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| Buddhism |
| Terms and concepts |
| History |
| People |
| Schools and sects |
| Texts |
| Temples |
| Culture |
| Buddhism by region |
| Timeline |
| List of topics |
Buddhist philosophy is the branch of Eastern philosophy based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha (c. 563 BC - c. 483 BC). Buddhist philosophy deals extensively with problems in metaphysics, phenomenology, ethics, and epistemology.
From its inception, Buddhism has had a strong philosophical component. Buddhism is founded on the rejection of certain orthodox philosophical concepts, in which the Buddha had been instructed by various teachers. Buddhism rejects theism, monism, and dualism alike. The Buddha criticized all concepts of metaphysical being, and this critique is inextricable from the founding of Buddhism.
Particular points of Buddhist philosophizing have often been the subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism. Metaphysical questions such as "Is there a god?" and "Does the soul (Atman) really exist?" have divided the Buddha's followers even during his own lifetime, and epistemological debates over the proper modes of evidence have always been lively in Buddhism.
Readers should note that theory for its own sake is not valued in Buddhism, but theory pursued in the interest of enlightenment for oneself or others is fully consistent with Buddhist values and ethics.
Some have asserted that Buddhism as a whole is a philosophy rather than a religion. Proponents of such a view may argue that (a) Buddhism is non-theistic (i.e., it has no special use for the existence or nonexistence of a god or gods) or atheistic and (b) religions necessarily involve some form of theism. Others might contest either part of such an argument. Other arguments for Buddhism "as" philosophy may claim that Buddhism does not have doctrines in the same sense as other religions; the Buddha himself taught that a person should accept a teaching only if one's own experience verifies it.
Arguments against Buddhism as a philosophy might call attention to the way Buddhism's pervasive inconclusion of supernatural entities (not "gods" in the sense of Western monotheism, of course), to what most scholars identify as worship practices (ceremonial reverence of saints, etc.), to Buddhism's thoroughly developed hierarchies of clergy (not usually characteristic of a "philosophy"), and its overall religious organization.
A third perspective might take the position that Buddhism can be practiced either as a religion or as a philosophy. A similar distinction is often made with reference to Taoism.
Lama Anagorika Govinda expressed it as follows in the book 'A Living Buddhism for the West':
It should also be noted that in the South and East Asian cultures in which Buddhism achieved most of its development, the distinction between philosophy and religion is somewhat unclear and possibly quite spurious, so this is may be a semantic problem arising in the West alone.
Decisive in distinguishing Buddhism from what is commonly called Hinduism is the issue of epistemological justification. The schools of Indian logic recognize a certain set of valid justifications for knowledge, while Buddhism recognizes a smaller set. Both accept perception and argument, for example, but for the orthodox schools, the received textual tradition (e.g., the Vedas) is in itself an epistemological category equal to perception and argument, so that to make a claim that was unsubstantiable by appeal to the textual canon would be as ridiculous as to claim the sky was green.
Buddhism, on the other hand, rejected an inflexible reverence of accepted doctrine. As the Buddha said:
In earliest Buddhism and today still in Theravāda, any metaphysical essence or being underlying the play of phenomenal experience is rejected. No "soul" or permanent self was recognized, and the perception of a continuous identity was held to be an illusion.
This teaching, known as anatta, brought up many questions. If there is no ātman or Brahman underlying the objects and events of the universe, how could they be explained? What gave them their existence? And if there was no "self", who makes the decisions we think we make, and what gets reincarnated?
Early Buddhist philosophers and exegetes 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. These dharmas (roughly synonymous with "phenomena") were interpreted differently by different schools: some held they were real, some held only some were real, some held all were illusory, some held they were empty, some held they were intrinsically associated with suffering, etc.
Other debates in metaphysics and phenomenology include the issue of the Pudgala, or "person", which was inserted by the Pudgalavada school to replace the ātman as that which transmigrates and that which carries the burden of karma from one life to another. Other schools made unsurprising objection to this. There were further sub-debates regarding whether the pudgala was real or illusory or something in between. The Yogacara school, somewhat later, would later elevate the mind to act as a substitute for Brahman, much as the Pudgala replaces the ātman.
