The Buddha

Key ideas

1. The Four Noble Truths. There is suffering, it has an origin in craving, it can cease, and there is a path that leads to its cessation. In the discourse traditionally called his first, the Buddha presents these as the framework of his teaching.
2. The middle way and the eightfold path. He rejected both indulgence in sensual pleasures and self-mortification. The path he taught has eight factors, grouped as training in wisdom (right view, intention), ethics (speech, action, livelihood) and concentration (effort, mindfulness, concentration).
3. Not-self. Each of the five aggregates that make up a person, form, feeling, perception, choices and consciousness, is impermanent, unsatisfactory and not under our control, so none is fit to be regarded as “my self”. Whether he denied any self at all is disputed.
4. Dependent origination. Things arise in dependence on conditions: “When this exists, this comes to be; due to the arising of this, this arises.” A chain of twelve links runs from ignorance to old age and death.
5. Karma and rebirth. Karma is intentional action, whose results ripen in this life or later ones. The later person is neither the same as the earlier one nor different from it.
6. Nirvana. Liberation is the extinguishing of craving, aversion and delusion, and with it the end of rebirth. The Dhammapada calls it the highest happiness.
7. The undeclared questions. The Buddha declined to say whether the cosmos is eternal or finite, or whether a liberated person exists after death, because answers would not lead to freedom from suffering. The simile of the poisoned arrow makes the point.

The Buddha was a wandering teacher of the eastern Ganges plain who lived in the sixth or fifth century BCE and founded Buddhism. His personal name was Siddhārtha Gautama; buddha is a title meaning “the awakened one”. He taught that suffering has a cause, craving, and an end, and that a path of conduct, meditation and insight leads to it.

When did he live, and how do we know?

The Theravāda tradition gives 623–543 BCE, and earlier scholarship gave about 563–483 BCE. Many scholars now place his death near 400 BCE. The earliest sources, the Pali Nikāyas and their Chinese parallels, the Āgamas, record his teachings far more than his life. They were passed on orally and, by tradition, written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. The earliest datable evidence outside them is Ashoka’s pillar at Lumbini, of about 250 BCE, which records a visit to the Buddha’s birthplace.

What does tradition say of his life?

By tradition he was born at Lumbini, a prince of the Śākya clan, and lived at Kapilavastu. Later biographies say he left home after seeing an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a renunciant. An early discourse has him say, “I was twenty-nine years of age … when I went forth to discover what is skillful.” In the Noble Search he says he studied under two teachers, then found in Magadha what he sought: “extinguishment”. Tradition places the awakening at Bodh Gaya and the first sermon near Varanasi. He taught for some forty-five years, founded an order of monks and nuns, and died at Kusinārā, aged eighty. His last recorded words are “Conditions fall apart. Persist with diligence.”

What are the Four Noble Truths?

In the discourse traditionally called his first, addressed to five mendicants, he rejects “indulgence in sensual pleasures” and “indulgence in self-mortification” and teaches a middle way between them. There is suffering (dukkha), which in brief is “the five grasping aggregates”. It has an origin in craving, for sensual pleasures, for continued existence and for nonexistence. It has a cessation, “the fading away and cessation of that very same craving”, called nirvana. And there is a path to it, the noble eightfold path: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. See the four noble truths.

What did he teach about the self?

Addressing the same five mendicants (SN 22.59), he argues that if form were a self it would not lead to affliction, and we could command it: “May my form be like this!” What is impermanent and unsatisfactory is not fit to be regarded as “This is mine, I am this, this is my self.” The same holds for feeling, perception, choices and consciousness, the five aggregates of a person: this is not-self.

Whether he denied that any self exists, or only that any aggregate is one, is disputed; later Indian philosophers generally took the stronger view. A verse of the nun Vajirā in the canon, later developed in the Milindapañha, compares a person to a chariot: see Nāgasena’s chariot.

How do dependent origination, karma and rebirth fit together?

“When this exists, this comes to be; due to the arising of this, this arises” (MN 38). Twelve links run from ignorance through craving to rebirth, old age and death: see dependent origination. Karma is intentional action: what counts is the volition, not the movement. Its results ripen in this life or later ones, and the later person is neither the same as the earlier nor different. Freedom from saṃsāra, the round of rebirth, comes when craving, aversion and delusion end.

Why did he leave some questions unanswered?

The monk Māluṅkyaputta demanded to know whether the cosmos is eternal and whether a liberated person exists after death. The Buddha compared him to a man struck by a poisoned arrow who will not have it removed until he learns who shot it. Such views, he said, “aren’t beneficial or relevant to the fundamentals of the spiritual life”. On one reading the questions also rest on a false presupposition.

What did he say about authority, birth and rival views?

In the Kālāma Sutta the Kālāmas of Kesamutta, puzzled by rival teachers, are told not to go by oral transmission, lineage, canonical authority, logic or a teacher’s standing, but to test claims against the harm that greed, hatred and delusion do. This concerns how far we may rely on testimony. On birth he says: “You’re not a lowlife by birth, nor by birth are you a brahmin” (Sn 1.7). To quarrelling teachers he tells the parable of the blind men and the elephant (Ud 6.4).

What was his influence?

Buddhism spread across Asia as Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, declining in India after the eighth century. Later Buddhist philosophy includes the Madhyamaka of Nāgārjuna and the Yogācāra of Vasubandhu; see Buddhist philosophy. In modern India Ambedkar became a Buddhist at Nagpur in 1956 and wrote The Buddha and His Dhamma. UGC NET Unit 1 and UPSC Paper I cover the Four Noble Truths, the eightfold path and pratītyasamutpāda; see the UGC NET guide and UPSC guide.

How should you start reading the Buddha?

Begin with the Dhammapada. Then read SN 56.11, SN 22.59, MN 63 and AN 3.65, short discourses in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation listed under Works, and DN 16 for his last months.