BUDDHISM

Buddhism derives its name from the Sanskrit word buddha (awakened, wise, or learned), which was one of the many epithets given to Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 563–c. 483 BCE), the founder of the set of theories and practices that are now called Buddhism. Traditional accounts of Gautama's life are more inspirational and hagiographical than historical in nature, and any attempt to extract a historical record from them is likely to prove frustrating, although the attempts of such authors as Hans Wolfgang Schumann (1989) and Michael Carrithers (1983) to find a credible story of Gautama's life are well worth reading.

According to traditional accounts Gautama left his wife and newborn child to seek his liberation from suffering and followed various teachers who ultimately failed to satisfy his needs. He then set out on his own and found the liberation he sought through meditation and self-discipline. At first disinclined to teach, because he felt his teachings would appeal to few people, he finally decided to tell others what he had discovered. Soon after his death, his disciples met and repeated all they could remember being taught by him, and these recollections were committed to memory. All the rules he had set down for the community of his disciples were collectively known as the vinaya. The collections of his other teachings on good character, contemplative exercises, and the theory behind them were known collectively as sutras. The vinaya and sutras supposedly collected shortly after Gautama's death became a closed canon for some Buddhists; other Buddhists eventually accepted as canonical a large corpus of other literature. Although there is a great deal of agreement between what is found in both the closed and extended canon, there is also a good deal of difference. In what follows, an attempt will be made to make note of where there is agreement and where there is divergence of opinion among Buddhists.

The epithet Buddha emphasizes Gautama's claim to have awakened, as if from a slumber, to seeing things as they really are. Another epithet commonly given to Gautama is jina (conqueror), which emphasizes his having overcome his internal enemies, the passions. In much of the Buddhist canonical literature Gautama refers to himself as Tathāgata, an epithet that has been explained in various ways by later Buddhists; one possible interpretation is that the Tathāgata knew the truth or understood things as they really are. Traditionally being a follower of Buddhism consists in going for refuge to the Buddha, the dharma (the goal of Buddhist practice), and the sangha (the community of virtuous people). In what follows, each of these terms will be discussed with reference to how understanding of them has changed down through the centuries.

The Buddha

During the time when the Buddha Gautama was alive, going for refuge to him meant becoming his disciple and agreeing to follow his teachings and the rules of his community. After his death, however, the meaning of going for refuge to the Buddha changed. The action came to mean making an effort to cultivate in oneself the virtues associated with buddhas in general, for the claim attributed to Gautama was that he was the most recent in a series of buddhas, all of whom had taught the same thing to the people of their generation and all of whom had had the same set of virtues. The set of virtues associated with buddhas are called the factors of awakening. Canonical texts always talk about thirty-seven mental factors that are required for awakening. These factors are the sum of seven different lists of wholesome mental qualities. When all redundant terms are eliminated from these lists, however, there are just ten different factors: wisdom, courage, concentration, mindfulness, inner joy, mental and emotional flexibility, equanimity, faith, right resolve, and good moral habit.

Wisdom is explained as understanding and discrimination, and it includes awareness of one's own body and mind, reflections on the inevitability of death, and recognition that all complex beings change and therefore are not worth striving for. Wisdom also entails realizing that no one is fully in control of one's own body, mind, or personality and that therefore these things are not really one's self, and none of them really belongs to anyone; rather, everything that comes into being is an essentially impersonal event. Because the factors conditioning any one event are beyond reckoning, no one can be in control of all of them; since it is possible to alter some of the conditions in one's life, however, discipline and practice are not in vain, however difficult they may be.

Courage consists in having the resolve and energy to do virtuous and wholesome actions that benefit oneself and others. Concentration is defined as having a healthy mentality focused on a single topic at a time. Mindfulness is defined as good memory, and especially recalling the importance of virtue in all situations and remembering to cultivate it. Inner joy is described as zest and enthusiasm for being virtuous and helping others do the same. Flexibility is defined as workability and pliability of one's thoughts and emotions, which are the opposite of intellectual and emotional rigidity, obsessiveness, and the tendency to pass judgment on others. Equanimity means indifference to pleasure and pain, and impartiality with respect to people. Faith is described as conviction and trust in the teachings of the Buddha as a result of experiencing the initial benefits of practicing what he taught. Right resolve consists in the resolve to cultivate wholesome and to eliminate unwholesome mental states. Good moral habit includes thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that conduce to the well-being of oneself and others, and it manifests in earning one's livelihood in ways that minimize damage done to other living beings and to their environment.