In many or all of these debates, some would point out the irony of pursuing questions which the Buddha was often prone to refuse to answer, on the grounds that they were non-conducive to enlightenment.
For more detailed information, see Schools of Buddhism and the individual schools themselves.
The original positive Buddhist contribution to the field of metaphysics is pratītyasamutpāda, which arises from the Buddhist critique of Indian theories of causality. It states that events are not predetermined, nor are they random, and it rejects notions of direct causation owing to the need for such theories in the Indian context to be undergirded by a substantialist metaphysics. Instead, it posits the arising of events under certain conditions which are inextricable, such that the units in question at no time have independent existence.
Pratitya-samutpada goes on to posit that certain specific events, concepts, or realities are always dependent on other specific things. Craving, for example, is alway 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, and ultimately dependant on a an all-encompassing stillness.
Nāgārjuna, one of the most influential Buddhist philosophers, asserted a direct connection between, even identity of, dependent origination, anatta, and 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 (sva-bhāva). This element of Nāgārjuna's thought is relatively uncontroversial, but it opens the way for his identification of saṃsāra and The following article is about the term Nirvana in the context of Buddhism. See Nirvana (disambiguation) for other meanings.
| Buddhism |
| Terms and concepts |
| History |
| People |
| Schools and sects |
| Texts |
| Temples |
| Culture |
| Buddhism by region |
| Timeline |
| List of topics |
In Buddhism, nirvāṇa (from the Sanskrit -- Pali: Nibbāna -- Chinese: Nie4 Pan2 (涅槃)), literally "extinction" or "extinguishing", is the culmination of the Buddhist pursuit of liberation. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, described Buddhism as a raft which, after floating across a river, will enable the passenger to reach nirvana. Hinduism also uses nirvana as a synonym to its ideas of moksha, and it is spoken of in several Hindu tantric texts as well as the Bhagavad Gita.
Etymologically, nirvana connotes an extinguishing or "blowing out" of a fire or candle flame, and in the Buddhist context carries the further connotations of stilling, cooling, and peace. In nirvana, all greed, aversion, delusion, ignorance, craving and ego-centered consciousness are extinguished.
In Indian physics during the time of Gautama Buddha, when a fire was extinguished it went into a state of latency. Rather than ceasing to exist, it became dormant and unbound from any particular fuel, it became diffused throughout the cosmos. When the Buddha used the image to explain nibbana to the Indian Brahmins of his day, he bypassed the question of whether an extinguished fire continues to exist or not, and focused instead on the impossibility of defining a fire that doesn't burn: thus his statement that the person who has gone totally "out" can't be described.
As a negation of saṁsāra (i.e., the whole phenomenal world), nirvana is impossible to define directly; it can only be experienced or realized. One may not even be able to say this, since saying this implies the existence of an experiencing subject--which in fact would not persist after full nirvāṇa. While some of the side-effects of nirvana can be identified, a definition of nirvāṇa can only be approximated by what it is not. It is not the clinging existence with which man is understood to be afflicted. It is not any sort of becoming. It has no origin or end. It is not made or fabricated. It has no dualities, so that it cannot be described in words. It has no parts that may be distinguished one from another. It is not a subjective state of consciousness. It is not conditioned on or by anything else.
Calling "nirvana" the opposite of samsara may not be doctrinally accurate since even in early Buddhism and by the time of Nāgārjuna, there are teachings of the identity of nirvana and samsara. However, even here it is assumed that the natural man suffers from at the very least a confusion regarding the nature of samsara.
We can also say that, given the vital importance of the idea of anatta (Pāli; Sanskrit: Anātman), which negates not merely the grasping mind but also any concept of essential substance or permanent self, it is clear that nirvāṇa is not to be understood as a union with monistic ideal. Since there is essentially no self and no not-self, there is nothing to unite, instead it is an experience of non-separation.
It should also be noted that the Buddha discouraged certain lines of speculation, including speculation into the state of an enlightened being after death, on the grounds that these were not useful for pursuing enlightenment; thus definitions of nirvāṇa might be said to be doctrinally unimportant.
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