My aim here is to list and correct some common misnomers about Buddhism. These misconceptions are common among people in Western societies who know something about Buddhism — they seem to be part of what passes for common “knowledge” about Buddhism — so readers who know very little about Buddhism might wonder what all the fuss is about.
In identifying misnomers, I have tried to stick to things that most scholars would agree are untrue, and in providing correctives, to things most would agree are true. In other words, I hope this gives a short list of “some of the most common things Buddhist scholars think non-specialists get wrong about Buddhism”.
- Buddhism is “more of a philosophy (or a ‘way of life’) than a religion”. (Buddhism requires no faith. Buddhism is atheist. Buddhism is an atheist religion. Buddhism is a philosophy.)
- Buddhist meditation is mainly a matter of 1) making your mind totally blank, or 2) of “just observing” your physical sensations and mental contents.
- Buddhism is “pessimistic”.
- Buddhism is “other-worldly”.
- Nirvāṇa is a state of complete personal annihilation.
- Theravāda is “original” Buddhism, or the oldest form of Buddhism.
- One of the two major “schools” of Buddhism is “Hīnayāna” or “the Lesser Vehicle”.
- The defining feature of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths – or some other doctrine, such as No-Self, conditioned co-arising (pratiītyasamutpāda), the emptiness of all things (sarvadharmaśūnyatā) etc.
- Buddhism is the only genuinely non-violent major world religion.
By the same token, of course, I am only one person, and I can only say what I think, in light of what I know professionally. It remains possible, then — even likely — that my choice of topics, and what I have said about each, have been governed in part by my own particular interests and opinions.
Buddhism is “more of a philosophy (or a ‘way of life’) than a religion”
Whether this common proposition is true depends, of course, entirely on how you define the relevant terms: “philosophy”, “religion”, and even “Buddhism”! Often, such exercises in definition and labelling tell us less about the phenomena ostensibly under discussion, and more about the categories held by the person doing the analysis. However, as it is usually used, I guess this statement is understood to mean two main things:
- Buddhism is not “religious”, in some relevant way that some other religion is (usually Christianity). This is often taken to be a good thing, moreover, because we are often critically aware of various things religion has done or required — violence and blind faith are often raised as examples — that we do not like. Buddhism is taken to be free of these problems, and thus, perhaps, by implication, to represent a viable alternative to those disgruntled with a “religion” they know better (and by the label of “religion”).
- In calling Buddhism a “philosophy”, people often seem to imply such things as: it is entirely amenable to rational disputation and analysis; it requires unquestioning acceptance of no tenets; it attempts to provide guidelines for wise living with no necessary reference to notions of the supernatural or assumptions incompatible with a “sensible” (common-sensical or scientific) view of the world.
There are several problems with this statement.
First, it seems closely related to another common misnomer, that Buddhism requires no faith.
It is true, I think, that most Buddhist systems give a lesser place to faith in their soteriological schemes (their schemes of how people are saved), in comparison to Christianity, where faith alone is often taken as the acid-test of a person’s qualifications for salvation, or faith alone is capable of saving. By the same token, however, Buddhism also understands that the only “people” or “entities” (all such terms are problematic in application to a Buddha) that can truly understand the liberatory teachings are Buddhas, or other fully liberated beings like arhats (those saved by the teaching of a Buddha, rather than by their own efforts alone). Until one is fully liberated, then, one is incapable of fully understanding the teaching, let alone evaluating whether it is true or false. Traversing the Buddhist path therefore requires open-minded entertainment of the possibility of truth in doctrines of which one cannot yet, by virtue of one’s unenlightened nature, fully understand; and it therefore requires at least that much faith in the teachings and the Buddhas who teach them. Notwithstanding injunctions found in some texts to assess the truth of all teachings ourselves, this is faith, of an important kind. I suspect that the high degree in which Buddhism is supposed to require no faith has more to do with a modern allergy to the notion of faith.
The idea that Buddhism is “not a religion” also seems to be connected to another misnomer, that is, that Buddhism is atheist. This is sometimes expressed in the quasi-paradoxical form Buddhism is an atheist religion.
Plenty of definitions of the word “religion” in English still hinge on the notion of a creator-God, but comparison of many religions shows that belief in such a God is not always central or foundational, so that this definition is a hangover from the religious-cultural heritage of English-speaking cultures, not an incontrovertible fact about the nature of all religions. Buddhism does not entertain the notion of such a God, but it cannot be disqualified from being a religion for that reason alone.
