americans. Some stressed the universal characteristics of Buddhism, and others criticized anti-Japanese sentiment in America. ... Read more about At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions Internment Crisis Building “American Buddhism” New Asian Immigration and the Temple Boom Popularizing Buddhism The Image of the Buddha Ever since the first century, Buddhists have created images and other depictions of the Buddha in metal, wood, and stone with stylized hand-positions called mudras . Images of the Buddha are often the focus of reverence and devotion. ... Read more about The Image of the Buddha The Practice of Mindfulness People commonly equate Buddhism with meditation, but historically very few Buddhists meditated. Those who did, however, drew from a long and rich tradition of Buddhist philosophical and contemplative practice. ... Read more about The Practice of Mindfulness One Hand Clapping? Sesshin: A Meditation Retreat Intensive Zen meditation retreats, or sesshins , such as one in Mt. Temper, New York, are designed for participants to focus intensively on monastic Buddhist practice and meditation. Retreats include many rituals to allow students to fully immerse themselves in their practice—even during mealtime. ... Read more about Sesshin: A Meditation Retreat Chanting the Sutras Chanting scriptures and prayers to buddhas and bodhisattvas is a central practice in all streams of Buddhism, intended both to reflect upon content and to focus the mind. ... Read more about Chanting the Sutras Creating a Mandala Becoming a Monk The many streams of Buddhism differ in their approaches to monasticism and initiation rituals. For example, is it common in the Theravada tradition for young men to become novice monks as a rite of passage into adulthood. In some Mahayana traditions, women can take the Triple Platform Ordination and become nuns. Meanwhile, in some Japanese traditions, priests and masters can marry and have children. ... Read more about Becoming a Monk From Street Gangs to Temple In Southern California, some Theravada temples have taken up the practice of granting temporary novice ordinations to Cambodian American gang members, with the hope of reorienting the youth toward their families’ religion and culture. ... Read more about From Street Gangs to Temple Devotion to Guanyin The compassionate bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, also known as Guanyin, is central to the practice of Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhists in America. A bodhisattva is an enlightened one who remains engaged in the world in order to enlighten all beings, and Buddhists channel the bodhisattva Guanyin by cultivating compassion for all beings in the world. ... Read more about Devotion to Guanyin Buddha’s Birthday Buddhists often consider the Buddha’s birthday an occasion for celebration, and Chinese, Thai, and Japanese temples in America all celebrate differently. ... Read more about Buddha’s Birthday Remembering the Ancestors Celebrating the New Year Although the Lunar New Year is not a particularly “Buddhist” holiday, many Thai and Chinese Buddhists observe the occasion with celebration and visits to family and activities at Buddhist temples. ... Read more about Celebrating the New Year Building a Pure Land on Earth Pure Land Buddhists pay respect to Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, who created a paradise for Buddhist devotees called the “Land of Bliss.” Pure Land Buddhists in America seek to create a Pure Land here on Earth through ritual acts of devotion, care for animals and human beings, study, meditation, and acting compassionately in the public sphere. ... Read more about Building a Pure Land on Earth Monastery in the Hudson Valley The Chuang Yen Monastery in Kent, New York, is a prime example of how Chinese Buddhism has flourished in America, in all its richness and complexity. ... Read more about Monastery in the Hudson Valley One Buddhism? Or Multiple Buddhisms? There are two distinct but related histories of American Buddhism: that of Asian immigrants and that of American converts. The presence of the two communities raises such questions as: What is the difference between the Buddhism of American converts and Buddhism of Asian immigrant communities? How do we characterize the Buddhism of a new generation Asian-American youth—as a movement of preservation or transformation? ... Read more about One Buddhism? Or Multiple Buddhisms? The Difficulties of a Monk A reflection on American Buddhist monasticism from the Venerable Walpola Piyananda highlights the tensions that arise when immigrant Buddhism encounters American social customs that differ from those in Asia. ... Read more about The Difficulties of a Monk Changing Patterns of Authority American convert Buddhism and immigrant Asian Buddhism have dramatically different models of authority and institutional hierarchy. Buddhist organizations and communities in America are forced to attend to the question of how spiritual, social, financial, and organizational authorities will be dispersed among its leaders and members. ... Read more about Changing Patterns of Authority Women in American Buddhism American Buddhism has created new roles for women in the Buddhist tradition. American Buddhist women have been active in movements to revive the ordination lineages of Buddhist nuns in the Theravada and Vajrayana traditions. ... Read more about Women in American Buddhism Buddhism and Social Action: Engaged Buddhism Pioneered by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1970s, “Engaged Buddhism” brings a Buddhist perspective to the ongoing struggle for social and environmental justice in America. ... Read more about Buddhism and Social Action: Engaged Buddhism Ecumenical and Interfaith Buddhism: Coming Together in America Since the 1970s, Buddhist leaders from various traditions have engaged together in ecumenical councils and organizations to address prevalent challenges for Buddhism in North America. These events have brought together Buddhist traditions that, in the past, have had limited contact with one another. In addition, these groups have become involved in interfaith partnerships, particularly with Christian and Jewish organizations. ... Read more about Ecumenical and Interfaith Buddhism: Coming Together in America Teaching the Love of Buddha: The Next Generation How do Buddhists in America transmit their culture and tradition to new generations? In the Jodo Shinshu school of Japanese Buddhism, Sunday School classes have become an important religious educational tool to address this question, and its curriculum offers a particularly American approach to educating children about their tradition. ... Read more about Teaching the Love of Buddha: The Next Generation Image Gallery Awe and dread: How religions have responded to total solar eclipses over the centuries Silicon valley start-up aims to unlock buddhist jhana states with tech, how lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune, is depicted in jainism and buddhism. Sokatsu Shaku Gelug School Buddha hall Seung Sahn, Zen Master Buddhism Timeline 7627213d930e1981366069359e5a876e, buddhism in the world (text), ca. 6th-5th c. bce life of siddhartha gautama, the buddha. The dates of the Buddha remain a point of controversy within both the Buddhist and scholarly communities. Though many scholars today place the Buddha’s life between 460-380 BCE, according to one widely accepted traditional account, Siddhartha was born as a prince in the Shakya clan in 563 BCE. After achieving enlightenment at the age of 36, the Buddha spent the remainder of his life giving spiritual guidance to an ever-growing body of disciples. He is said to have entered into parinirvana (nirvana after death) in 483 BCE at the age of 81. c. 480-380 BCE The First Council Though specific dates are uncertain, a group of the Buddha’s disciples is said to have come together shortly after the Buddha’s parinirvana in hopes of establishing guidelines to ensure the continuity of the Sangha. According to tradition, as many as 500 prominent arhats gathered in Rajagriha to recite together and standardize the Buddha’s sutras (discourses on Dharma) and vinaya (rules of conduct). c. 350 BCE The Second Council It remains unclear if what is known as the Second Council refers to one particular assemblage of monks or if there were several meetings convened during the 4th century BCE to clarify points of controversy. It also remains unclear precisely what matters of doctrine or conduct were in dispute. What is clear is that this council resulted in the first schism in the Sangha, between the Sthaviravada and the Mahasanghika. 