Even though it was considered possible for a person to cultivate all these virtues while living an ordinary family life, it was said to be much easier to succeed if one first renounced family life and lived alone or in a community of like-minded friends. For this reason, the ideal setting for Buddhist practice has nearly always been seen to be a monastery.

For the first several centuries in the history of Buddhism, the Buddha was venerated as a man who had been born an ordinary man and who had struggled to discover and eliminate the root causes of rebirth and its inevitable difficulties. After a long life of teaching others how to eliminate their own causes of rebirth, he died a serene death, knowing that he had helped many others to become awakened and liberated from their suffering. He likened himself to a physician who had studied the symptoms of a disease, made a diagnosis, and prescribed a course of treatment. Like a physician, he could only encourage his patients to take the necessary course of treatment; he could not do their work for them. After some five or six centuries, however, this description of the Buddha's career lost its appeal to many people, and new movements evolved within Buddhism that portrayed buddhas in importantly different ways.

One of the most influential of these new portrayals of what a buddha is appeared in a Mahayana Buddhist text, probably written in the second or third century CE, known as the Sutra of the White Lotus of the True Doctrine, commonly referred to simply as the Lotus Sutra. This complex and highly polemical text repudiates the earlier Buddhist doctrine that the Buddha was born, lived, and died, never again to be reborn in any form anywhere. The Lotus Sutra puts forth the view that all particular buddhas, including Gautama, are but manifestations of an eternal entity known as Shakyamuni Buddha, who is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly compassionate but otherwise beyond human comprehension. Shakyamuni Buddha, being transcendent, can be known to human beings only by taking human form. All the buddhas of the past, present, and future should be known to be manifestations of this cosmic buddha.

Moreover, the most important teaching of all these manifestations of Shakyamuni Buddha is that every sentient being in the universe is destined to become a fully enlightened buddha, for all beings, and not just those who are known now to be buddhas, are essentially one with the enlightened mind called Shakyamuni Buddha. Announcing this message in various ways, the Lotus Sutra pronounces harsh condemnation of those who teach that the goal of Buddhism is to attain nirvana, if that is understood as the end of the cycle of rebirths. Monks who teach that Buddha Gautama was an ordinary human being who achieved extraordinary things and that he eventually died never to be reborn, are denounced in the Lotus Sutra as charlatans and pseudo-Buddhists whose teachings could prevent others from attaining perfect enlightenment. The immediate destiny of such monks is a long and painful stay in hell, but even they, assures the Lotus Sutra, will eventually realize full and perfect enlightenment.

A second sort of new portrayal of a buddha figure is found in a genre of literature that has come to be known as Pure Land sutras. The term pure land is a translation of a Chinese expression that is in turn an interpretation of a Sanskrit expression that means "a happy land" or "a land of ease." The principal innovation in this genre of sutras is the notion that there are buddhas who attained buddhahood only after amassing an incalculable amount of merit through austerities and good works. After attaining buddhahood these buddhas used their merit to create realms in which all the distractions posed by hardships are unknown so that inhabitants of these realms could devote all their energy to cultivating virtue and striving for nirvana. People from our burdensome world are said to be able to gain entry in one of these realms of ease simply by calling on the name of the buddha who created it.

By far the most popular of these buddhas was Amitābha, whose name means "he whose light is unmeasured." The invocation of Amitābha's name became one of the most common practices among Buddhists in East Asia. In some places, and especially in Japan, some followers of the Lotus Sutra held Amitābha (Amida in Japanese) practitioners in contempt because of the latter's reluctance to regard Amitābha as a manifestation of Shakyamuni. The various views that Buddhists have held on what exactly the nature of a buddha is have been described in detail and with considerable philosophical refinement by Paul J. Griffiths in On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood (1994).