If we broaden the sense of “atheist” to mean “belief that there are no gods (plural)”, then almost all traditional forms of Buddhism are clearly not atheist. Buddhism easily recognises the existence of many gods (devas or devatās) — many of them the same ones found in other Indian religions; some of them derived from other cultures Buddhism spread to. It just doesn’t think gods are so special, to put it bluntly. Gods are more powerful than ordinary human beings, sure — but they are nothing compared to Buddhas, who really are the best beings conceivable. In particular, these gods, on Buddhist views, can play little real role in saving sentient beings and assuring their true welfare. Only Buddhas (and like beings) can do that. Perhaps Buddhism is “atheist” in the sense that it does not centre on gods, but it certainly recognises their existence, and can hardly said to be atheist in that regard.
We might also ask, not whether Buddhism names its most important being(s) “god”, but what characteristics those beings have. A meaningful sense of “god”, in the sense that “theism” is a belief system centring on such a “god”, is that a god is a supernatural being with many superlative qualities, such as all-power, all-good, and so on. In an excellent book called On Being Buddha, Paul Griffiths has compared standard Buddhist ideas about the nature of Buddhas with Catholic theology about the qualities of God, to show that they are very similar. He characterises this overall similarity by saying that both systems are about “maximally great” beings. Once we stop quibbling about the name, then, Buddhism may be much closer to nominally “theist” religions than it looks at first glance.
It also seems that claims that “Buddhism is not a religion” typically define religion in terms of belief (see below). However, this, again, may in part be an unconsciously ethnocentric hangover from Christianity, which makes belief and doctrine such a central matter. In a broader comparative perspective, there is no apparent reason why it is always best to define religions in terms of belief, rather than, for instance, in terms of function — what the religion, and people in it, do. When we switch to this point of view, then, lots of things about Buddhism look just as religious as any meaningful point of comparison. In most historical Buddhist cultures, Buddhists worship. They engage in ritual. They believe in supernatural phenomena, including orders of being, not visible in our daily world, and probably incompatible with the worldview of science. They hold clear beliefs about their destiny after death in this lifetime. They attempt to ensure for themselves good fates, variously defined, by ritual means, by something like prayer, or by magic. Buddhist institutions seek and accept money for religious services, such as mediation with forces beyond this visible or temporal world. Buddhist institutions provide ideologies that prop up and justify worldly political power. Buddhist institutions require of their members celibacy, and other extraordinary indicators of their devotion to values other than those of this life. This list could be extended almost endlessly.
It would be possible to go on at much greater length. The main point is that with careful, balanced consideration of what we mean by “religion”, and open, inclusive consideration of all the many things that have historically been said and done in the name of Buddhism, it becomes increasingly difficult to meaningfully exclude Buddhism from the category of religion. Of course, conversely, it is also conceptually difficult to define “religion” neutrally enough that it does easily include Buddhism, especially without including some other things we might not intuitively want in the set — such as rugby, for instance?[1] But there, the problem may lie more with our powers of definition, than in the nature of Buddhism itself.
That leaves us with the other part of the common understanding — that Buddhism is a philosophy.
It is certainly true that Buddhism includes much philosophy, on one reasonable definition of “philosophy” — highly technical and subtle disputation on such questions as the possibility and nature of knowledge, the nature of fundamental being, something like metaphysics, criteria for truth, the nature of language and its relation to the world, and even formal logic. (This is, of course, not quite what people normally mean when they say it is “more of a philosophy than a religion”, and the point is partly to play games, again, with definition, to show how much hinges on it.) However, even such formal philosophy as does exist in Buddhism does not share one important characteristic feature that we often think of as important to philosophy — it is, generally, not interested in philosophical questions for their own sake, or in all philosophical questions equally. Rather, Buddhist philosophy is properly subordinate to the project of salvation, and the ultimate yardstick by which Buddhism measures all philosophy is the service it can or cannot do this project. Where they are judged useless to this project, some legitimate (or at least, common and vexing) philosophical questions are even ruled out of court as topics of inquiry. In Buddhism, then, philosophy is always the handmaiden of soteriology (the project of salvation), and it is hard to reasonably say that Buddhism is, in its essence, a philosophy, in light of that fact.
This brings us to the sense in which the statement that “Buddhism is a philosophy” is probably more commonly meant and understood – that it just gives us a set of principles for living wisely, in the loose proverbial sense that we might say, “Live and let live, that’s my philosophy.” Especially when “philosophy” in this sense is contrasted with religion, it seems that one important point is that Buddhism just guides us in getting along as best as possible in life, without requiring us to buy into any outlandish schemes about the supernatural, the afterlife, heavens, hells, or whatnot. This seems closely related to another common claim, that Buddhism is more (or just) a “way of life”.