269-232 BCE The Spread of Buddhism Through South Asia After witnessing the great bloodshed and suffering caused by his military campaigns, Indian Emperor Ashoka Maurya converted to Buddhism, sending missionaries throughout India and into present day Sri Lanka. 200 BCE-200 CE Emergence of Two Schools of Buddhism Differing interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings resulted in the development of two main schools of Buddhism. The first branch, Mahayana, referred to itself as the “Great Vehicle,” and is today principally found in China, Korea, and Japan. The second branch comprised 18 schools, of which only one exists today — Theravada, or the “Way of the Elders.” Theravada Buddhism is presently followed in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. 65 CE First Mention of Buddhism in China Han dynasty records note that Prince Ying of Ch’u, a half-brother of the Han emperor, provided a vegetarian feast for the Buddhist laity and monks living in his kingdom around 65 CE. This indicates that a Buddhist community had already formed there. c. 100 CE Ashvaghosha Writes Buddhacarita Among the early biographies of the Buddha was the Buddhacarita, written in Sanskrit by the Indian poet Ashvaghosha. Buddhacarita, literally “Life of the Buddha,” is regarded as one of the greatest epic poems of all history. 200s CE Nagarjuna Founds the Madhyamaka School Nagarjuna is one of the most important philosophers of the Buddhist tradition. Based on his reading of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, Nagarjuna argued that everything in the world is fundamentally sunya, or “empty” — that is, without inherent existence. This idea that the world is real yet radically impermanent and interdependent has played a central role in Buddhist philosophy. 372 CE Buddhism Introduced to Korea from China In 372 CE the Chinese king Fu Chien sent a monk-envoy, Shun-tao, to the Koguryo court with Buddhist scriptures and images. Although all three of the kingdoms on the Korean peninsula soon embraced Buddhism, it was not until the unification of the peninsula under the Silla in 668 CE that the tradition truly flourished. 400s CE Buddhaghosa Systematizes Theravada Teachings Buddhaghosa was a South Indian monk who played a formative role in the systematization of Theravada doctrine. After arriving in Sri Lanka in the early part of the fifth century CE, he devoted himself to editing and translating into Pali the scriptural commentaries that had accumulated in the native Sinhalese language. He also composed the Visuddhimagga, “Path of Purity,” an influential treatise on Theravada practice. From this point on, Theravada became the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and eventually spread to Southeast Asia. 402 CE Pure Land Buddhism Established in China In 402 CE, Hui-yuan became the first Chinese monk to form a group specifically devoted to reciting the vow to be reborn in the Western Paradise, and founded the Donglin Temple at Mount Lu for this purpose. Subsequent practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism regard Hui-yuan as the school’s founder. 520 CE Bodhidharma and Ch’an (Zen) in China The Ch’an (Zen) school attributes its establishment to the arrival of the monk Bodhidharma in Northern China in 520 CE. There, he is said to have spent nine years meditating in front of a wall before silently transmitting the Buddha’s Dharma to Shen-Kuang, the second patriarch. All Zen masters trace their authority to this line. 552 CE Buddhism Enters Japan from Korea In 552 CE the king of Paekche sent an envoy to Japan in hopes of gaining military support. As gifts, he sent an image of Buddha, several Buddhist scriptures, and a memorial praising Buddhism. Within three centuries of this introduction, Buddhism would become the major spiritual and intellectual force in Japan. 700s CE Vajrayana Buddhism Emerges in Tibet Buddhist teachings and practices appear to have first made their way into Tibet in the mid-7th century CE. During the reign of King Khri-srong (c. 740-798 CE), the first Tibetan monastery was founded and the first monk ordained. For the next four hundred years, a constant flow of Tibetan monks made their way to Northern India to study at the great Buddhist universities. It was from the university of Vikramasila around the year 767 that the yogin-magician Padmasambhava is said to have carried the Vajrayana teachings to Tibet, where they soon became the dominant form of Buddhism. 1044-1077 CE Theravada Buddhism Established in Burma Theravada Buddhism was practiced in pockets of southern Burma since about the 6th century CE. However, when King Anawrahta ascended the throne in 1044, Shin Arahan, a charismatic Mon monk from Southern Burma, convinced the new monarch to establish a more strictly Theravadin expression of Buddhism for the entire kingdom. From that time on, Theravada would remain the tradition of the majority of the Burmese people. c. 1050 CE Development of Jogye Buddhism in Korea The Ch’an school, which first arrived in Korea from China in the 8th century CE, eventually established nine branches, known as the Nine Mountains. In the 11th century, these branches were organized into one system under the name of Jogye. Although all Buddhist teachings were retained, the kong-an (koan) practice of Lin-chi Yixuan gained highest stature as the most direct path to enlightenment. 1100s CE Pure Land Buddhism Established in Japan Following a reading of a Chinese Pure Land text, the Japanese monk Honen Shonin (1133-1212 CE) became convinced that the only effective mode of practice was nembutsu: chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha. This soon became a dominant form of Buddhist practice in Japan. 1100s CE Rinzai School of Zen Buddhism Established in Japan In the 12th century CE, a Japanese monk named Eisai returned from China, bringing with him both green tea and the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. In the form of meditation practiced by this school, the student’s only guidance is to come from the subtle hint of a raised eyebrow, the sudden jolt of an unexpected slap, or the teacher’s direct questioning on the meaning of a koan. 1203 CE Destruction of Buddhist Centers in India By the close of the first millennium CE, Buddhism had passed its zenith in India. Traditionally, the end of Indian Buddhism is identified with the advent of Muslim Rule in Northern India. The Turk Muhammad Ghuri razed the last two great Buddhist universities, Nalanda and Vikramasila, in 1197 and 1203 respectively. However, recent histories have suggested that the destruction of these monasteries was militarily, rather than religiously, motivated. 