Buddhist Philosophy

A doctor does not begin with metaphysics. He looks at the patient, names the illness, finds its cause, says whether it can be cured, and prescribes. The Buddha’s first teaching has exactly this shape — and from that practical beginning grew theories of mind, causation, language and knowledge that Hindu philosophers spent fifteen centuries answering. The In Dialogue page gives a short introduction; this page goes deeper.

School view This page presents Buddhist philosophy as Buddhist thinkers themselves set it out, drawing on Pāli and Sanskrit sources. Buddhism is a living religion, with its own scriptures and self-understanding; rival schools’ critiques are gathered in the box near the end.

Among the wanderers

Siddhārtha Gautama lived in the Ganges plain, most historians now think in the 5th century BCE (Theravāda tradition places him earlier). It was an age of new cities, new kingdoms and new questions. Beside the Vedic priests moved the śramaṇas, “strivers”: wandering renouncers who rejected the sacrificial order and sought freedom by austerity, meditation or argument. The Pāli Sāmaññaphala Sutta names six famous teachers of the day, among them the materialist Ajita Kesakambalī, the fatalist Makkhali Gosāla (see In Dialogue) and Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta — Mahāvīra of the Jains (see Jaina Philosophy).

After his awakening at Bodh Gaya, Gautama — now the Buddha, “the awakened one” — taught a middle way between indulgence and self-torment, and, in philosophy, between belief in a permanent self and the materialists’ annihilation at death.

1. c. 5th c. BCEThe BuddhaTeaching in Magadha and Kosala for some forty-five years. His words were transmitted orally by the monastic community, the saṅgha.
2. 3rd c. BCEAśokaThe Mauryan emperor’s edicts promote dharma and non-violence; missions carry Buddhism to Sri Lanka.
3. 1st c. BCEThe Pāli Canon written downIn Sri Lanka, by the Theravāda tradition’s own account. Other schools kept canons in Sanskrit and Prakrit.
4. c. 2nd c. CENāgārjunaFounder of the Madhyamaka, the “middle” school of emptiness.
5. c. 4th–5th c.Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, BuddhaghosaThe brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu shape Yogācāra; Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa summarises Abhidharma. In Sri Lanka, Buddhaghosa writes the Theravāda classic Visuddhimagga.
6. c. 480–540DignāgaThe great logician who founds the Buddhist theory of knowledge. Nālandā in Bihar is now the largest centre of learning in Asia.
7. c. 600–660DharmakīrtiMakes Dignāga’s logic a complete system.
8. 8th c.Śāntarakṣita goes to TibetHis Tattvasaṅgraha surveys and answers every rival school, Hindu and Buddhist.
9. c. 1200Nālandā and Vikramaśīla sackedThe great monastic universities are destroyed during the conquests in Bihar and Bengal.
10. 1956Ambedkar’s conversionAt Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar and several hundred thousand followers take refuge in the Buddha.

The four truths

In his first sermon, at the deer park near Vārāṇasī, the Buddha set out four “truths of the noble ones”: duḥkha, the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned life; its arising, from craving (tṛṣṇā, Pāli taṇhā); its cessation, nirvāṇa; and the path, the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

Duḥkha is wider than pain. It is the friction of a wheel badly fitted to its axle: even pleasure is unsatisfying because it passes, and a life built on what passes cannot rest. Notice what the last line says. The deepest suffering lies in the five skandhas — body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness — as clung to. The problem is not that we have a body and mind, but that we grasp them as “mine,” “I,” “my self.”

Not-self

The teaching of anātman is sometimes heard as “you do not exist.” Buddhist philosophers say something more careful. Search experience for a self that is permanent, independent and in control, and you will not find it: each of the five aggregates changes, each arises from conditions, none obeys our command. What we call a person is a stream of physical and mental events, causally linked like the flame of a lamp passed through the night — not the same flame, not a different one.

So the person is real conventionally, as the chariot of Nāgasena’s famous simile is real (see In Dialogue), but there is no extra owner standing behind the stream. Seeing this is not meant to be bleak: much of our anxiety and cruelty, Buddhist teachers say, comes from defending an imagined fortress called “me.”