The problem is that even in this sense, Buddhism is arguably not really “a philosophy”. By its own lights, the guiding normative motive of Buddhism has almost always ultimately been to help beings get free from the world, not to get along in the world. Insofar as it does attempt to help them get along, it judges its success in the extent to which it finally prepares the conditions for them eventually get free. This reference to an ultimate value opposed to the world also makes it somewhat inaccurate to say that Buddhism is a “way of life”. There is a direct contradiction between a system whose founding assumption is that all life, through infinite rounds of redeath and rebirth, is inescapably characterised by suffering (and therefore the most important religious or existential problem to be solved), and the claim that the same system is a means of helping us succeed or be happy in life.
Buddhist meditation is mainly a matter of 1) making your mind totally blank, or 2) of “just observing” your physical sensations and mental contents
It is true that there are kinds of meditation discussed in classical Buddhist texts that match (sometimes only partially) to each of these descriptions.
Classical meditations are described (or prescribed) in which mental contents seem to be gradually reduced, and we do read descriptions of states that would seem to be entirely contentless, which are given such rarified names as “infinite space”, “infinite consciousness”, “nothingness” and “neither perception nor non-perception”. In Chan/Zen Buddhism, as well, some states are promoted which, taken on their name alone, would seem to consist of a completely empty mind: “no-thought”, “no-mind”, and so on.
There are also classical descriptions of meditations (usually called “mindfulness” practices, or something similar) in which one closely observes one’s physical and mental states. Further, such meditations are perhaps those most commonly taught in modern Buddhist centres, especially in the West. However, one major difference already arises between such practices in classical texts, and the manner in which they tend to be taught and practiced in modern settings. In classical texts, the practitioner is typically instructed to identify the phenomena observed, often in accordance with quite detailed categorical frameworks closely associated to technical Buddhist doctrine. In the modern context, by contrast, the practice typically seems to be just to encounter sense-data and thought, without such analysis in reference to doctrinal categories.
A second difference is that in classical texts, such meditations are often only preparatory practices that precede more advanced practice, and/or contemplation or realisation of the truth of key items of Buddhist doctrine. For example, texts might lay out a more complex curriculum of practice, where mindfulness meditation is followed by insight into the Four Noble Truths (which I will talk about later), or the doctrine of “non-self” (the claim either that what we take for “self” either does not really exist, or that whenever we try to identify the “self’, we are always wrong). This reflects perhaps the most important broad sense in which common modern stereotypes about meditation differ from classical models, and in which the “blank mind” model, in particular, is a misnomer. In very many classical systems of meditation practice or theory, meditation is held to be basically twofold, comprising śamatha (“calming”, “stilling”, “pacifying” the mind) and vipaśyanā (“insight”, in other words the direct apprehension of truth). In this analysis, only śamatha corresponds even approximately to the ideal of attaining a “blank mind”, whereas vipaśyanā refers to meditative practice aiming at the direct apprehension of truth – specifically, of course, doctrinal truth, that is, the truth of central Buddhist teachings. Indeed, in most of the many systems that propose this basic twofold typology of meditations, it is by far most common to hold that śamatha has a kind of subordinate or preparatory role, whereas vipaśyanā is most usually the real point and pinnacle of the system. This means that even where meditations to “still” (or even “empty”) the mind were practiced, far from being the be-all and end-all, they were often ancillary.
There is also an interesting tendency to tension between these two common stereotypical models of how we are supposed to meditate, which is not often observed. If one just lets the mind go and neutrally observes it, the mind typically behaves as a “monkey mind” — even like a monkey let off the leash. This is hardly conducive to the stilling and emptying of the mind, at least in the short term. In the long term, of course, it is possible, and some texts claim this, that the mind will gradually settle on its own, like a pool of water in which waves are stirred up and then left to subside. This tension is therefore possibly not absolute. Nonetheless, the tradition does not uniformly seem to have been happy to leave matters at this, and very many meditation practices aimed at training the mind, on the assumption that if tranquility ever was to be obtained, it would be won only by dint of persistent hard work. For instance, practices are described in classical texts which involve taking a particular, simple object of the attention, and training the mind to stay on the object for increasing periods of time, with increasing intensity and exclusivity — in other words, to increase the practitioner’s power of concentration. Once again, however, these concentration practices are often presented as preliminary to other things.
The biggest reason these images of meditation constitute a kind of misnomer, however, is not so much that they are inaccurate, but that they immensely under-represent the astonishing range of meditation practices that are described or prescribed in traditional texts (and, presumably, were actually practiced). There are analytic meditations where the meditator is supposed to analyse all their phenomenal experience — at speed, or on the fly – into the technical categories of highly complex theories of the constituents of reality. There is a whole world of elaborate and intense visualisation meditations, which include meditations to precipitate a visionary encounter with the Buddha(s), visualisations of sexual encounters with or violent sacrifices to Tantric Buddhist deities, and so on. There are meditations on rotting corpses and all the minute stages of their decomposition, which were practiced either through visualisation or actually sitting in a charnel ground, with the cadaver in front of you. There are meditations designed to cultivate specific good emotional states or “sets”, sometimes conjoined with an understanding that it is possible for the meditator to make a real difference to the well-being of other sentient beings through the power of this special mode of thought alone. In other words, the full repertoire of actual Buddhist meditations that existed through history, and that are indeed often still practiced in at least some part of the broad Buddhist world, is far richer than common stereotypes would allow.
Buddhism is “pessimistic”
Almost since the first close encounters of the West with Buddhism, in the nineteenth century, Buddhism has frequently been characterised – not to say pilloried — as “pessimistic”. This label, further, is almost exclusively applied with the assumption that pessimism is a bad thing. Like many stereotypes, this characterisation may contain a kernel of truth, but it is also open to misuse and misunderstanding, and has lent itself to both.
The most important sense in which it might be true to say that Buddhism is pessimistic is that it is pessimistic about our prospects of salvation or happiness in this world, or in this life. Fundamental Buddhist doctrine states that everything in this world is characterised by “suffering” (duḥkha) — more specifically, that it is ultimately unsatisfactory, flawed, or incapable of satisfying us, even if that unsatisfactory quality in it is only deferred or potential in a given moment. The ultimate normative goal of Buddhist teaching and practice, therefore, is always, in principle, to get sentient beings entirely free of the round of rebirth and redeath, that is, of this world or this life as Buddhism traditionally understands it. The only prospect of true peace or release lies in leaving the world entirely, in some sense.
However, it seems that when people dispense with this qualification, and say, without specifying terms of reference, that Buddhism is pessimistic and that’s the end of it, they are illegitimately (and perhaps unconsciously) creating a hybrid concept, made up in equal parts of their own presuppositions and Buddhist ideas. From Buddhism, they get the idea that this world is irremediably flawed; but they supply the assumption, which traditional Buddhism unequivocally would not accept, that this world is all there is. If this world is indeed all there is, then the Buddhist doctrine that it is ultimately entirely unsatisfactory is a bleak prospect indeed; but that is not what the Buddha taught.
Let us consider the “Four Noble Truths”, a very old, basic, authorative and widespread epitome of the teachings. They are:
- Everything in this world is characterised by suffering (ultimately unsatisfactory);
- This problem is caused by craving, aversion and ignorance;
- The problem can be solved;
- The path to the solution of this problem is the Eightfold Noble Path [i.e. Buddhist practice, again in epitome].
Only the first two of these teachings are negative, and could be fairly characterised as “pessimistic”. The last two teachings are a message of hope. Salvation is possible, and Buddhism will teach you the way. In this epitome of the doctrines, then, there is a balance between bad news and good news, and the good news wins in the end. It is only possible to characterise this teaching as pessimistic if you unfairly exclude the hopeful parts, and while this may be possible if we bring to bear our own assumptions that nothing outside this world exists, it is not a fair characterisation of Buddhism on its own terms.
The Four Noble Truths can be taken as an accurate representative of Buddhism in this regard. Buddhism is a religion that promises or aims to bring salvation to beings suffering within the fold of this world. In this, it is no more pessimistic, or less optimistic, than any other religion that presumes we have a profound existential problem, and presents itself as the solution.
Buddhism is “other-worldly”
Max Weber, a nineteenth-century intellectual giant considered one of the founders of the field of sociology, may not have originated the categorisation of religions, cultures and world-views as “this-worldly” or “other-worldly”, but his work did a huge amount to popularise these categories. On Weber’s analysis, Indian religion and culture as a whole was characterised as “other-worldly”, as were many specific religions within the tradition — perhaps none more so than Buddhism. When he called a system “other-worldly”, Weber meant, roughly, that the ultimate values and significant actions of its adherents and constituents were oriented towards another world, rather than the visible material world present to our senses here and now. This characterisation has stuck, and Buddhism is still often referred to as “other-worldly”.
From the point of view of normative Buddhist doctrine, this characterisation is potentially extremely misleading, because it implies that Buddhism believes in, and orients itself towards, “another world”, posited over and against this world. The reason this is misleading is that (except when it is speaking in overtly figurative, imagistic terms) Buddhist doctrine consistently denies that Nirvāṇa, or the state of liberation by any other name, is a “place”, let alone a “world”.
In earliest Buddhist cosmology, it seems, “the world” was originally the entire order of being, and was thought to comprise a central cosmic mountain, surrounded by four continents distributed at the four compass-points in surrounding oceans, the whole of which was ringed around by layers of concentric mountain ranges and further oceans. Above was the sky, and progressively more remote and rarified heavens of various descriptions; below one of the continents (ours) there were numerous colourful hells; below the whole of the world were various discs, comprised of various elements, which supported it all. Later, especially in Mahāyāna Buddhism, this schema was multiplied to infinity, so that a wider “universe”, if you like, was imagined, which contained inordinate numbers of these “worlds”.