1200s CE True Pure Land Buddhism Established Honen’s disciple Shinran Shonin (1173-1262 CE) began the devotional “True Pure Land” movement in the 13th century CE. Considering the lay/monk distinction invalid, Shinran married and had several children, thereby initiating the practice of married Jodo Shinshu clergy and establishing a familial lineage of leadership — traits which continue to distinguish the school to this day. 1200s CE Dōgen Founds Soto Zen in Japan Dōgen (1200-1253 CE), an influential Japanese priest and philosopher, spent most of his two years in China studying T’ien-t’ai Buddhism. Disappointed by the intellectualism of the school, he was about to return to Japan when the Ts’ao-tung monk Ju-ching (Rujing) explained that the practice of Zen simply meant “dropping off both body and mind.” Dōgen, immediately enlightened, returned to Japan, establishing Soto (the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese graphs for Ts’ao-tung) as one of the pre-eminent schools. 1253 CE Nichiren Buddhism Established in Japan As the sun began to rise on May 17, 1253 CE, Nichiren Daishonin climbed to the crest of a hill, where he cried out “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,” “Adoration to the Sutra of the Lotus of the Perfect Truth.” Nichiren considered the recitation of this mantra to be the core of the true teachings of the Buddha. He believed that it would eventually spread throughout the world, a conviction sustained by contemporary sects of the Nichiren school, especially the Soka Gakkai. 1279-1360 CE Theravada Buddhism Established in Southeast Asia With Kublai Khan’s conquest of China in the thirteenth century CE, ever greater numbers of Tai migrated from southwestern China into present day Thailand and Burma. There, they established political domination over the indigenous Mon and Khmer peoples, while appropriating elements of these cultures, including their Buddhist faith. By the time that King Rama Khamhaeng had ascended the throne in Sukhothai (central Thailand) in 1279, a monk had been sent to Sri Lanka to receive Theravadin texts. During the reigns of Rama Khamhaeng’s son and grandson, Sinhala Buddhism spread northward to the Tai Kingdom of Chiangmai. Within a century, the royal houses of Cambodia and Laos also became Theravadin. 1391-1474 CE The First Dalai Lama Gedun Drupa (1391-1474 CE), a Tibetan monk of great esteem during his lifetime, was considered after his death to have been the first Dalai Lama. He founded the major monastery of Tashi Lhunpo at Shigatse, which would become the traditional seat of Panchen Lamas (second only to the Dalai Lama). 1881 CE Founding of Pali Text Society Ever since its founding by the British scholar T.W. Rhys Davids in 1881 CE, the Pali Text Society has been the primary publisher of Theravada texts and translations into Western languages. 1891 CE Anagarika Dharmapala Founds Mahabodhi Society Sri Lankan writer Anagarika Dharmapala played an important role in restoring Bodh-Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, which had badly deteriorated after centuries of neglect. In order to raise funds for this project, Dharmapala founded the Mahabodhi Society, first in Ceylon and later in India, the United States, and Britain. He also edited the society’s periodical, The Mahabodhi Journal. 1930 CE Soka Gakkai Established in Japan Soka Gakkai is a Japanese Buddhist movement that was begun in 1930 CE by an educator named Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Soon after its founding, it became associated with Nichiren Shoshu, a sect of Nichiren Buddhism. Today the organization has over twelve million members around the world. 1938 CE Rissho Kosei-Kai Established in Japan The Rissho Kosei-Kai movement was founded by the Rev. Nikkyo Niwano in 1938 CE, and is based on the teachings set forth in the Lotus Sutra and works for individual and world peace. Rev. Niwano was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1979 and honored by the Vatican in 1992. The Rissho Kosei-Kai has since been active in interfaith activities throughout the world. 1949 CE Buddhist Sangha Flees Mainland China With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Buddhist monks and nuns fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Many of these monks and nuns subsequently immigrated to Australia, Europe and the United States. 1950 CE World Fellowship of Buddhists Inaugurated in Sri Lanka The World Fellowship of Buddhists was established in 1950 CE in Sri Lanka to bring Buddhists together in promoting common goals. Since 1969, its permanent headquarters have been in Thailand, with regional offices in 34 different countries. 1956 CE Buddhist Conversions in India On October 14, 1956 CE, Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891-1956), India’s leader of Hindu untouchables, publicly converted to Buddhism as part of a political protest. As many as half a million of his followers also took the three refuges and five precepts on that day. In the following years, over four million Indians, chiefly from the castes of untouchables, declared themselves Buddhists. 1959 CE Dalai Lama Flees to India With the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, and other Vajrayana Buddhist leaders fled to India. A Tibetan government in exile was established in Dharamsala, India. 1966 CE Thich Nhat Hanh Visits the U.S. and Western Europe Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese monk, teacher, and peace activist. While touring the U.S. in 1966, Nhat Hanh was outspoken against the American-supported Saigon government. As a result of his criticism, Nhat Hanh faced certain imprisonment upon his return to Vietnam. He therefore decided to take asylum in France, where he founded Plum Village, today an important center for meditation and action. 1975 CE Devastation of Buddhism in Cambodia Pol Pot’s Marxist regime came to power in Cambodia in 1975 CE. Over the four years of his governance, most of Cambodia’s 3,600 Buddhist temples were destroyed. The Sangha was left with an estimated 3,000 of its 50,000 monks. The rest did not survive the persecution. 1989 CE Founding of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) The International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) began in Thailand in 1989 as a conference of 36 monks and lay persons from 11 countries. Today, it has expanded to 160 members and affiliates from 26 countries. As its name suggests, INEB endeavors to facilitate Buddhist participation in social action in order to create a just and peaceful world. 1989 CE Dalai Lama Receives Nobel Peace Prize Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his tireless work spreading a message of non-violence. He has said on many occasions about Buddhism, “My religion is very simple – my religion is kindness.” 2010 CE Western Buddhist Teachers call for U.S. Commission of Inquiry to Burma In 2010, prominent Buddhist teachers in the U.S. signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to repudiate the results of the upcoming Burmese election, in light of crimes against ethnic groups committed by the Burmese military regime. With over 520 million followers, Buddhism is currently the world’s fourth-largest religious tradition. Though Theravada and Mahayana are its two major branches, contemporary Buddhism comprises a wide diversity of practices, beliefs, and traditions — both throughout East and Southeast Asia and worldwide. Buddhism in America (text) 1853 ce the first chinese temple in “gold mountain”. Attracted by the 1850s Gold Rush, many Chinese workers and miners came to California, which they called “Gold Mountain” — and brought their Buddhist and Taoist traditions with them. In 1853, they built the first Buddhist temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown. By 1875, Chinatown was home to eight temples, and by the end of the century, there were hundreds of Chinese temples and shrines along the West Coast. 