Buddhism

A throne with no one on it

On the carved stone gateways of the great stupa at Sanchi, in central India, made around the first century BCE, crowds of devotees bow, garland, and worship — and at the center of their reverence, again and again, there is nobody there. They kneel before an empty throne beneath a tree. They venerate a pair of footprints, a wheel, a riderless horse, a parasol shading an absence. For roughly three centuries after his death, this is how Buddhists depicted the Buddha: by not depicting him at all. The founder was present in the art only as a gap, a space, a symbol of someone who had passed beyond depiction.

It is the most fitting possible introduction to the tradition, because the man these symbols point to taught the most radical idea in this entire archive: that there is, at the deepest level, no permanent self — not in you, not in anyone, not even, in the end, in the enlightened one who "blew out" like a flame. The empty throne is not just an artistic convention; it is a doctrine in stone. This chapter is about Buddhism in its earliest form — the historical Buddha, his teaching, and the community and empire that carried it from a renunciant's insight in the Ganges valley to one of the world's great religions.

The man, and the limits of his story

The founder was Siddhartha Gautama, a man of the Shakya people of the Ganges plain (in what is now the India–Nepal border region), later called the Buddha, "the Awakened One." That a real teacher existed is not seriously doubted. But — an educational caution that matters — we cannot write his biography with confidence, because the detailed life-stories are later and heavily legendary, and even his dates are disputed: the traditional reckoning puts him at about 563–483 BCE, while much recent scholarship favors a "short chronology" of roughly 480–400 BCE. The absence of any contemporary inscription naming him means we depend on texts written down centuries later.

The traditional story, told for its meaning as much as its history, runs like this. A sheltered prince, shielded by his father from all suffering, ventures out and encounters the Four Sights — an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a serene wandering ascetic — and is shattered by the discovery of aging, sickness, and death. He abandons palace, wife, and child (the Great Renunciation), and for years practices extreme asceticism, nearly starving himself, before concluding that self-torture is as useless as self-indulgence. Choosing a Middle Way between them, he sits beneath a fig tree at Bodh Gaya and attains enlightenment (bodhi) — seeing, at last, the truth of suffering and its end. He preaches his first sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath — "turning the wheel of the Dharma" — gathers disciples, teaches for forty-five years, and dies (attains final nirvana, parinirvana) at Kushinagar.

The world that made him: the śramaṇa ferment

The Buddha did not appear from nowhere. The Ganges plain of his day was in religious upheaval. A movement of śramaṇas — "strivers," wandering renunciants — had risen in open revolt against the religion of Chapter 5: they rejected the authority of the Brahmin priests, the efficacy of the Vedic sacrifice, and the whole apparatus of ritual, and sought liberation instead through meditation, ethics, and ascetic discipline. Buddhism was one śramaṇa movement among several; its great contemporary was Jainism (founded by Mahavira), and there were others — the fatalist Ajivikas, outright materialists, and more. What they shared was a question the Vedic sacrifice could not answer: not "how do we please the gods?" but "how do we escape suffering and the endless round of rebirth?"

The other great śramaṇa path: Jainism

The most important of the Buddha's fellow-strivers deserves its own portrait, for Jainism is a complete tradition in its own right — and one that has survived continuously to the present. Its great teacher was Mahavira ("Great Hero," born Vardhamana), an older contemporary of the Buddha and, in Jain reckoning, not a founder at all but the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara — a "ford-maker" who crosses the river of rebirth and shows the way, latest in a line of enlightened teachers reaching back through cosmic time. Like the Buddha, Mahavira renounced a princely life, practiced years of severe austerity, and attained omniscience (kevala jnana).

But where Buddhism denied the self, Jainism affirms an eternal soul, the jiva, present in every living thing — and its whole path is the effort to free that soul from the literal weight of karma, conceived not as an abstract law but as a fine material substance that clings to the soul through harmful action and drags it down. The way to shed it is renunciation and, above all, an ahimsa (non-harming) more radical than any other tradition's: the devout Jain sweeps the path before stepping, strains drinking water, wears a mouth-cloth, and forgoes agriculture and many foods, because all life — down to the one-sensed beings in earth, water, and air — must not be injured. From this flow the Five Great Vows (non-violence, truth, non-stealing, celibacy, and non-possession) and the spiritual heroism of sallekhana, the voluntary fast to death undertaken serenely at life's end.