Whether one “world” was posited, or many, the basic nature of “the world” (or “a world”) never changed, in terms of its doctrinal relevance – any “world” was a domain of suffering, throughout all of which obtained the fundamental doctrine, “All in this (the, any) world is suffering.” This means that salvation or liberation, for Buddhism, always meant salvation from the world, but not to some other world. When liberated beings left the round of suffering and rebirth, it was not because they were bound for some other place. They were just leaving the world, or being (even “existence”), altogether. (Perhaps confusingly, the tradition also denied that a liberated being absolutely does not exist; see below on “nihilism”.)
However, as with many of these stereotypes, there is a grain of truth in the notion that Buddhism is “other-worldly”, if we qualify our terms more carefully. This characterisation is meaningful insofar as it points out that Buddhist values, and salvation, are fundamentally oriented away from this world. Given that there is not some other world to which these values are oriented, though, it would be more accurate to say that Buddhism, in this sense, is non–worldly.
Another sense in which this stereotype is misleading, though, is that even insofar as it is thus partially true, it is only true for some aspects of Buddhist traditions – especially high doctrine, or the rarified theory of full liberation. In historical reality, however, many Buddhists have lived and do live their lives without much reference to these ultimate verities, except infrequently and perhaps in principle. Meanwhile, Buddhism has many practices and supporting beliefs that are oriented towards improving the lot of its adherents in this world and this life – ensuring safer childbirth, or protection from accidents, for example. The anthropologist Milford Spiro influentially called this strand of Buddhism “apotropaic Buddhism”, that is, Buddhism designed to ward off misfortune (and thereby ensure good luck).
Between these two extremes of non–worldly orientation towards ultimate verities and final liberation, and the quite this-worldly Buddhism Spiro calls “apotropaic”, there is also an intermediate case, and ironically, this third aspect of Buddhism may represent another sense in which the idea of “other-worldly” Buddhism might contain a kernel of truth. Here, I am thinking of a large range of Buddhist practices and supporting beliefs where one tries to ensure wellbeing for oneself or others (often one’s kin), still in this world, but not in this life. In other words, because Buddhism assumes reincarnation, there is ample room for people to worry about, and attempt to influence, their post-mortem fate – but that is a fate that will also work itself out in this world. Now, it is admittedly a bit of a sophistic ploy to appeal to this fact, but the etymological meaning of the English word “world” is “age” or “life of man”; and if we artificially wrench the world back to this meaning, perhaps we could speak at least this part of Buddhism as “other-worldly” in the sense that it is oriented towards another lifetime, after this one.
Nirvāṇa is a state of complete personal annihilation
Just as Buddhism is frequently characterised as “pessimistic” in the West, it is also often said to be “nihilistic”. When people say this, they usually mean one of two things:
- that Buddhism proposes that the goal of existence should be to stop existing, and Buddhist salvation is personal annihilation (this is probably the common understanding of Nirvāṇa);
- that Buddhism proposes that actually, absolutely nothing exists in the first place. Neither of these statements is strictly true.
Buddhism does propose that what a person ordinarily takes to be his or her self, in ordinary day-to-day living and thinking, is actually not what we think. It further proposes that no matter how hard we look, or where, we will not be able to find anything that actually corresponds to this common, illusory sense of “self”. An important goal of Buddhist practice has been to realise the illusory nature of this conception of “self”, and such realisation is presented in many texts as identical with liberation; liberation is liberation from this illusion (which keeps us bound to the cycle of rebirth and redeath in the world). This is the famous doctrine of “non-self”, and it is at the root of claims that Buddhism is “nihilistic” in the first sense.
The trouble is that Buddhism emphatically does not propose that a person ceases to exist after liberation. Of course, if, by “exist”, we mean “be in this world”, then, in that limited sense, the person should cease to “exist” – they should no longer be reborn and die again in the eternal cycle of reincarnation. But the question of what becomes of them – like the question of “where” they go, if anywhere – Buddhism simply leaves open. Indeed, Buddhist texts steadfastly refuse to answer the question of whether or not the liberated person exists or does not exist; this is one of a standard set of questions you are supposed to be better off not asking![2]
Furthermore, Buddhism is so steadfastly against the blunt statement that the liberated person does not exist, that this position is traditionally named in standard lists of heresies or mistaken positions that Buddhism sets out to combat. Thus, it is a very inaccurate characterisation of Buddhism, on its own terms, to claim that it preaches “annihilation”.