1878 CE Kuan-yin in Hawaii In 1878, the monk Leong Dick Ying brought to Honolulu gold-leaf images of the Taoist sage Kuan Kung and the bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-yin. He thus established the Kuan-yin Temple, which is the oldest Chinese organization in Hawaii. The Temple has been located on Vineland Avenue in Honolulu since 1921. 1879 CE The Light of Asia Comes West Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia, a biography of the Buddha in verse, was published in 1879. This immensely popular book, which went through eighty editions and sold over half a million copies, gave many Americans their first introduction to the Buddha. 1882 CE The Chinese Exclusion Act Two decades of growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The act barred new Chinese immigration for ten years, including that by women trying to join their husbands who were already in the U.S., and prohibited the naturalization of Chinese people. 1893 CE Buddhists at the Parliament of the World’s Religions The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago in conjunction with the World Columbian Exposition, included representatives of many strands of the Buddhist tradition: Anagarika Dharmapala (Sri Lankan Maha Bodhi Society), Shaku Soyen (Japanese Rinzai Zen), Toki Horyu (Shingon), Ashitsu Jitsunen (Tendai), Yatsubuchi Banryu (Jodo Shin), and Hirai Kinzo (a Japanese lay Buddhist). Days after the Parliament, in a ceremony conducted by Anagarika Dharmapala, Charles T. Strauss of New York City became the first person to be ordained into the Buddhist Sangha on American soil. 1894 CE The Gospel of Buddha The Gospel of Buddha was an influential book published by Paul Carus in 1894. The book brought a selection of Buddhist texts together in readable fashion for a popular audience. By 1910, The Gospel of Buddha had been through 13 editions. 1899 CE Jodo Shinshu Buddhism and the Buddhist Churches of America The Young Men’s Buddhist Association (Bukkyo Seinenkai), the first Japanese Buddhist organization on the U.S. mainland, was founded in 1899 under the guidance of Jodo Shinshu missionaries Rev. Dr. Shuya Sonoda and Rev. Kakuryo Nishijima. The following years saw temples established in Sacramento (1899), Fresno (1900), Seattle (1901), Oakland (1901), San Jose (1902), Portland (1903), and Stockton (1906). This organization, initially called the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission of North America, went on to become the Buddhist Churches of America (incorporated in 1944). Today, it is the largest Buddhist organization serving Japanese-Americans, entailing some 60 temples and a membership of about 19,000. 1900 CE First Non-Asian Buddhist Association In 1900, a group of Euro-Americans attracted to the Buddhist teachings of the Jodo Shinshu organized the Dharma Sangha of the Buddha in San Francisco. 1915 CE World Buddhist Conference Buddhists from throughout the world gathered in San Francisco in August 1915 at a meeting convened by the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission of North America. Resolutions from the conference were taken to President Woodrow Wilson. 1931 CE Sokei-an and Zen in New York The Buddhist Society of America was incorporated in New York in 1931 under the guidance of Rinzai Zen teacher Sokei-an. Sokei-an first came to the U.S. in 1906 to study with Shokatsu Shaku in California, though he completed his training in Japan where he was ordained in 1931. Sokei-an died of poor health in 1945, after having spent two years in a Japanese internment camp. The center he established in New York City would evolve into the First Zen Institute of America. 1935 CE Relics of the Buddha to San Francisco In 1935, a portion of the Buddha’s relics was presented to Bishop Masuyama of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission of North America, based in San Francisco. This led to the construction of a new Buddhist Church of San Francisco, with a stupa on its roof for the holy relics, located on Pine Street and completed in 1938. 1942 CE Internment of Japanese Americans Two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which eventually removed 120,000 Japanese Americans, both citizens and noncitizens, to internment camps where they remained until the end of World War II. Buddhist priests and other community leaders were among the first to be targeted and evacuated. Zen teachers Sokei-an and Nyogen Senzaki were both interned. Buddhist organizations continued to serve the internees in the camps. 1949 CE Buddhist Studies Center in Berkeley The Buddhist Studies Center was first established in 1949 in Berkeley, California, under the auspices of the Buddhist Churches of America. In 1966, the center changed its name to the Institute of Buddhist Studies and became the first seminary for Buddhist ministry and research. The Institute affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union in 1985, and today is active in training clergy for the Buddhist Churches of America. 1955 CE Beat Zen and Zen Literature The Beat Movement was started by American authors who explored American pop culture and politics in the post-war era, with strong themes from Eastern spirituality. The first public reading of the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco is said to have signalled the beginning of the Beat Zen movement. The late 1950s also saw a Zen literary boom in the U.S. Several popular books on Buddhism were published, including Alan Watt’s bestseller The Way of Zen and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. 1960 CE Soka Gakkai in the U.S. Daisaku Ikeda, President of Soka Gakkai, visited the United States in 1960, largely introducing Soka Gakkai to Americans. By 1992, Soka Gakkai International–USA estimated that it had 150,000 American members. 1965 CE Immigration and Nationality Act The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended the quota system which had virtually halted immigration from Asia to the United States for over forty years. Following 1965, growing numbers of Asian immigrants from South, Southeast, and East Asia settled in America; many brought Buddhist traditions with them. 1966 CE The Vietnam Conflict and Thich Nhat Hanh in America The Vietnam conflict incited a surge of Buddhist activism in Saigon, which included some monks immolating themselves as an act of protest. In response, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Cabot Lodge met with Vietnamese and Japanese Buddhist leaders, and the State Department established an Office of Buddhist Affairs headed by Claremont College Professor Richard Gard. In 1966, Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh came to the United States to speak about the conflict. His visit, coupled with the English publication of his book, Lotus in a Sea of Fire, so impressed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that King nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize. 1966 CE First Buddhist Monastery in Washington D.C. The Washington Buddhist Vihara was the first Sri Lankan Buddhist temple in America. It was established in Washington, D.C. in 1966 as a missionary center with the support of the Sri Lankan government. The Ven. Bope Vinita Thera brought an image and a relic of the Buddha to the nation’s capital in 1965. The following year, the Vihara was incorporated, and in 1968, it moved to its present location on 16th Street, NW. 1969 CE Tibetan Center in Berkeley Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan monk educated at Banaras Hindu University in India, came to Berkeley and in 1969 established the Nyingma Meditation Center, the first Tibetan Buddhist center in the U.S. 1970 CE Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to America Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was an Oxford-educated Tibetan teacher who brought the Karma Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist lineage to the U.S. in 1970. In 1971, he established Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado, and in 1973, he founded Vajradhatu, an organization consolidating many Dharmadhatu centers. Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, his classic introduction to Trungpa’s form of Tibetan Buddhism, was published in 1973. 1970 CE International Buddhist Meditation Center The International Buddhist Meditation Center was established by Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An, a Vietnamese Zen Master, in Los Angeles in 1970. The College of Buddhist Studies is also located on the grounds of the Center, which is currently under the direction of Thien-An’s student, Ven. Karuna Dharma. 1972 CE Korean Zen Master comes to Rhode Island Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn came to the United States in 1972 with little money and little knowledge of English. He rented an apartment in Providence and worked as a washing machine repairman. A note on his door said simply, “What am I?” and announced meditation classes. Thus began the Providence Zen Center, followed soon by Korean Zen Centers in Cambridge, New Haven, New York, and Berkeley, all part of the Kwan Um School of Zen. 1974 CE Buddhist Chaplain in California In 1974, the California State Senate appointed Rev. Shoko Masunaga as its first Buddhist and first Asian-American chaplain. 1974 CE First Buddhist Liberal Arts College Naropa Institute was founded in Boulder, Colorado in 1974 as a Buddhist-inspired but non-sectarian liberal arts college. It aimed to combine contemplative studies with traditional Western scholastic and artistic disciplines. The accredited college now offers courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Buddhist studies, contemplative psychotherapy, environmental studies, poetics, and dance. 1974 CE Redress for Internment of Japanese Americans In 1974, Rep. Phillip Burton of California addressed the U.S. House of Representatives on the topic “Seventy-five Years of American Buddhism” as part of an ongoing debate surrounding redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II. 1975 CE The Fall of Saigon and the Arrival of Refugees About 130,000 Vietnamese refugees, many of them Buddhists, came to the U.S. in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. By 1985 there were 643,200 Vietnamese in the U.S. Dr. Thich Thien-an, a Vietnamese monk and scholar already in Los Angeles, began the first Vietnamese Buddhist temple in America – the Chua Vietnam – in 1976. The temple is still thriving on Berendo Street, not far from central Los Angeles. With the end of the war, some 70,000 Laotian, 60,000 Hmong, and 10,000 Mien people also arrived in the U.S. as refugees bringing their religious traditions, including Buddhism, with them. 1976 CE Council of Thai Bhikkhus The Council of Thai Bhikkhus, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1976 and based in Denver, Colorado, became the leading nationwide network for Thai Buddhism. 1976 CE City of 10,000 Buddhas The City of 10,000 Buddhas was established in 1976 in Talmage, California by the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association as the first Chinese Buddhist monastery for both monks and nuns. The City of 10,000 Buddhas consists of sixty buildings, including elementary and secondary schools and a university, on a 237-acre site. 1976 CE First Rinzai Zen Monastery On July 4 1976, Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, America’s first Rinzai Zen monastery, was established in Lew Beach, New York, under the direction of Eido Tai Shimano-roshi. 1979-1989 CE Cambodian Refugees Come to the U.S. The regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ended in 1979 with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Over the following ten years, 180,000 Cambodian refugees were relocated from Thailand to the United States. In 1979, the Cambodian Buddhist Society was established in Silver Spring, Maryland, as the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in America. Later in 1987, the nearly 40,000 Cambodian residents of Long Beach, California, purchased the former headquarters of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and converted the huge building into a temple complex. 1980 CE First Burmese Temple Dhammodaya Monastery, the first Burmese Buddhist temple in America, was established in Los Angeles in 1980. 1980 CE Buddhist Sangha Council The Buddhist Sangha Council of Los Angeles (later of Southern California) was established under the leadership of the Ven. Havanpola Ratanasara in 1980. It was one of the first cross-cultural, inter-Buddhist organizations, bringing together monks and other leaders from a wide range of Buddhist traditions. 1986 CE Buddhist Astronaut on Challenger Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka, a Hawaiian-born Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, was killed 73 seconds after takeoff in the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. He was the first Asian-American to reach space. 1987 CE American Buddhists Get Organized For ten days in July of 1987, Buddhists from all the Buddhist lineages in North America came together in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a Conference on World Buddhism in North America — intended to promote dialogue, mutual understanding, and cooperation. In the same year, the Buddhist Council of the Midwest gathered twelve Chicago-area lineages of Buddhism; in Los Angeles, the American Buddhist Congress was created, with 47 Buddhist organizations attending its inaugural convention. Also in 1987, the Sri Lanka Sangha Council of North America was established in Los Angeles to serve as the national network for Sri Lankan Buddhism. 1987 CE Buddhist Books Gain Wider Audience In 1987, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield published what became a classic book on vipassana meditation – Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation. Thich Nhat Hanh, who was residing at Plum Village in France and visiting the United States annually, also published Being Peace, a classic treatment of “engaged Buddhism” – Buddhism that is concerned with social and ecological issues. 1990s CE Popular Buddhism Throughout the 1990s, immigrant and American-born Buddhist communities were growing and building across the United States. In the midst of this flourishing, there emerged a popular “Hollywood Buddhism” or a Buddhism of celebrities which persists today. Espoused by figures from Tina Turner to the Beastie Boys to bell hooks, Buddhism became a larger part of mass culture during the 90s. 1991 CE Tricycle: the Buddhist Review The first issue of Tricycle: the Buddhist Review, a non-sectarian national Buddhist magazine, was published in 1991. The journal features articles by prominent Buddhist teachers and writers as well as pieces on Buddhism and American culture at large. 1991 CE Tibetan Resettlement in the United States The National Office of the Tibetan Resettlement Project was established in New York in 1991 after the U.S. Congress granted 1,000 special visas for Tibetans, all of them Buddhists. Two years later, the Tibetan Community Assistance Program opened to assist Tibetans resettling in New York. Cluster groups of Tibetan refugees have since established their own small temples and have begun to encounter Euro-American practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. 