Jainism's most distinctive intellectual contribution is anekantavada, the doctrine of the "many-sidedness" of reality: no single viewpoint captures the whole truth, famously illustrated by the blind men each describing one part of an elephant — a built-in philosophical humility rare in the ancient world. The tradition later split into two great communities, the Digambara ("sky-clad," whose most austere monks go naked) and the Svetambara ("white-clad"), over monastic practice and whether a woman can win liberation in her present birth. That Jainism affirms the very soul the Buddha denied, from within the same renunciant ferment, is the sharpest reminder of how genuinely plural the Axial-Age Ganges world was.

The teaching: four truths and a missing self

The Buddha framed his core insight as the Four Noble Truths — presented, in the manner of the physician he is often compared to, as a diagnosis and a cure:

1. Dukkha — life as we live it is pervaded by suffering, unsatisfactoriness, a fundamental unease; even pleasures are fleeting and end in loss. 2. The origin of dukkha is craving (tanha) — the thirst for pleasure, for existence, for things to be other than they are. 3. The cessation of dukkha is possible: extinguish craving, and suffering ends. This is nirvana. 4. The way to that cessation is the Noble Eightfold Path — right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration — traditionally grouped into wisdom, ethical conduct, and meditation.

Underlying this is the Buddha's analysis of reality in three marks of existence: anicca (everything is impermanent, in ceaseless flux), dukkha (this impermanence makes clinging painful), and — the revolutionary one — anatta, or non-self: there is no permanent, unchanging soul or essence in a person or in anything. What we call a "self" is a bundle of ever-changing processes (the five aggregates — body, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness), with no fixed "I" behind them.

Here the educational payoff of the Vedic chapter arrives. The Upanishads (Chapter 5) had taught the tradition's deepest secret: that within you is the atman, the true, eternal Self, identical with the absolute Brahman, and that liberation is finding it. The Buddha's anatta is the flat contradiction of this: there is no such Self to find. Where the Upanishadic sage sought and discovered the true self, the Buddha looked and found only a stream of conditioned processes — and taught that clinging to the illusion of a permanent self is the very root of suffering. Two of the greatest religions of the East diverge on precisely this point.

How, then, can there be rebirth without a soul to be reborn? This is Buddhism's famous puzzle, and the answer is dependent origination (pratityasamutpada): nothing exists as an independent substance; everything arises in dependence on conditions, in a shifting web of cause and effect. Rebirth is not a soul migrating but a causal continuity — like one flame lighting another, the second neither the same as the first nor entirely different. Karma (action) drives this continuity, an impersonal moral law by which deeds shape future states, but there is no eternal self that "has" the karma. And nirvana — literally "blowing out," as of a flame — is the extinguishing of the fires of craving, the unconditioned peace beyond the round of rebirth. The Buddha deliberately refused to define it as either annihilation or eternal existence; it is, he suggested, beyond such categories.

That refusal was a method, not an evasion. Asked the great metaphysical questions — is the universe eternal? is there a soul that survives? — the Buddha often kept a famous silence, telling the parable of a man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows who shot it and why: he will die first. Liberation from suffering, not speculation, was the point. And note what is absent from the whole system: there is no creator god. Gods (devas) exist in Buddhist cosmology, but they too are trapped in the round of rebirth, not creators and not saviors. Buddhism is, at its root, non-theistic — a path of liberation that does not run through a deity.