Similar correctives apply to the other version of the claim that Buddhism is “nihilist”, namely, that it claims that absolutely nothing exists anyway. The root of this misunderstanding is almost certainly the Mahāyāna doctrine of “emptiness”, which claims, variously, that everything that appears is in some important sense an illusion, or that it does not exist in the sense we imagine it does. In Buddhist terms, however, this is emphatically not the same thing as saying that there is nothing there at all. Within Mahāyāna Buddhism, sophisticated philosophical positions developed on the question of whether things exist or not (and if so, what), and the standard position was that it is incorrect to say, simplistically, either that they exist or that they do not. Buddhism was supposed to walk a “middle path” between these extremes, each of which was equally erroneous. In fact, a famous line in a famous text suggests that if you have to pick between them, the doctrine of full-blooded existence, while incorrect, is the lesser of the two evils: the doctrine of emptiness, if you grasp it wrongly, is as dangerous as a clumsily grasped snake. All of this suggests strongly, once more, that it is grossly inaccurate, on Buddhism’s own terms, to characterise it as preaching “nihilism” in the sense of the total inexistence of all things.
As this discussion shows, however, it is not simple to understand correctly the doctrines misconstrued by this common misunderstanding that “Buddhism is nihilist”. It is not meant to be. Indeed, many texts in the tradition would say that these doctrines can only be correctly understood by a liberated being — a Buddha or an Arhat — because to understand them correctly and fully is to be liberated. For other such beings, the tradition claims, the problem is that ordinary worldly language, through which we attempt to understand the world, is itself so flawed that it does not admit of any absolutely correct articulation of the truths in question. This may well be frustrating, if we would prefer them to just say in plain terms what they mean! – but it nonetheless is not helpful to simply foist upon them our own simplified understanding, especially when the resulting characterisation ends up diametrically opposed to some of the tradition’s most important basic claims.
Theravāda is “original” Buddhism, or the oldest form of Buddhism
Theravāda, or the “doctrine [or school] of the Elders”, is the common name for a broad group of Buddhist traditions in South-East Asia — such countries as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and so on. It is commonly thought and said that Theravāda is the oldest form of Buddhism, or that it represents something close to original Buddhism. However, there are several senses in which Theravāda actually only developed centuries after the time of the historical Buddha — at least late enough to be of roughly the same vintage as early Mahāyāna (“greater vehicle”) traditions.
Most importantly, while the Theravāda tradition preserves and respects one of the oldest canons in Buddhism, it has historically interpreted that canon in line with authoritative commentaries that were only written around the fifth century of the Common Era — a thousand years after the Buddha. Even though it is clear that these commentaries were at least in part based upon older commentaries now lost, those older commentaries are unlikely to have been much older than the turn of the Common Era, which is not enough to make them older than old Mahāyāna texts.
Similarly, the Theravāda only took institutional shape, as a coherent group, and then came to dominance, by complex processes that took place in Sri Lanka in the first centuries of the Common Era, so Theravāda is much later than original Buddhism in that regard, too.
Finally, although no complete canon as old as the Pāli canon[3] preserved by the Theravāda has survived into the modern era, partial canons survive in Chinese translation, and fragments of several Sanskrit canons exist. Though these translations or manuscripts are not as old as the Pāli canon, that does not mean that the original texts they represent were not as old, and determination of dating is a fiendishly complex and uncertain business. Thus, the Theravāda is not necessarily the oldest known form of Buddhism in the texts it preserves and reveres, either.
One of the two major “schools” of Buddhism is “Hīnayāna” or “the Lesser Vehicle”
Around the first centuries of the Common Era, a range of complicated new Buddhist texts, doctrines, and presumably groups emerged, which claimed for themselves the label “Mahāyāna”, meaning “greater vehicle”. This label is based upon the conceit that Buddhism is a vehicle (or “path” or “way”; yāna can mean both) — think, for example, of a boat that “ferries” sentient beings from the world of suffering to a state of liberation. When adherents of the Mahāyāna called their way of doing things the Mahāyāna, then, they were saying clearly that it was superior.
In contrast to their own movements and texts, Mahāyānists often characterised other types of Buddhism as hīnayāna, which means “lesser vehicle”, with all the belittlement and disdain that implies. When modern scholars began trying to survey and categorise the Buddhist world as a whole, they noticed that there are a range of countries in which Mahāyāna is dominant (most “Northern” Buddhist countries, including Japan, Korea, China, and Tibet, Mongolia and Manchuria — Tantric Buddhism is part of the Mahāyāna too). Then there were other countries, in the south, with other kinds of Buddhism. Blindly following the terminology of Mahāyāna self-promotion, they called everything other than the Mahāyāna “Hīnayāna”, and the name stuck, so that people began speaking as if there was a real Hīnayāna in the world and in Buddhist history. But probably no Buddhists, or at least very few, through history ever proclaimed themselves to be “Hīnayānists”, and to unquestioningly accept a pejorative label applied to them by adversaries and use it as if it is a plain objective fact is simply disrespectful.