1991 CE Dalai Lama in Madison Square Garden For more than a week in October in 1991, the Dalai Lama gave the “Path of Compassion” teachings and conferred the Kalachakra Initiation in Madison Square Garden in New York City. 1993 CE Centennial of the World’s Parliament of Religions There were many prominent Buddhist speakers at the 1993 Centennial of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, among them Thich Nhat Hanh, Master Seung Sahn, the Ven. Mahaghosananda, and the Ven. Dr. Havanpola Ratanasara. The Dalai Lama gave the closing address. There were myriad Buddhist co-sponsors of the event, including the American Buddhist Congress, Buddhist Churches of America, Buddhist Council of the Midwest, World Fellowship of Buddhists, and Wat Thai of Washington, D.C. 2006 CE American Monk Named First U.S. Representative to World Buddhist Supreme Conference In 2006, Venerable Bhante Vimalaramsi (Sayadaw Gyi U Vimalaramsi Maha Thera) was nominated and confirmed as the first representative from the United States for the World Buddhist Supreme Conference, which is held every two years and includes representatives from fifty countries. 2007 CE First Buddhist Congresswoman Sworn In Rep. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, in 2007 became the first Buddhist to be sworn into the United States Congress. Today, Buddhism thrives in America, with American Buddhists comprising myriad backgrounds, identities, and religious traditions and often integrating Buddhism with other forms of spiritual practice. It is estimated that there are roughly 3.5 million Buddhist practitioners in the United States at present. Many live in Hawaii or Southern California, but there are surely followers of Buddhism around the nation. Selected Publications & Links Takaki, Ronald . A Different Mirror . Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1993. Sidor, Ellen S . A Gathering of Spirit: Women Teaching in American Buddhism . Cumberland: Primary Point Press, 1987. Tweed, Thomas A., and Stephen Prothero (eds.) . Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History . New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Access to Insight America burma buddhist association, american buddhist congress, buddha’s light international association, buddhist churches of america, explore buddhism in greater boston. Buddhism arrived in Boston in the 19th century with the first Chinese immigrants to the city and a growing intellectual interest in Buddhist arts and practice. Boston’s first Buddhist center was the Cambridge Buddhist Association (1957). The post-1965 immigration brought new immigrants into the city—from Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. These groups brought with them a variety of Buddhist traditions, now practiced at over 90 area Buddhist centers and temples. Representing nearly every ethnicity, age, and social strata, the Buddhist community of Greater Boston is a vibrant presence in the city. Friday essay: how the West discovered the Buddha Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland Disclosure statement Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. University of Queensland provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU. View all partners Buddhism is the third largest (and fastest growing) religion in Australia with approximately half a million adherents . The celebration of the Buddha’s birthday here (on or around May 15) has become a major cultural event and the Buddhist doctrine of “mindfulness” is now a part of mainstream culture . But how and when did the West discover the Buddha? The facts about the Buddha’s life are opaque but we can assume he was born no earlier than 500 BCE and died no later than 400 BCE. He was said to be the son of an Indian king, so distressed by the sight of suffering that he spent years searching for the answer to it, finally attaining enlightenment while sitting under a bodhi (sacred fig) tree. The Buddha’s family name was Gotama (in the Pali language) or Gautama (in Sanskrit). Although it does not appear in the earliest traditions, his personal name was later said to be Siddhartha, which means “one who has achieved his purpose”. (This name was retrofitted by later believers.) According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha spent 45 years teaching the path to enlightenment, gathering followers, and creating the Buddhist monastic community. According to the legend, upon his death at the age of 80, he entered Nirvana. In India during the 3rd century BCE, the emperor Ashoka first promoted Buddhism. From this time on, it spread south, flourishing in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, then moving through Central Asia including Tibet, and on to China, Korea, and Japan. Ironically, the appeal of Buddhism declined in India in succeeding centuries. It was virtually extinct there by the 13th century. In that same century, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo gave the West its first account of Buddha’s life. Between 1292 and 1295, journeying home from China, Marco Polo arrived in Sri Lanka. There he heard the story of the life of Sergamoni Borcan whom we now know as the Buddha. Marco wrote about Sergamoni Borcan, a name he had heard at the court of Kublai Khan, in his book The Description of the World . This was the Mongolian name for the Buddha: Sergamoni for Shakyamuni – the sage of the Shakya clan, and Borcan for Buddha – the “divine” one. (He was also known as Bhagavan – the Blessed One, or Lord.) According to Marco, Sergamoni Borcan was the son of a great king who wished to renounce the world. The king moved Sergamoni into a palace, tempting him with the sensual delights of 30,000 maidens. But Sergamoni was unmoved in his resolve. When his father allowed him to leave the palace for the first time, he encountered a dead man, and an infirm old man. He returned to the palace frightened and astonished , “saying to himself that he would not remain in this bad world but would go seeking the one who had made it and did not die.” Sergamoni then left the palace permanently and lived the abstinent life of a celibate recluse. “Certainly,” Marco declared , “had he been Christian, he would have been a great saint with our Lord Jesus Christ”. Read more: How the Buddha became a Christian saint Jesuits and authors Little more was known about the Buddha for the next 300 years in the West. Nevertheless, from the mid-16th century, information accumulated, primarily as a result of the Jesuit missions to Japan and China. By 1700, it was increasingly assumed by those familiar with the Jesuit missions that the Buddha was the common link in an array of religious practitioners they were encountering. For example, Louis le Comte (1655-1728), writing his memoir of his travels through China on a mission inspired by the Sun King Louis XIV declared, “all the Indies have been poisoned with his pernicious Doctrine. Those of Siam call them Talapoins, the Tartars call them Lamas or Lama sem, the Japoners Bonzes, and the Chinese Hocham.” The writings of the English author Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731) show what the educated English reader might have known of the Buddha in the early 18th century. In his Dictionary of all Religions (1704), Defoe tells us of an idol of Fe (the Buddha) on an island near the Red Sea, said to represent an atheistic philosopher who lived 500 years before Confucius, that is, around 