Dependent arising

If there is no self, what links one life, one moment, to the next? The Buddha’s answer is pratītya-samutpāda, “arising in dependence,” given in a terse formula:

Applied to a human life, the formula unfolds into twelve links (nidānas). Later Abhidharma teachers spread them over three lives — past causes, present results and causes, future results — but every school agrees that the chain can also be watched turning moment by moment. Step round the wheel; each station holds two links:

The wheel replaces the self with a process. Rebirth happens without anything passing over intact, as one candle lights another. Karma here is above all intention (cetanā); a creator God is not needed to dispense its fruits, because the fruits are built into the causal stream itself. Buddhists accordingly argued, at length, that there is no Īśvara: a permanent cause could never produce anything at one moment rather than another. When the Buddha’s disciple Assaji was asked what his teacher taught, he answered in a single verse — the most widely inscribed Buddhist verse in Asia, found in its Sanskrit form on stones and seals from Bihar to the Malay peninsula:

Moments and elements: Abhidharma

The Buddha’s discourses speak the language of ordinary life. The Abhidharma — “higher teaching” — set out to restate them without any convenient fictions, listing the ultimate elements (dharmas) of experience: kinds of matter, kinds of consciousness, mental factors such as attention, greed or mindfulness, and the unconditioned nirvāṇa. The Theravāda Abhidhamma counts four kinds of ultimate reality; the Sarvāstivāda list in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa has seventy-five dharmas. A person, a tree or a pot is a name for a bundle of these.

From this grew kṣaṇikavāda, the doctrine of momentariness. Two arguments carried it. First, destruction needs no cause: a pot struck by a hammer was already perishing; the hammer only starts a new series of shards. If perishing is built into being, a thing perishes the moment it arises. Second, later logicians such as Ratnakīrti (11th century) argued from efficacy: to be real is to do something. A permanent thing could not produce its effects all at once (then it would be idle afterwards) nor one by one (then it would be changing). So whatever exists, exists for an instant — like a river that is never the same water twice, yet is still called the Ganges.

Four schools of interpretation

Indian and Tibetan doxographers — and Hindu ones, such as the 14th-century Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha — sorted Buddhist philosophy into four schools, each answering the question “what is ultimately real?” more radically than the last. The scheme simplifies a messy history, but it is a good map. Tap each:

Emptiness and the two truths

Is Madhyamaka nihilism? Its critics, Hindu and Buddhist, often said so. Nāgārjuna’s reply was that emptiness is not a thing, and not nothing: it is the absence of a fixed essence in things that plainly function. A cup is empty of own-being — it depends on clay, the potter, the firing, and our idea of “cup” — and precisely because it is empty, it can hold tea. To make sense of this he distinguished two levels of truth (satya-dvaya):

Conventionally, there are persons, cups and causes, and lying is wrong; ultimately, none of them has a self-standing essence. Two verses later Nāgārjuna adds that the ultimate cannot be taught except through the conventional. Readers of Advaita will hear an echo in its two levels of reality, vyavahāra and paramārtha — an echo that would become a weapon in debate.

Emptiness is meant to be lived. In the Mahāyāna it is paired with compassion: the bodhisattva vows to seek awakening for the sake of all beings, and because neither self nor other has a fixed essence, the line between my suffering and yours is not a wall. Early Buddhism’s ideal was the arhat, freed from rebirth; the Mahāyāna aims at full Buddhahood. Either way, liberation is not a self finally found but craving finally ended — a fire gone out for want of fuel.

The logicians

From the 5th century the centre of Buddhist philosophy moved to pramāṇa, the theory of knowledge (see How We Know). Dignāga — Tibetan tradition says he was born near Kāñcī — argued that there are only two means of knowledge, because there are only two kinds of object. Perception grasps the bare, momentary particular, “free of conceptual construction”; inference works with concepts, which are general. Scripture is reliable only so far as it can be checked like an inference. Dharmakīrti made this a complete system:

Knowledge, in other words, is what you can act on. You see water, walk to it and drink; the mirage gives you nothing to drink. Dignāga’s theory of meaning, apoha (“exclusion”), was just as bold: the word “cow” does not name a real universal cow-ness, but marks off everything that is not a cow. Concepts are useful fictions, built from difference. Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā, for whom universals are real, fought this for centuries.

The great debates

The Buddhist–Hindu argument was the engine of Indian philosophy for a thousand years. The Naiyāyikas — from Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara to Udayana’s Ātmatattvaviveka — defended an enduring self from memory and recognition, wholes over and above parts, real universals and a creator God (see Nyāya & Vaiśeṣika). Kumārila of the Mīmāṃsā attacked Yogācāra idealism and the Buddha’s claim to omniscience, and defended the authorless Veda. Buddhists such as Śāntarakṣita answered each in turn. Indian logic itself — and later Navya-Nyāya — was forged in this contest.

With Advaita the relationship was closer and more uneasy: Gauḍapāda’s Māṇḍūkya Kārikā (c. 6th century) borrows Mahāyāna images such as the whirling firebrand, yet Shankara refuted the Buddhist schools at length. The charge that Advaita was “Buddhism in disguise” (pracchanna-bauddha), and the Advaitin reply, are told on Advaita Vedānta.