Buddhism has its mythic drama all the same. The round of rebirth (samsara) turns through six realms — from the hell-beings and hungry ghosts, through animals and humans, up to the jealous demigods and the long-lived gods — into any of which one may be reborn according to karma, none of them permanent, all still bound to suffering, and only a human birth well placed to win release. And presiding over the whole cycle is Mara — "Death," the tempter, the lord of desire — who in the tradition assailed the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree with armies, storms, and his seductive daughters to break his resolve, and whom the Buddha overcame simply by touching the earth to witness his right to awaken. Mara is not a devil in the Zoroastrian or biblical sense but the personification of everything — craving, distraction, mortality — that keeps beings turning on the wheel. (An honesty note: the elaborate painted "Wheel of Life" that depicts all this, familiar from Tibetan art, is a later development and should not be read back into the earliest period.)

Ethics and the community

Buddhist morality flows from the same insight: because all beings suffer and are bound in the same web, the response is compassion (karuna) and loving-kindness (metta), and above all ahimsa, non-harming. For laypeople the ethical core is the Five Precepts: to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and intoxicants. There is no divine lawgiver behind these; they are the natural conduct of one who understands karma and seeks release.

The Buddha founded a community, the Sangha — the order of monks (bhikkhus) and, notably, nuns (bhikkhunis), which he established (tradition says) at the request of his foster-mother Mahaprajapati, though the texts record his hesitation and the imposition of additional rules on the nuns, an ambivalence scholars still discuss. Monastic life was governed by an elaborate code, the Vinaya. Monks and laity lived in reciprocity: the laity gave food and support (dana, generous giving, which earns merit), and the monks gave the teaching. At the center of Buddhist devotion stood — and stands — the Three Jewels or Three Refuges: I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma (the teaching), and in the Sangha (the community).

The texts, and the empire that spread them

The Buddha wrote nothing, and for centuries his teaching was carried orally. Tradition says that shortly after his death the First Council convened, where his attendant Ananda recited the discourses and the monk Upali the monastic rules, fixing the memorized canon. Over time the movement split into some eighteen early schools; the one whose scriptures survive most fully is the Theravada ("Teaching of the Elders"), whose Pali Canon — the Tipitaka, "Three Baskets" — comprises the Vinaya (discipline), the Sutta (discourses), and the Abhidhamma (systematic philosophy). It was committed to writing only around the first century BCE, in Sri Lanka. (The great Mahayana transformation of Buddhism belongs to a later era and a later chapter.)

The single figure who turned a regional movement into a world religion was the emperor Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE). Ruler of the vast Mauryan empire, he converted to Buddhism — remorseful, the tradition says, after the bloodshed of his conquest of Kalinga — and used the machinery of empire to promote the Dharma. He had edicts proclaiming Buddhist ethics inscribed on rocks and polished stone pillars across the subcontinent (these edicts are, incidentally, the earliest datable Buddhist evidence we possess), redistributed the Buddha's relics into countless stupas, and sent missionaries abroad — most consequentially to Sri Lanka, whence Theravada Buddhism would spread across Southeast Asia. Ashoka is to Buddhism something like what Constantine would later be to Christianity: the imperial patron who made a world religion.

What the ground shows

The material record is rich from Ashoka onward: his pillars (the four-lion capital from Sarnath is now the state emblem of India) and rock edicts; the pillar at Lumbini marking the traditional birthplace; and the great stupa complexes at Sanchi and Bharhut, whose reliefs give us early Buddhist art — including, as we began, its striking aniconism. The first anthropomorphic images of the Buddha appear only around the first century CE, in Gandhara (northwest Pakistan/Afghanistan) and Mathura — and the Gandharan Buddhas, with their wavy hair and toga-like robes, show the unmistakable influence of Greek art, carried east in the wake of Alexander (Chapter 8): one of history's most beautiful cross-cultural fusions, Greco-Buddhist sculpture.

The believer's lens

To the Buddhist, the Buddha is not a god to be worshipped but a physician and awakened teacher who diagnosed the deepest human sickness and prescribed its cure. The diagnosis is the Four Noble Truths: life as we grasp at it is shot through with dukkha (unsatisfactoriness); its cause is craving; craving can cease; and the way to its cessation is the Eightfold Path of ethical, meditative, and wisdom practice. Behind it lies the radical insight of anattā — that there is no fixed, permanent self at all, only a flow of conditioned processes — and of dependent origination, the web of causes by which craving spins the wheel of rebirth. To follow the path is to loosen the grip of craving and ignorance until, at last, the fire goes out: nirvāṇa, the unconditioned peace beyond birth and death. From inside, this is not pessimism but the most practical hope imaginable — that suffering has a cause, and the cause can be removed, by anyone willing to walk the path.