This leaves us with the tricky problem of what to call everything apart from the Mahāyāna, including everything that came before it in Buddhist history. Scholars do not agree on this question, and any number of terms circulate: “Mainstream” Buddhism, “background Buddhism”, “non-Mahāyāna Buddhism”, and so on. If we are clear that we are only talking about early Buddhism, then we can talk about “early Buddhism”; if we are clear that we are only talking about Theravāda Buddhism, it is probably best just to say “Theravāda Buddhism”.
The defining feature of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths
— or some other doctrine, such as No-Self, conditioned co-arising (pratiītyasamutpāda), the emptiness of all things (sarvadharmaśūnyatā) etc.
This assumption is a little more amorphous, but perhaps, for that, all the more influential in shaping misunderstandings of Buddhism.
When people are inquiring about Buddhism, or introducing it, they often begin by asking about or saying “What Buddhists believe.” Some basic teaching will usually be introduced as one of the most central things about the tradition, such as the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths, of non-self, and so on. However, it may reflect a bias to begin this way. Assumptions about the nature of “religion” in English-speaking (and European) cultures are heavily conditioned by the historical dominance of Christianity in the West. It is certainly true that tenets of belief have been central to Christianity; but this does not mean that all religions are similarly centred on beliefs or doctrine.
If we suspend this assumption, then, it is an open question whether any doctrine is the most general feature characterising all the different kinds of Buddhism in the historical and contemporary world. Certainly, one thing that is striking about Buddhism is its immense doctrinal diversity. The various traditions, taken together, have a much vaster corpus of sacred texts between them than, for example, the Bible or the Qur’an, or other comparable bodies of scripture. There was no central doctrinal authority that functioned, like the Catholic Church in Western Christendom, to adjudicate and enforce doctrinal orthodoxy, and throughout Buddhist history, there was immense doctrinal creativity and ferment in many ages.
Contemporary scholars thus often entertain the possibility that dimensions of Buddhism other than belief might be more generally characteristic of the religion as a whole. I will give two examples:
- the worship of the relics of the Buddha in reliquary monuments called stūpas; and
- maintenance of and interaction with celibate communities of ordained monks and nuns (the Saṃgha).
Before the Buddha physically died, the tradition tells us, he gave instructions for the disposal of his corpse (with great pomp), and after he died, he was cremated and his instructions were (more or less) followed. Special remnants of his cremated body, called śarīrāṇi (commonly called “relics” in English), were gathered up from the cremation site, divided up between a number of kings, taken to various parts of the country, and enshrined in stūpas, that is, round memorial mounds with various special architectural features. Whether or not this tradition and practice really dates back to the death of the historical Buddha, it is certain that worship of relics in stūpas was practiced by a couple of centuries after his death at the latest. This cult of relic and stūpa worship subsequently spread wherever Buddhism spread in Asia, so that the stūpa, by various names, is one of the most disctinctive architectural forms of Asian civilisation — also called caitya or sometimes “dagoba” in South-East Asia; chorten in Tibet; and “pagoda” in the distinctive shape it assumes in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan etc.). Believers would circumambulate (walk ritually in a clockwise direction around) the stūpa, make offerings to it, prostrate themselves before it, and even arrange to have their own mortal remains buried next to it. Recent scholarship has gathered more and more evidence that adherents at all levels of sophistication in historical Buddhist socieities probably believed that the Buddha(s) was (were) really present in these relics and monuments, and this interpretation is now commonly accepted. Thus, the worship of relics in stūpas is one of the oldest, most widespread and most basic features of Buddhist society and religiosity. These facts all make this practice a good candidate for the title of the (or at least a) defining feature of Buddhism as a whole.
During his historical lifetime, it seems (and so tradition tells us), the Buddha also founded orders of monks and nuns to carry on his teachings and systems of practice after his physical death. Such communities were celibate and (theoretically, and practically to varying degrees in various times and places) economically inactive. They were thus entirely dependent upon the material support of the lay communities around them for everything from fresh “bodies” (each new generation of monks and nuns) to their dwellings and daily food. This dependence was reciprocated, at least in theory, by “gifts of the Dharma (teaching)” that they gave back to the community, for which the laity relied equally upon them. Like reliquary stūpas, communities of monks and nuns also spread everywhere that Buddhism spread in Asia. The complex patterns of co-dependent interaction between monastics and laypeople, therefore, and the complex social institutions and ritual cycles that concretely realised that abstract relationship, was also one of the oldest, most universal and most enduring features of all Buddhist traditions, and this, too makes it a good candidate for the title of the (or a) defining feature of Buddhism.