1,000 BCE. This idol was carried to China with Instructions concerning the Worship paid to it, and so introduced a Superstition, that in several things abolish’d the Maxims of Confucius, who always condemned Atheism and idolatry. A quite different Buddha was to be encountered by the British in the later 1700s as they achieved economic, military, and political dominance in India. Initially, the British were reliant on their Hindu informants. They told them the Buddha was an incarnation of their god Vishnu who had come to lead the people astray with false teaching. More confusion reigned. It was often argued in the West that there were two Buddhas – one whom Hindus believed to be the ninth incarnation of Vishnu (appearing around 1000 BCE), the other (Gautama) appearing around 1000 years later. And yet more confusion. For there was a tradition in the West since the mid-17th century that the Buddha came from Africa. Well into the 19th century, it was thought that representations of the Buddha, particularly in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, depicted with woolly hair and thick “Ethiopian lips” (as one writer put it ) were evidence of his African origins. Such observers were mistaking traditional representations of the Buddha with his hair tightly coiled into tiny cones as a sign of his African origins. First use of the term ‘Buddhism’ Two major turning points eventually sorted out these confusions. The first was the invention of the term “Buddhism”. Its first use in English was in 1800 in a translation of a work entitled Lectures on History by Count Constantine de Volney . A politician and orientalist, de Volney coined the term “Buddhism” to identify the pan-Asian religion that he believed was based on a mythical figure called “Buddha”. Only then did Buddhism begin to emerge from the array of “heathen idolatries” with which it had been identified, becoming identified as a religion, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The second turning point was the arrival in the West of Buddhist texts. The decade from 1824 was decisive. For centuries, not a single original document of the Buddhist religion had been accessible to the scholars of Europe. But in the space of ten years, four complete Buddhist literatures were discovered – in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Pāli. Collections from Japan and China were to follow. With the Buddhist texts in front of them, Western scholars were able to determine Buddhism was a tradition that had arisen in India around 400-500 years BCE. And among these texts was the Lalitavistara (written around the 4th century CE), which contained a biography of the Buddha. For the first time Westerners came to read an account of his life. The Lalitavistara and other biographies depicted a highly magical and enchanted world – of the Buddha’s heavenly life before his birth, of his conception via an elephant, of his mother’s transparent womb, of his miraculous powers at his birth, of the many miracles he performed, of gods, demons, and water spirits. But within these enchanted texts, there remained the story of the life of the Buddha with which we are familiar. Of the Indian King Shuddhodana who, fearing Gautama would reject the world, keeps his son sheltered from any sights of suffering. When Gautama finally leaves the palace he encounters an old man, a diseased man, and a dead man. He then decides to search for the answer to suffering. For the Buddha, the cause of suffering lies in attachment to the things of the world. The path to liberation from it thus lies in the rejection of attachment. The Buddha’s way to the cessation of attachment was eventually summarised in the Holy Eightfold Path – right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. The outcome of this path was the attainment of Nirvana when the self at the time of death escaped from rebirth and was extinguished like the flame of a candle. This selfless Buddha, who was said to have died in the groves of trees near the Indian town of Kusinagara , was the one the West soon came to admire. As the Unitarian minister Richard Armstrong, put it in 1870, his personality has endured for centuries, and is as fresh and beautiful as now when displayed to European eyes, as when Siddharta [sic] himself breathed his dying breath in the shades of (the forest of) Kusinagara. History versus legend But is the Buddha of the legend also the Buddha of history? That the tradition we call Buddhism was founded by an Indian sage named Gautama around the 5th century BCE is very likely. That he preached a middle way to liberation between worldly indulgence and extreme asceticism is highly probable. That he cultivated practices of mindfulness and meditation, which led to peace and serenity, is almost certain. That said, the earliest Buddhist traditions showed little interest in the details of the life of the Buddha. It was, after all, his teachings – the Dharma as Buddhists call it – rather than his person that mattered. But we can discern a growing interest in the life of the Buddha from the first century BCE until the second or third centuries of the common era as the Buddha transitions within Buddhism from a teacher to a saviour, from human to divine. It was from the first to the fifth centuries CE that there developed a number of Buddhist texts giving full accounts of the life of the Buddha , from his birth (and before) to his renunciation of the world, his enlightenment, his teachings, and finally to his death. Thus, there is a long period of at least 500-900 years between the death of the Buddha and these biographies of him. Can we rely upon these very late lives of the Buddha for accurate information about the events of his life? Probably not. Nevertheless, the legend of his life and teachings still provide an answer to the meaning of human life for some 500 million followers in the modern world. Friday essay Western civilisation Admissions Officer Director of STEM Community member - Training Delivery and Development Committee (Volunteer part-time) Chief Executive Officer Head of Evidence to Action 112 IMAGES The Buddha: Siddhartha Gautama Free Essay Example Essay on Gautam Buddha in English Essay on Gautam Buddha In English Essay on Gautam Buddha in English || Biography of Mahatma Buddha || @studycentre4u 😍 Short story of lord buddha. The Story of Lord Buddha. 2019-02-03 The Life and Times of Gautam Buddha VIDEO Who was Buddha? #Buddha #Buddhism #shorts Essay on Buddha Purnima in English || Buddha Jayanti Essay Writing || Gautam Buddha Essay in English || Essay on Gautam Buddha in English 10 Lines On Gautam Buddha In English Gautama Buddha's biography in English // Essay on Gautama Buddha // Content Writer ✍️ Life of the Buddha-An Interview with Acharya S. N. Goenka (Hindi)-4 COMMENTS Life of the Buddha According to tradition, the historical Buddha lived from 563 to 483 B.C., although scholars postulate that he may have lived as much as a century later. He was born to the rulers of the Shakya clan, hence his appellation Shakyamuni, which means "sage of the Shakya clan.". The legends that grew up around him hold that both his conception and ... Buddha Buddha (born c. 6th-4th century bce, Lumbini, near Kapilavastu, Shakya republic, Kosala kingdom [now in Nepal]—died, Kusinara, Malla republic, Magadha kingdom [now Kasia, India]) was the founder of Buddhism, one of the major religions and philosophical systems of southern and eastern Asia and of the world. Buddha is one of the many epithets of a teacher who lived in northern India sometime ... Gautam Buddha Essay for Students in English This essay will help you to understand the life of Gautam Buddha in minimum