The skeptical lens

The historian notes at once that the life of the Buddha as usually told is a later, layered, and miracle-laden construction — the earliest connected biographies postdate him by centuries — so that while a wandering teacher named Siddhārtha Gautama in the śramaṇa ferment of the Ganges plain around the fifth century BCE is historically credible, the vivid particulars (the four sights, the palace, the demon Māra) are read as tradition, not documentary fact. His teachings, too, were transmitted orally for centuries before the Pali Canon was written down (traditionally in the first century BCE), so recovering the Buddha's own words beneath the tradition is genuinely difficult. The doctrines themselves — anattā, karma, rebirth, nirvāṇa — are profound philosophical and contemplative claims, described here as the tradition holds them, neither proven nor refuted; whether there is rebirth, or an unconditioned freedom to be reached, is not a question the historical record can settle. What it can attest is the movement, its texts, its spread, and the emperor Ashoka who carried it across Asia.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The eloquence of absence. Early Buddhist aniconism is itself the tradition's first great act of sacred encoding. To show the Buddha by an empty throne, a footprint, a Bodhi tree, a parasol, or a wheel was to say something words could not: that the Awakened One had passed beyond form and being into nirvana, and could not be caught in an image. Absence, here, is the most exact presence.

The wheel. The central Buddhist symbol is the Dharmachakra, the wheel of the Dharma, and it is an encoded doctrine: its eight spokes stand for the Noble Eightfold Path, its hub for discipline, its rim for the mindfulness that holds all together. To "turn the wheel" is to teach; Ashoka set it atop his pillars as the sign of a realm ruled by Dharma, and it turns, today, on the flag of India.

The stupa as cosmos. The stupa — the domed mound raised over a relic — is architecture as cosmology: the hemispherical dome an image of the world-egg or the heavens, a central axis (the mast and its parasols) as the axis of the universe, the relic at the heart the still point of the sacred. Worshippers circumambulate it clockwise, walking the cosmos in miniature.

Teaching by number. The most pervasive and distinctive Buddhist "encoding" is its relentless use of numbered lists — the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Marks, the Three Jewels, the Five Precepts, the Five Aggregates, the Twelve links of dependent origination, the Three Poisons. This is not arbitrary: in an oral tradition, the numbered list (the matika) is a memory technology, a scaffold that lets a vast teaching be held exactly in the mind and recited without loss — the same problem the Vedic reciters solved with their interlocking patterns (Chapter 5), solved here by enumeration. The lotus (purity rising unstained from the mud), the Bodhi tree, and the auspicious swastika (Chapter 9) round out the early symbolic vocabulary. An honesty note: the elaborate mantras, mandalas, and iconography that many associate with Buddhism belong largely to the later Mahayana and Tantric developments, and should not be read back into this austere early period.

Connections

Buddhism's deepest tie is to Chapter 5: it is a child and a rebel of the Vedic world, sharing its vocabulary of karma, rebirth, and samsara while rejecting its sacrifice, its priesthood, and — most sharply — its atman. It is the sibling of Jainism and a member of the śramaṇa ferment. Across the Axial Age, it belongs with the other great transformations this era gathers: Confucius and the Chinese sages, the Greek philosophers (Chapter 8's world, coming to flower), and the prophets and sages of Israel (Chapters 7 and 10) — all, in Karl Jaspers's famous phrase, part of the "Axial Age" in which humanity turned, across Eurasia, toward inwardness, ethics, and transcendence. Forward, Buddhism's story is only beginning: the Mahayana and its bodhisattvas, the spread to China, Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Japan, and the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara all belong to later chapters of this archive.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch11.html · a comparative library of the sacred.