The Dharma

Those who followed the closed canon of Buddhist texts teach that the dharma to which a Buddhist goes for refuge is nirvana, which is seen as the ultimate goal of all Buddhist practice and theory. Ultimately, nirvana is defined as the cessation of rebirth after one's present life comes to an end, but the term also refers to the cessation of psychological afflictions while one is still alive. The principal afflictions discussed in Buddhist teachings are greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed is understood broadly as all craving for material possessions, physical and psychological comforts, physical and psychological pleasures, celebrity, approval, and anything that one regards as desirable. Hatred includes irritation, resistance, anger, and any sort of aversion or wish for dissociation from something. Delusion includes any sort of misunderstanding or misjudgment that could result in unsuccessful action.

These three root afflictions are said to be the principal causes of all distress and discontent. Eliminating them results in being content with whatever situation that may present itself. In many Buddhist texts it is said that contentment arises not merely from the absence of afflictions but from the presence of their opposites. Thus, when greed is replaced by generosity, hatred by love, and delusion by wisdom, then one is truly contented, and when these replacements are permanent, then one has attained liberation from suffering in this life.

While the dharma to which a Buddhist goes for refuge is nirvana, the term dharma also refers to virtue in general and to anything, such as teachings and practices, that help one to cultivate virtue. The most important of the virtues is wisdom, since it plays a role in the cultivation of all other virtues. Wisdom is said to arise in three stages. The first stage consists in learning what wise people have said and how they have acted. The second consists in reflecting on what one has learned through study. And the third consists in realizing in one's own life what the wise people of the past have discussed. This third stage includes a variety of contemplative exercises that have been designed to improve a person's mentality. For each of the virtues discussed earlier as those associated with buddhas, specific meditative exercises have been designed.

In canonical Buddhism the attainment of nirvana is usually described as incremental. The analogy most frequently used is that one's mentality is like gold ore, which is a mixture of precious metal and various unwanted minerals. Refining ore to get pure gold requires a gradual elimination of the unwanted minerals through various chemical and mechanical processes. Similarly, one's mentality is a mixture of wholesome and unwholesome habits that mute the effectiveness of the wholesome traits. Refining one's character requires the gradual elimination of bad habits through study, reflection, and cultivation, and the culmination of all this refinement is nirvana. In some forms of later Buddhism, however, a different conception of nirvana arose. In this new view nirvana, understood not as the mere absence of affliction but as the constant presence of tranquillity, lucidity, and bliss, is the fundamental nature of all things. Thus, all consciousness is fundamentally calm, lucid, and contented, and the so-called afflictions are temporary obscurations of that lucidity. The most common analogy for this view of nirvana is that of the sun, which shines all the time but is sometimes temporarily obscured by clouds. In this view of consciousness the condition of enlightenment is innate and permanent.

Nirvana, therefore, is not the cessation of existence but the realization that consciousness is beginningless and endless and constantly tranquil. In some forms of this doctrine it is said that ultimately there is only one mind, namely, the Buddha's; all apparently individual minds are but episodes of this one Buddha mind. Since the Buddha's mind can only be wholesome, it follows that all those who are apparently individuals are also wholesome, and all mental events, including those called unwholesome or vicious are in fact virtuous. Delusion, then consists in a failure to recognize the innate wholesomeness of all existence. In some formulations of this position delusion consists in thinking in terms of oppositions at all; thus, it is delusional to think in terms of the contrast between virtue and vice, wholesomeness and unwholesomeness, delusion and wisdom, liberation and bondage, buddha and ordinary person, and so forth.