Hindu authors also caricatured Buddhism. Doxographers often reduced emptiness to “nothing exists”; several Purāṇas made the Buddha an avatāra of Vishnu sent to mislead; and Tamil Śaiva hagiography tells of debates in which Buddhists are humiliated, reflecting fierce competition for royal favour. Buddhist texts returned the compliment. These portraits are history, not philosophy.

Decline and survival

Buddhism faded in most of India between about the 8th and 13th centuries. Historians give many causes — lost royal patronage, the absorption of Buddhist ideas and devotion into Hindu traditions, and finally the destruction of the great monasteries around 1200 — a slow fading, not one event. Elsewhere the tradition flourished: Theravāda in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand; Mahāyāna in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam; Vajrayāna in Tibet and the Himalaya.

In modern India it returned in a new form. In 1956, at Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar, architect of India’s constitution and a Dalit (see Varna & Jati), took refuge in the Buddha with a vast crowd of followers, and administered twenty-two vows, some of them explicitly renouncing Hindu deities and practices. His posthumously published The Buddha and His Dhamma read the Buddha as a social reformer and rationalist, reinterpreted karma and rebirth, and even questioned whether the four truths were original. This Ambedkarite Buddhism, often called Navayāna, “new vehicle,” is now practised by millions. Modern reading Its critique of caste is a challenge Hindus should hear rather than deflect. Women too had a place from early on: the Buddha admitted nuns, and the Pāli Therīgāthā, verses of the early nuns, is among the oldest women’s poetry anywhere — though the rules subordinated nuns to monks, and full ordination of women in the Theravāda is still contested.

Tamil Buddhism

The Tamil country had a long Buddhist history. The epic மணிமேகலை Maṇimēkalai of Cīttalai Cāttaṉār (usually dated between the 5th and 7th centuries; estimates vary) is the sequel to the Cilappatikāram: its heroine, the dancer’s daughter Maṇimēkalai, renounces the world, feeds the hungry from a bowl that never empties, hears the teachers of rival schools — Vedic, Śaiva, Jain, Ājīvika, materialist — and receives the dharma from the sage Aravaṇa Aṭikaḷ at Kāñcī. Its later cantos give a summary of Buddhist logic close to Dignāga’s. Kāñcī was a Buddhist centre for centuries, and Kāveripaṭṭiṉam and Nākappaṭṭiṉam had monasteries; at Nākappaṭṭiṉam a king of Śrīvijaya — the Sumatran maritime empire whose reach included the Malay peninsula — built a vihāra in the early 11th century with Rājarāja Cōḻa’s grant. See also Tamil Sacred Literature.

The story continued in modern times. In 1898 the Tamil scholar and physician Iyothee Thass founded the Sakya Buddhist Society in Madras, arguing that Tamil Dalit communities had been Buddhists before caste was imposed on them — a Tamil forerunner of Ambedkar’s movement.

Buddhism in Malaysia today

Buddhism is Malaysia’s second-largest religion, followed by nearly one in five Malaysians, most of them of Chinese descent. Community practice Chinese Mahāyāna temples such as Kek Lok Si in Penang stand alongside Theravāda ones founded by Sri Lankan, Thai and Burmese communities — the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, dates from 1894 — and Tibetan centres. The Sri Lankan-born monk K. Sri Dhammananda, long based in Kuala Lumpur, wrote What Buddhists Believe, read across the region. Wesak is a national public holiday. And the roots are old: Sanskrit Buddhist inscriptions of around the 5th century, among them a stone set up by the master mariner Buddhagupta, have been found in Kedah and Seberang Perai, near the Bujang Valley’s Hindu and Buddhist temple ruins.

For Malaysian Hindus, Buddhists are neighbours — at festival open houses, at each other’s temples, and at Thaipusam, where many Chinese devotees walk. Knowing their philosophy as they know it is a courtesy as well as an education.

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Sources & further reading

• Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Gordon Fraser, 1959).
• Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya (Wisdom Publications, 2000).
• Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Paul Williams with Anthony Tribe, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition (Routledge, 2000).
• Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Jay L. Garfield (trans.), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• John D. Dunne, Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy (Wisdom Publications, 2004).
• Richard King, Early Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism: The Mahāyāna Context of the Gauḍapādīya-kārikā (SUNY Press, 1995).
• Anne E. Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• B. R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (People’s Education Society, 1957).
• K. Sri Dhammananda, What Buddhists Believe (Buddhist Missionary Society, Kuala Lumpur).