words. Basically in a few words, this essay gives you a brief detail about Buddha. Essay on Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha, the messenger of peace, equality, and fraternity, was born in Lumbini in the 6th Century BC, the Terai region of Nepal. His real name was Siddhartha ... Buddha The Buddha (fl. circa 450 BCE) is the individual whose teachings form the basis of the Buddhist tradition. These teachings, preserved in texts known as the Nikāyas or Āgamas, concern the quest for liberation from suffering.While the ultimate aim of the Buddha's teachings is thus to help individuals attain the good life, his analysis of the source of suffering centrally involves claims ... Buddhism Buddhism, religion and philosophy that developed from the teachings of the Buddha (Sanskrit: "Awakened One"), a teacher who lived in northern India between the mid-6th and mid-4th centuries bce (before the Common Era). Spreading from India to Central and Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, Buddhism has played a central role in the spiritual, cultural, and social life of Asia, and ... Siddhartha Gautama Siddhartha Gautama (better known as the Buddha, l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE) was, according to legend, a Hindu prince who renounced his position and wealth to seek enlightenment as a spiritual ascetic, attained his goal and, in preaching his path to others, founded Buddhism in India in the 6th-5th centuries BCE.. The events of his life are largely legendary, but he is considered an actual ... The Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, [e] most commonly referred to as the Buddha ('the awakened'), [f] [g] was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE [4] [5] [6] [c] and founded Buddhism.According to Buddhist legends, he was born in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, [b] to royal parents of the Shakya clan, but renounced his home life to live as a ... Life of Gautama Buddha and the origin of Buddhism Buddha , orig. Siddhartha Gautama, (born c. 6th-4th century bce, Lumbini, near Kapilavastu, Shakya republic, Kosala kingdom—died, Kusinara, Malla republic, Magadha kingdom), Spiritual leader and founder of Buddhism.The term buddha (Sanskrit: "awakened one") is a title rather than a name, and Buddhists believe that there are an infinite number of past and future buddhas. Buddhism and Buddhist Art Buddhism proposes a life of good thoughts, good intentions, and straight living, all with the ultimate aim of achieving nirvana, release from earthly existence. For most beings, nirvana lies in the distant future, because Buddhism, like other faiths of India, believes in a cycle of rebirth. The life of the Buddha Suddenly, at age 29, he was confronted with impermanence and suffering. On a rare outing from his luxurious palace, he saw someone desperately sick. The next day, he saw a decrepit old man, and finally a dead person. He was very upset to realize that old age, sickness and death would come to everyone he loved. History of Buddhism and the Life of Buddha Essay It was founded by Buddha Shakyamuni in 624 BC, while he was working and living in Lumbini (Eckel, 2010). Buddhism is an Asiatic religion that has managed to spread across various parts of the globe. Buddhism has three major divisions in South East Asia, North Asia, and Japan. Buddhists consider Buddha as their religious leader. Buddha Buddha was born in the 6th century B.C., or possibly as early as 624 B.C., according to some scholars. Other researchers believe he was born later, even as late as 448 B.C. And some Buddhists ... A Basic Buddhism Guide: Introduction to Buddhism This short essay is intended to give a brief introduction to Buddhism. It will discuss the way Buddhists perceive the world, the four main teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhist view of the self, the relationship between this self and the various ways in which it responds to the world, the Buddhist path and the final goal. - Mike Butler. Buddha Buddha (c. 500s B.C.E.) The historical Buddha, also known as Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, and Buddha Śākyamuni, was born in Lumbini, in the Nepalese region of Terai, near the Indian border. He is one of the most important Asian thinkers and spiritual masters of all time, and he contributed to many areas of philosophy, including ... Who Is The Buddha? The Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama, was born around 567 B.C.E., in a small kingdom just below the Himalayan foothills. His father was a chief of the Shakya clan. It is said that twelve years before his birth the brahmins prophesied that he would become either a universal monarch or a great sage. To prevent him from becoming an ascetic, his ... Buddhism Buddhism - Enlightenment, Dharma, Four Noble Truths: The teacher known as the Buddha lived in northern India sometime between the mid-6th and the mid-4th centuries before the Common Era. In ancient India the title buddha referred to an enlightened being who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance and achieved freedom from suffering. According to the various traditions of Buddhism, buddhas ... Essay on Buddhism 500 Words Essay on Buddhism Introduction. Buddhism, a religion and philosophy that emerged from the teachings of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), has become a spiritual path followed by millions worldwide. It is a system of thought that offers practical methodologies and profound insights into the nature of existence. Life of the Buddha Essay General Essay on Buddhism Life of the Buddha Buddhism arose in northern India in the 6th century BCE. The historical founder of Buddhism, Siddharta Gautama (c.560-480 BCE) was born in a village called Lumbini into a warrior tribe called the Sakyas (from where he derived the title Sakyamuni, meaning 'Sage of the Sakyas'). According to tradition Gautama's father, Suddhodana was the king of a ... 9 Essays These essays have grown from the Meditation and Recovery group which began meeting weekly at the San Francisco Zen Center in 2000. As we have studied the Steps and Buddhism together, sometimes from one perspective, sometimes from the other, our collective experience and wisdom has grown. Each time we have read and discussed the Steps---or the Essay On Gautam Buddha Essay On Buddha Purnima As kids become more comfortable writing smaller essays, they can add more detail to their writing with longer ones. Here's an example of a Gautam Buddha essay in 200 words: Gautam Buddha, also known as Siddhartha Gautama, was a spiritual leader and the founder of Buddhism. Buddhism Read essays on Buddhism in America, the Buddhist Experience, and Issues for Buddhists in America. Explore our curated selection of news, publications, and links. ... As Buddhism spread through Asia, it formed distinct streams of thought and practice: the Theravada ("The Way of the Elders" in South and Southeast Asia), the Mahayana (the "Great ... Friday essay: how the West discovered the Buddha Wikimedia Commons. In that same century, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo gave the West its first account of Buddha's life. Between 1292 and 1295, journeying home from China, Marco Polo arrived ... Buddhism Essay Buddhism is a religion that Is concentrated on spiritualism than religious teachings. Established by the buddha, one must obtain their own spiritual awakening, or nirvana through meditation. There are three main branches of Buddhism Theravada Buddhism , Mahayana Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism. About 2,500 years ago, Prince Siddhartha. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis