Buddhist philosophy
Buddhist philosophy is the elaboration and explanation of the delivered teachings of the Buddha as found in the Tripitaka and Agama. Its main concern is with explicating the dharmas constituting reality. A recurrent theme is the reification of concepts, and the subsequent return to the Buddhist middle way.
Early Buddhism avoided speculative thought on metaphysics, phenomenology, ethics, and epistemology, but was based instead on empirical evidence gained by the sense organs (ayatana).
Nevertheless, Buddhist scholars have addressed ontological and metaphysical issues subsequently. Particular points of Buddhist philosophy have often been the subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism. These elaborations and disputes gave rise to various schools in early Buddhism of Abhidhamma, and to the Mahayana traditions and schools of the prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, buddha-nature and Yogacara.
Indian background
The historical Buddha lived during a time of spiritual and philosophical revival in Northern India when the overly ritualistic practices of the vedas came under rational scrutiny.
As well as the Buddha's own teachings, new ethical and spiritual philosophies such as those of Mahavira became established during this period when alternatives to the mainstream religion arose in an atmosphere of freethought and renewed vitality in spiritual endeavour. This general cultural movement is today known as the Sramanic tradition and the epoch of new thought as the axial era.
These heterodox groups held widely divergent opinions but were united by a critical attitude towards the established religion whose explanations they found unsatisfactory and whose animal sacrifices increasingly distasteful and irrelevant. In Greece, China and India there was a return to fundamental questions and a new interest in the question of how humans should live.
Life and teachings of the Buddha
Biography
According to the traditional accounts, Gautama, the future Buddha,born into a Vedic Kshatriya family,was a prince who grew up in an environment of luxury and opulence. He became convinced that sense-pleasures and wealth did not provide the satisfaction that human beings longed for deep within. He abandoned worldly life to live as a mendicant. He studied under a number of teachers, developing his insight into the problem of suffering.
After his awakening he regarded himself as a physician rather than a philosopher. Whereas philosophers merely had views about things, he taught theNoble Eightfold Path which liberates from suffering.
Philosophy
The Buddha discouraged his followers from indulging in intellectual disputation for its own sake, which is fruitless, and distracting from true awakening. Nevertheless, the delivered sayings of the Buddha contain a philosophical component, in its teachings on the working of the mind, and its criticisms of the philosophies of his contemporaries.
According to the scriptures, during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions. These regarded issues such as whether the universe is eternal or non-eternal (or whether it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self, the complete inexistence of a person after Nirvana and death, and others.
Emphasis on awakening
One explanation for this silence is that such questions distract from activity that is practical to realizing enlightenment and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith.
Experience is [...] the path most elaborated in early Buddhism. The doctrine on the other hand was kept low. The Buddha avoided doctrinal formulations concerning the final reality as much as possible in order to prevent his followers from resting content with minor achievements on the path in which the absence of the final experience could be substituted by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith, a situation which sometimes occurs, in both varieties, in the context of Hindu systems of doctrine.
Attachments to the skandhas
Another explanation is that both affirmative and negative positions regarding these questions are based on attachment to and misunderstanding of the aggregates and senses. That is, when one sees these things for what they are, the idea of forming positions on such metaphysical questions simply does not occur.
Emptiness
Another closely related explanation is that reality is devoid of sensory mediation and conception, or empty, and therefore language itself is a priori inadequate without direct experience.
Thus, the Buddha's silence does not indicate misology or disdain for philosophy. Rather, it indicates that he viewed the answers to these questions as not understandable by the unenlightened. Dependent arising provides a framework for analysis of reality that is not based on metaphysical assumptions regarding existence or non-existence, but instead on imagining direct cognition of phenomena as they are presented to the mind. This informs and supports the Buddhist approach to liberation from adventitious distortion and engaging in the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Buddha of the earliest Buddhists texts describes Dharma (in the sense of "truth") as "beyond reasoning" or "transcending logic", in the sense that reasoning is a subjectively introduced aspect of the way unenlightened humans perceive things, and the conceptual framework which underpins their cognitive process, rather than a feature of things as they really are. Going "beyond reasoning" means in this context penetrating the nature of reasoning from the inside, and removing the causes for experiencing any future stress as a result of it, rather than functioning outside of the system as a whole.
Some Buddhist scholars assert words are inadequate to describe the goal of the Buddhist path, but concerning the usefulness of words in the path itself, schools differ radically.
Early Buddhism
Basic teachings
Certain basic teachings appear in many places throughout the early texts, so most scholars conclude that the Buddha must at least have taught these teachings:
Three marks of existence
Five aggregates
Dependent arising
Karma and rebirth
The four noble truths
The Noble Eightfold Path
Nirvana
According to these scholars, there was something they variously call "earliest Buddhism", "original Buddhism" or "pre-canonical Buddhism".
Some scholars disagree, and have proposed other theories. According to some scholars, the philosophical outlook of earliest Buddhism was primarily negative, in the sense that it focused on what doctrines to reject more than on what doctrines to accept.[a] Only knowledge that is useful in achieving enlightenment is valued. According to this theory, the cycle of philosophical upheavals that in part drove the diversification of Buddhism into its many schools and sects only began once Buddhists began attempting to make explicit the implicit philosophy of the Buddha and the early suttas.
Other scholars reject this theory. After the death of the Buddha, attempts were made to gather his teachings and transmit them in a commonly agreed form, first orally, then also in writing (the Tripiṭaka).
Dukkha
Dukkha, often translated as suffering, is the inherent unsatifactoriness of life. This unsatifactoriness drives our yearning for a better way of life, yet keeps us imprisoned in wordly existence and rebirth.
Dependent origination
The working of the rising and ceasing of suffering is explained by Pratitya-samutpada, dependent origination. It states that events are not predetermined, nor are they random. It rejects notions of direct causation, which are necessarily undergirded by a substantialist metaphysics. Instead, it posits the arising of events under certain conditions which are inextricable, such that the processes in question at no time, are considered to be entities.
Dependent origination posits that certain specific events, concepts, or realities are always dependent on other specific things. Craving, for example, is always dependent on, and caused by, emotion. Emotion is always dependent on contact with our surroundings. This chain of causation purports to show that the cessation of decay, death, and sorrow is indirectly dependent on the cessation of craving.
This concept leaves no room for the existence of everlasting, absolute entities. The world must be thought of in procedural terms, not in terms of things or substances. Likewise,
Anatta
The Buddha asserted the non inherently existent concept of the ego, in opposition to the Upanishadic concept of an unchanging ultimate self. The Buddha held that attachment to the appearance of a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering, and the main obstacle to liberation. The apparent ego is merely the result of identification with the temporary aggregates, the components of the individual human being's body and consciousness at any given moment in time.
Ethics
Eightfold Path
Although there are many ethical tenets in Buddhism that differ depending on whether one is a monk or a layman, and depending on individual schools, the Buddhist system of ethics can be summed up in the eightfold path:
And this, monks, is the noble truth of the way of practice leading to the cessation of suffering -- precisely this Noble Eightfold Path – right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
The purpose of living an ethical life is to escape the suffering inherent in samsara. Skillful actions condition the mind in a positive way and lead to future happiness, while the opposite is true for unskillful actions. Ethical discipline also provides the mental stability and freedom to embark upon mental cultivation via meditation.
The part of the Noble Eightfold path that covers morality/ethics is right speech, right action and right livelihood. The other parts cover concentration and wisdom, with wisdom being covered by right view and right intention and the remaining three belonging to concentration.
The three aggregates are not included under the noble eightfold path, friend Visakha, but the noble eightfold path is included under the three aggregates. Right speech, right action, & right livelihood come under the aggregate of virtue. Right effort, right mindfulness, & right concentration come under the aggregate of concentration. Right view & right resolve come under the aggregate of discernment.
Precepts
While the precepts for monks and nuns differ somewhat depending on which tradition one has ordained in (Tibetan, Thai Theravadan, etc.), the precepts for laymen and laywomen followers of the Buddha are the same.
There are the five precepts that all followers of the Buddha must observe if they hope to be reborn as a human being and there are the ten precepts which are an expansion of five precepts, with four of the five being repeated in the list of ten. So excluding the redundancy of the two lists, there are eleven precepts to follow. The five and ten precepts must be followed if one hopes to be reborn in one of the various heavenly realms. The eleven precepts are:
1) Do not kill
2) Do not steal
3) Do not commit sexual improprieties
4) Do not speak falsely (don't lie)
5) Do not speak harshly (yelling, insulting, etc.)
6) Do not speak divisively or slanderously
7) Do not speak thoughtlessly (no unnecessary speech, idle chit-chat)
8) Do not covet
9) Do not have ill will toward others (don't maliciously wish harm on others)
10) Do not hold wrong views (believe in karma, understand the four noble truths, etc.) 11) Do not use intoxicants (the one precept of the five precepts that is not repeated in the list of the ten precepts)
Textual authority
Decisive in distinguishing Buddhism from what is commonly called Hinduism is the issue of epistemological justification.
All schools of Indian logic recognize various sets of valid justifications for knowledge, or pramāṇa. Buddhism recognizes a set that is smaller than the others. For some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism the received textual tradition is an epistemological category equal to perception and inference (although this is not necessarily true for some other schools).
Thus, in the Hindu schools, if a claim was made that could not be substantiated by appeal to the textual canon, it would be considered as ridiculous as a claim that the sky was green and, conversely, a claim which could not be substantiated via conventional means might still be justified through textual reference, differentiating this from the epistemology of modern science. It must also be remembered that most Hindu schools do believe that logical inference and perception of the sense organs is the most effective means testing of a claim .
Early Buddhist schools
The main early Buddhist philosophical schools are the Abhidharma schools, particularly Sarvāstivāda and Theravāda.
Sarvastivadin realism
Early Buddhist philosophers and exegetes of the Sarvāstivādins created a pluralist metaphysical and phenomenological system, in which all experiences of people, things and events can be broken down into smaller and smaller perceptual or perceptual-ontological units called "dharmas".
Other schools incorporated some parts of this theory and criticized others. The Sautrāntikas, another early school, and the Theravādins, now the only modern survivor of the early Buddhist schools, criticized the realist standpoint of the Sarvāstivādins.
Theravada
Theravada promotes the concept of vibhajjavada (Pāli, literally "Teaching of Analysis") to non-Buddhists. This doctrine says that insight must come from the aspirant's experience, critical investigation, and reasoning instead of by blind faith. As the Buddha said according to the canonical scriptures:
Do not accept anything by mere tradition ... Do not accept anything just because it accords with your scriptures ... Do not accept anything merely because it agrees with your pre-conceived notions ... But when you know for yourselves—these things are moral, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when performed and undertaken, conduce to well-being and happiness—then do you live acting accordingly.
Mahayana
Mahayana often adopts a pragmatic concept of truth: doctrines are regarded as conditionally "true" in the sense of being spiritually beneficial. In modern (State controlled) Chinese Buddhism, all doctrinal traditions are regarded as equally valid.
Main Mahayana philosophical schools and traditions include the prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, Tathagatagarbha, Yogācāra, Huayan, and Tiantai schools.
Indian Mahayana
Prajnaparamita
The Prajanaparamita-sutras emphasize the emptiness of the five skandhas. The Heart sutra, a text from the prajnaparamita-sutras, articulates this in the following saying in which the five skandhas are said to be "empty":
"Oh, Sariputra, Form Does not Differ From the Void,
And the Void Does Not Differ From Form.
Form is Void and Void is Form;
The Same is True For Feelings,
Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness".
Madhyamaka
The Mahāyānist Nāgārjuna, one of the most influential Buddhist thinkers, promoted classical Buddhist emphasis on phenomena and attacked Sarvāstivāda realism and Sautrāntika nominalism in his magnum opus, The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā).
Nagarjuna asserted a direct connection between, even identity of, dependent origination, selflessness (anatta), and emptiness (śūnyatā). He pointed out that implicit in the early Buddhist concept of dependent origination is the lack of any substantial being (anatta) underlying the participants in origination, so that they have no independent existence, a state identified as emptiness śūnyatā, or emptiness of a nature or essence (svabhāva).
Tathagatagarbha
The tathāgathagarbha sutras, in a departure from mainstream Buddhist language, insist that the potential for awakening is inherent to every sentient being. They marked a shift from a largely apophatic (negative) philosophical trend within Buddhism to a decidedly more cataphatic (positive) modus.
Prior to the period of these scriptures, Mahāyāna metaphysics had been dominated by teachings on emptiness in the form of Madhyamaka philosophy. The language used by this approach is primarily negative, and the tathāgatagarbha genre of sutras can be seen as an attempt to state orthodox Buddhist teachings of dependent origination using positive language instead, to prevent people from being turned away from Buddhism by a false impression of nihilism.
In these sutras the perfection of the wisdom of not-self is stated to be the true self; the ultimate goal of the path is then characterized using a range of positive language that had been used previously in Indian philosophy by essentialist philosophers, but which was now transmuted into a new Buddhist vocabulary to describe a being who has successfully completed the Buddhist path.
The word "self" (atman) is used in a way idiosyncratic to these sutras; the "true self" is described as the perfection of the wisdom of not-self in the Buddha-Nature Treatise, for example. Language that had previously been used by essentialist non-Buddhist philosophers was now adopted, with new definitions, by Buddhists to promote orthodox teachings.
The tathāgatagarbha does not, according to some scholars, represent a substantial self; rather, it is a positive language expression of emptiness and represents the potentiality to realize Buddhahood through Buddhist practices. In this interpretation, the intention of the teaching of tathāgatagarbha is soteriological rather than theoretical.
The tathāgathagarbha, the Theravāda doctrine of bhavaṅga, and the Yogācāra store consciousness were all identified at some point with the luminous mind of the Nikāyas.
In the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Buddha insists that while pondering upon Dharma is vital, one must then relinquish fixation on words and letters, as these are utterly divorced from liberation and the Buddha-nature.
Yogacara
The Yogacara-school tries to explain the arising of suffering by explaining the workings of our mind. It takes the concepts of the five skandhas and the six consciousnesses, to explain how manas creates vijnapti, concepts to which we cling.
Chinese Buddhism
Huayan and Avatamsaka-sutra
The Huayan developed the doctrine of "interpenetration" or "coalescence" (Wylie: zung-'jug; Sanskrit: yuganaddha), based on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture. It holds that all phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) are intimately connected (and mutually arising). Two images are used to convey this idea. The first is known as Indra's net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that beings can be liberated from suffering. The doctrine of interpenetration influenced the Japanese monk Kūkai, who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism. It is iconographically represented by yab-yum. Interpenetration and essence-function are mutually informing in the East Asian Buddhist traditions, especially the Korean Buddhist tradition.
Tibetan Buddhism
The Tibetan tantra entitled the "All-Creating King" (Kunjed Gyalpo Tantra) also emphasizes how Buddhist realization lies beyond the range of discursive/verbal thought and is ultimately mysterious. Samantabhadra, states there:
The mind of perfect purity ... is beyond thinking and inexplicable..."
Also later, the famous Indian Buddhist practitioner and teacher, mahasiddha Tilopa discouraged any intellectual activity in his six words of advice.
Comparison with other philosophies
Baruch Spinoza, though he argued for the existence of a permanent reality, asserts that all phenomenal existence is transitory. In his opinion sorrow is conquered "by finding an object of knowledge which is not transient, not ephemeral, but is immutable, permanent, everlasting." Buddhism teaches that such a quest is bound to fail. David Hume, after a relentless analysis of the mind, concluded that consciousness consists of fleeting mental states. Hume's Bundle theory is a very similar concept to the Buddhist skandhas, though his denial of causation lead him to opposite conclusions in other areas. Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy had some parallels in Buddhism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's "word games" closely parallel the warning that intellectual speculation is a red herring to understanding, as found in the Buddhist Parable of the Poison Arrow. Friedrich Nietzsche, although himself dismissive of Buddhism as yet another nihilism, developed his philosophy of accepting life-as-it-exists[clarification needed] and self-cultivation, which is extremely similar to Buddhism as better understood in the West. Heidegger's ideas on being and nothingness have been held by some[who?] to be similar to Buddhism today.
An alternative approach to the comparison of Buddhist thought with Western philosophy is to use the concept of the Middle Way in Buddhism as a critical tool for the assessment of Western philosophies. In this way Western philosophies can be classified in Buddhist terms as eternalist or nihilist. In a Buddhist view all philosophies are to be considered non-essential.