Of course, the example of monastic orders is also heir to a possible problem as a defining characteristic of Buddhism – the fact that such communities were also found in other religious traditions (such as Jainism, Christianity and Daoism). It seems to be an open and difficult question whether other traditions developed their monasticism independently of Buddhism, or in some kind of historical relation with it; but it remains true that monasticism would probably not be enough to define Buddhism on its own. This points to a problem with any attempt to find “the” defining feature of a cultural phenomenon as complex as Buddhism, and perhaps we are better to think in terms of a cluster of basic defining features.
Note that this same bias to concentrating on doctrine (and meditation practice) at the expense of (other forms of) practice, institutions and so on has even been present in many of the remarks I have made here. I have been attempting to correct common misunderstandings of Buddhism, of course; and perhaps the focus on doctrine, especially, is itself a shaping force that makes more of our stereotypes about Buddhism cluster in the area of doctrine (or meditation). When it comes to other areas of Buddhism, we are so predisposed to overlook them that we don’t even have stereotypes about them![4]
Buddhism is the only genuinely non-violent major world religion
Buddhism is often said to be the only religion, at least among the so-called “world religions” that has managed historically to keep itself untainted by warfare or violence. It is possible that this is true in the more limited sense that it may be difficult to find a war that was fought officially in the name of Buddhism (though even this may not be impossible). However, it is certainly untrue that Buddhist ideas were never used to justify or promote war; it is also certainly untrue that Buddhist clerics, either historically or in the modern world, have kept their hands entirely clean of involvement in belligerent causes; and it is untrue that Buddhist doctrine, even, is entirely unambiguous in condemning all war and unilaterally preaching absolute pacifism. Buddhism, in the guise of both ideas and prominent persons, has been historically entangled in war in contexts as far apart as early and modern Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, and imperialist modern Japan (leading up to World War II), to give only a few examples. Thus, the stereotype that “Buddhism is the only truly peaceful religion” is simply historically inaccurate, and its currency is most likely more a function of our ignorance about the Buddhist world, in combination with the mysterious tendency of modern Western pop culture to simplistically assume Buddhism is “the good guy” among world religions.
Further Reading
- Gethin, Rupert. The Foundations of Buddhism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
The best up-to-date, single volume introduction I know to Buddhism, as it is currently understood by scholars. - Almond, Philip C. The British Discovery of Buddhism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Excellent, accessible study of important chapters in the encounter with and adoption of Buddhism by the West, and a good glimpse into the roots of some of our current stereotypes. - Prothero, Stephen. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Fascinating, thorough study of one of the most influential early Western converts to Buddhism (and, with Madame Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society). Olcott’s story is an interesting case study in dynamics seen much more widely in the formation of modern and Western Buddhism and ideas about Buddhism. - Driot, Roger-Pol. The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
A careful study (for the more philosophically inclined) of the ways interpretations of Buddhist philosophy in the West have hung on the coat-tails of broader Western philosophical trends, generation by generation. - Strong, John. Relics of the Buddha.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
A rich and marvellous study, by one of the best scholars of Buddhism working currently, that will give readers many insights into numerous truly “religious” facets of Buddhist traditions. - Victoria, Brian (Daizen) A. Zen at War.
New York: Weatherhill, 1997.
Controversial, sobering and thought-provoking — at times even harrowing — account of the involvement of high-ranking Buddhist clerics in the promotion of jingoistic militarism in the period of Japanese imperialism, leading up to and including World War II.
- For example, the theologian Paul Tillich famously defined faith (and implicitly religion) in terms of “ultimate concern”. This definition seems very broad, however, and it seems to me that we know of or can imagine scenarios in which a person’s genuine “ultimate concern” was not anything we would normally think of as “religious”. In order to accept such a definition, therefore, we must also accept a massive expansion (and dilution) of our category of “religion”. [↩]
- These are questions such as: “Is the world eternal?” “Is the world finite?” “Is the body identical to the soul?” “Is the body something different from the soul?” “Does the Buddha continue to exist after his death?” The pursuit of such questions, says the Buddha of our texts, is not conducive to spiritual liberation. See, for example, http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/bits/bits013.htm. [↩]
- The Buddhist canon as preserved in Pāli, a classical Indian language descended from Sanskrit. For a brief introduction, and the best online collection of English translations from the Pāli canon, see http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/index.html. [↩]
- A great illustration of this point is the fact, still little-known in the West, that Buddhists throughout Asia and history have devoted huge expense and energies to worshipping the relics of the Buddha, including but not limited to the remnants of his cremated physical body, and memorial monuments, often containing relics, or else commemorating his presence in the world in other ways. The best overview of this wonderful aspect of Buddhism is John Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). [↩]
