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Religion

Buddhism

The traditions that follow the teaching of the Buddha on suffering and its cessation.

Also called Buddhadharma, the Dharma

Introduction

Buddhism is the family of traditions that look to the teaching of the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, who lived in north India around the fifth century BCE. Buddhists take refuge in the “three jewels”: the Buddha, the Dharma, his teaching, and the Saṅgha, the community that practises it. At the centre of the teaching are the Four Noble Truths, of suffering, its origin in craving, its cessation, and the eightfold path to that cessation.

The Buddha presented his teaching as a middle way: between indulgence and self-mortification in practice, and between the belief in a permanent self and the denial of any continuity in philosophy. Everything conditioned, he taught, is impermanent, unsatisfactory and without self, and arises in dependence on conditions. Liberation, nirvāṇa, is the cessation of craving and with it of suffering and rebirth.

Buddhism has no creator God and no single scripture or authority. Its major living traditions are the Theravāda of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the Mahāyāna traditions of East Asia, and the Buddhism of Tibet and the Himalaya, often called Vajrayāna. They share the core teaching but differ in their scriptures, their ideals of practice, and their philosophies.

History

Historical

The Buddha taught in the Ganges plain for some forty-five years. After his death his followers recited his teachings at councils, and the community divided over questions of discipline and doctrine into several early schools. In the third century BCE the emperor Aśoka, who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent, supported the Dharma and, according to tradition, sent missions abroad, including to Sri Lanka.

From around the beginning of the common era, the Mahāyāna movement produced new sūtras and a new ideal, the bodhisattva. Buddhism spread along the trade routes to Central Asia and China, where it was established by the first century CE, and from China to Korea and Japan. It reached Tibet in the seventh and eighth centuries. In India, after more than fifteen centuries, it declined; the destruction of the great monasteries such as Nālandā around 1200 is often taken as the end of its institutional presence there.

In the modern period, Buddhist reformers in Asia responded to colonialism and to Western science, and Buddhism spread to Europe and North America through immigration, scholarship and teachers such as D. T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, the fourteenth Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. Meditation practices derived from Buddhism have become widely known in secular forms.

  1. c. 5th c. BCEThe life and teaching of the Buddha
  2. 3rd c. BCEThe emperor Aśoka supports the Dharma
  3. c. 1st c. BCEThe Pali canon is written down in Sri Lanka
  4. c. 1st c. BCE–1st c. CEEarly Mahāyāna sūtras; Buddhism reaches China
  5. c. 2nd–3rd c.Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka
  6. 7th–8th c.Buddhism reaches Tibet
  7. c. 1200The destruction of Nālandā; decline of Buddhism in India
  8. 20th c.Buddhism spreads to Europe and North America

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

  • Contemplation, with Christian Mysticism

    Scholarship

    Buddhist meditation shares with contemplative traditions elsewhere a discipline of attention and stilling, and a description of stages through which the mind becomes quiet and clear.

  • Knowledge, with Advaita Vedānta

    Scholarship

    Both teach that liberation comes through insight that removes ignorance, rather than through ritual or the accumulation of merit alone.

Areas of divergence

  • Self, with Vedānta

    Scholarship

    Buddhism teaches non-self (anātman), directly opposing the Upaniṣadic affirmation of the self (ātman). The two traditions argued over this for more than a thousand years.

  • God, with Christian Mysticism

    Scholarship

    Buddhism does not teach a creator God. Its accounts of awakening are not accounts of union with a personal God, however close some descriptions may seem.

Cite this entry
Chicago (bibliography)

“Buddhism.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/buddhism.

Chicago (note)

“Buddhism,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/buddhism.

MLA

“Buddhism.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/buddhism.

BibTeX
@misc{traditions-buddhism,
  title = {{Buddhism}},
  howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society},
  note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/buddhism}
}

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