The Sangha

The word sangha means "community." The community to which a Buddhist goes for refuge is the so-called noble (ārya-sangha ) community, which comprises all those who have reached one of the four stages leading to and including nirvana. Since it is seen as nearly impossible for an individual to make the necessary refinements in character that lead to nirvana, it is considered almost essential for one to keep company with virtuous people who will understand and support one's resolve to cultivate virtue and attain nirvana. In the hopes of providing a community of people dedicated to virtue and thus providing a noble sangha, the Buddha Gautama founded a monastic community as well as a community of lay disciples. Ideally, these formal communities should include enough members of the noble community to be of benefit to the world as a whole, and so to help these visible communities not only to be virtuous but also to be seen to be virtuous, Gautama set forth various sets of precepts. Lay disciples are expected to refrain from five harmful activities: killing, stealing, sexual transgressions, lying, and intoxication. Novitiates seeking ordination into the monastic community are expected to refrain from ten harmful actions and thoughts: the first four of the five expected of the laity plus refraining from harsh speech, gossip, frivolous speech, attachment, anger, and false views. Monastics are expected to observe more than two hundred vows, depending on which monastic order they belong to. Four of those vows are considered so important that any person who breaks them is dismissed from the monastic order for the rest of his or her life; these four vows are refraining from killing a human being, from the theft of anything that human beings regard as property, from any kind of sexual intercourse with any other being living or dead, and from making false claims about one's spiritual attainments.

The study of the monastic rules (vinaya) suggests that the principal purposes of the monastic community were twofold: to provide an ideal environment for individuals to cultivate virtue and to serve as a visible community that demonstrated to the society at large that a life of material simplicity dedicated to the cultivation of virtue and self-contentment is far more satisfactory than a life of material acquisitiveness dedicated to seeking possessions and the approval of others. Taking monastic vows is not seen as necessary for the attainment of nirvana, but is seen rather as the taking on of responsibilities to be of service to society at large. Some scholastics favor the view, based on passages in canonical texts, that, while it is not necessary to be a monastic to attain nirvana, it is impossible for anyone who has attained nirvana to remain a lay person for more than one day. Others, however, take the view that renunciation is itself a kind of attachment and that a liberated person would be able to live a normal lay life without becoming either attached to or afraid of its pleasures. This latter attitude can be found in many Buddhist movements within East Asia, and especially Japan, and in some movements in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Buddha Gautama made several observations about statecraft. He made these observations by telling stories, which often had a satirical edge. One attitude that emerges in these stories is that government came into human society at a time when morality was breaking down, and, since government was devised by people living in morally broken down cultures, government is itself as likely to exacerbate the problem as alleviate it. That notwithstanding, those whose task is to provide governance can sometimes benefit by the counsel of wise people, although not all governments are equally willing to heed wise counsel.

In his own instructions to kings, Gautama urged them, above all else, to provide to all citizens the means to earn their own livelihoods. This could best be achieved by taxing the wealthy and distributing resources to the needy and by educating the unskilled. A king who fails to do these things, said Gautama, is most likely to bring about a society in which the poor have no means of living other than stealing from the wealthy, and the wealthy then hire guardians to protect their wealth. This situation in turn leads to both the thieves and the mercenary guardians arming themselves to protect themselves against one another, and it leads to the wealthy seeking ever stricter laws and more severe punishments, until nearly everyone is armed and afraid. As fear and suspicion grows, violence increases, and as violence increases, the life expectancy of people declines. Eventually, said Gautama, the decline will become so dramatic that most people will die only shortly after reaching the age of reproduction, and children will be left to raise themselves, and morality will become so rare that people will have forgotten even the word virtue, let alone know what it stands for. All this can be avoided by governments that are more interested in protecting the poor than in serving the wealthy, said Gautama, and such governments are more likely to occur if wise and learned men and women remain actively engaged in society. Even monks who have renounced the family life should take an interest in providing wise counsel to governments. The ideal of providing selfless service to one's society was particularly emphasized in some of the Mahayana sutras that came into prominence in the first several centuries CE.

The entire philosophy of Buddhism is traditionally summarized in a formula called the four noble truths: (1) all forms of existence involve some suffering, (2) suffering arises because of unrealistic expectations, (3) suffering can be eliminated by eliminating unrealistic expectations, and (4) there is a method to be followed to eliminate them. The method itself is summarized in the formula: "Do what is beneficial, avoid doing harm, and keep the mind pure."

See also Buddhism—Schools: Chan and Zen; Buddhism—Schools: Dge-lugs; Buddhism—Schools: Hua yan; Buddhism—Schools: Madhyamika; Buddhism—Schools: Yogacara; Buddhist Epistemology.

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Richard P. Hayes (2005)