Buddhism

The Buddha is presented in the texts as a physician rather than a prophet: he identifies a condition, its cause, its cure and the treatment. The four statements are usually called the four noble truths.

The condition is dukkha, ordinarily rendered as suffering but closer to unsatisfactoriness, not only pain, but the instability of everything that is sought and held. Its cause is craving, and behind craving, ignorance about how things actually are. Its cessation is possible. The treatment is the eightfold path: right view and intention, right speech, action and livelihood, right effort, mindfulness and concentration, grouped as wisdom, ethical conduct and meditative training, and understood as cultivated together rather than in sequence.

Three characteristics are said to mark all conditioned things: they are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and without a self. The third, anatta, is the most distinctive and the most easily misread. The claim is not that persons do not exist, but that no permanent unchanging essence can be found in or behind the changing processes that make one up. How rebirth works without such an essence is answered by dependent origination, the account of how each state arises in dependence on conditions.

Nirvana is the extinguishing of craving and the ending of rebirth. The tradition is deliberately reticent about what it is, describing it more often by what it is not.

There is no creator in the picture. Gods appear throughout Buddhist cosmology, but they are long-lived beings within the round of rebirth rather than outside it, and cannot grant liberation. Practice for most Buddhists across most of history has centred on ethical conduct, generosity to the monastic community, devotion and the making of merit rather than on meditation, which was until the modern period largely a monastic specialism.

The early community divided over discipline and doctrine long before those differences hardened into the streams recognised today, and the conventional threefold division flattens a great deal.

Theravada, the way of the elders, is the surviving school of the early period and predominates in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. It takes the Pali canon as authoritative, holds up the arhat, one who has ended the defilements and will not be reborn, as the goal, and gives the ordained community a central place.

Mahayana texts began to appear around the turn of the Common Era, presenting themselves as teachings of the Buddha not previously disclosed. The change is in the goal: the bodhisattva works for the liberation of all beings rather than for an individual release, and buddhahood rather than arhatship becomes what practice aims at. Mahayana thought developed the analysis of shunyata, emptiness, systematised by Nagarjuna, and the Yogacara account of mind. It became the dominant form in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, where it produced the Chan or Zen schools of meditative practice and the Pure Land traditions of devotion to Amitabha.

Vajrayana, drawing on tantric texts and methods from around the seventh century, uses ritual, visualisation, mantra and a close relationship with a teacher as means to accelerate a path it otherwise shares with Mahayana. It prevails in Tibet, Mongolia, Bhutan and the Himalayan regions, and is present in Japan as Shingon.

The relationship between the three is itself disputed. Theravada does not accept the Mahayana scriptures as the word of the Buddha; Mahayana traditions have historically characterised the earlier schools in terms those schools reject. Vajrayana is classed by many as a branch of Mahayana rather than a third stream at all.

Around 324 million people are Buddhists, most of them in East, Southeast and South Asia. China holds the largest number, though counting there is unreliable, because religious affiliation in Chinese practice is not exclusive and much observance is not registered as membership of anything. Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos and Bhutan have Buddhist majorities; Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Mongolia and Nepal have large Buddhist populations.

Buddhism largely disappeared from the land of its origin. By about the thirteenth century it had ceased to exist as a significant institution in India, for reasons still debated: the loss of royal patronage, the absorption of its practices by other traditions, and the destruction of the great monastic universities of the north all figure in the accounts. It returned in the twentieth century, most visibly through the conversion of B.R. Ambedkar and large numbers of his followers in 1956.

The same century carried Buddhism to Europe and the Americas, where it exists both in immigrant communities practising the forms of their countries of origin and in convert communities, which are typically centred on meditation and less closely tied to monasticism. Secular derivatives, notably mindfulness practices detached from the doctrinal framework, have spread far more widely than the religion itself; practitioners assess that very differently depending on whether they regard the framework as essential to what is being practised.

In several Asian countries Buddhism is closely bound to national identity, and that has drawn it into political conflict, including communal violence, in ways that sit uneasily with the tradition's own account of itself.