Buddhism

The Buddha and his setting

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Buddha gives traditional dates of roughly 560 to 480 BCE for his life, and notes that many scholars now place his death around 405 BCE. It describes him as born into the Śākya clan near the present India–Nepal border, as practicing with wandering ascetics (śramanas) who rejected Vedic ritual authority, and as teaching for about 45 years after attaining awakening on his own.

Texts and early disputes

The same entry states that the core discourses survive as the Pāli Nikāyas and as Chinese translations of Sanskrit Āgamas. They were written down several centuries after the Buddha's death, and oral transmission probably preserved them before then. The entry reports that the sources disagree in places and that sectarian disputes may have shaped the record, and it notes that exegetical disputes, such as the debate over the status of the person, arose within a century or two of his death.

Branches and regional spread

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Buddhist ethics, the Theravāda is the only surviving tradition that is not Mahāyāna. It is dominant in Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia, Mahāyāna is the principal form in East Asia, and Vajrayāna is practiced in the Himalayas and parts of Central Asia. The entry treats the main doctrinal difference between Theravāda and Mahāyāna as a difference in the goals they recommend.

Chan Buddhism emerged in China from the sixth century CE and took shape roughly between 500 and 1000 CE. It later spread across East Asia as Zen in Japan, Sôn in Korea and Thiền in Vietnam. The entry reports that scholars now treat the traditional Bodhidharma lineage story, and much of Chan's account of its own history, as inventions of tradition that should be read critically.

Names for the founder and the tradition

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to the founder as the Buddha, also called Gautama, and places him among the śramanas, wanderers called heterodox because they rejected Vedic authority. The sources reviewed use Buddhism for the tradition as a whole and name its branches by region and school, so the singular and plural forms in this page's alias list, Buddhist tradition and Buddhist traditions, refer to the same family of traditions.

Branch and school names

Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna are the three branch names used in the Stanford entry on Buddhist ethics, which describes Vajrayāna as pursuing Mahāyāna goals through Tantric means. Chan carries different names by language: Zen in Japanese, Sôn in Korean and Thiền in Vietnamese. Chan is a school within East Asian Mahāyāna, so the terms are not interchangeable with Buddhism as a whole.

Terms for central ideas

The Buddha entry glosses anātman as the denial that the psychophysical elements (skandhas) constitute a self, and describes the middle path as avoiding both eternalism and annihilationism. It describes karma as volition-based action with consequences set by causal law. The Buddhist sense of these terms differs from some popular uses, and the entry argues that rebirth without a transmigrating self is logically possible.

Modern writing also uses Buddhist-derived to describe meditation programs taken from Buddhist sources. One study of Western Buddhists describes the context of Buddhist modernism, in which Buddhist theory and practice are presented as closely compatible with science.

Ethics and precepts

The Stanford entry on Buddhist ethics states that lay Buddhists take the Five Precepts, which concern killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication, while monastics follow stricter vows of individual liberation. The entry describes moral discipline (śīla) as central to the path, both a means of reducing harmful action and a result of spiritual progress.

Paths and goals

The tradition teaches different goals by branch. The ethics entry reports that Theravāda practitioners mostly aim to become arhats who enter Nirvana at death, with a small minority aspiring to Buddhahood, while Mahāyāna Buddhists take the bodhisattva vow to become Buddhas for the benefit of all beings. Mahāyāna paths are organized around six perfections: generosity, moral discipline, patient endurance, perseverance, meditative stability and wisdom.

Chan teachers, as summarized in the Stanford entry, describe practice as an expression of Buddha-nature rather than a means of acquiring it. The entry also notes that Chan monasteries generally followed monastic norms.

Related practices on Machipedia

Several Machipedia pages describe ideas or practices that Buddhist traditions teach or use: Meditation, Karma, Reincarnation and Soul, with Prayer and Forgiveness also linked to this tradition. The sources reviewed for this page support only some of these links. They describe karma, rebirth and the denial of a self in Buddhist teaching, and they describe meditation programs as drawing on Buddhist textual sources. They do not describe prayer or forgiveness practices, so this page does not characterize them.

Ending suffering

In the Buddha's teaching as the Stanford entry presents it, the Four Noble Truths hold that suffering exists, that it has origins, that it can cease, and that a path leads to its cessation. The entry presents liberation from this cycle, rather than worldly benefit, as the tradition's central purpose, and it identifies desire, aversion and ignorance as the defilements that drive karmic results.

Moral and meditative training

The tradition holds that ethical discipline and meditative stability are parts of the path. The ethics entry lists moral discipline and meditative stability among the Mahāyāna perfections, alongside wisdom, and describes ethics as central to progress toward liberation. A study of Western Buddhists notes that Buddhist textual sources acknowledge a wide range of effects of meditation beyond health outcomes.

Scholarship and demography

The historical record is shaped by late written sources. The Stanford entries report that the earliest discourses were written down several centuries after the Buddha and that later schools, such as Chan, built self-histories that scholars now read critically. Pew Research Center estimates 324 million Buddhists worldwide in 2020, down from 343 million in 2010, with 98 percent in Asia and the Pacific.

Pew notes that its estimates rely on censuses and surveys of religious identity, which work less well in East Asia, where Buddhism is intertwined with folk religions. The figures also exclude people who practice Buddhism without identifying as Buddhist.

Clinical research on meditation programs

No clinical trials of Buddhism as a whole were found; the research concerns meditation programs. A 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis of 47 randomized trials with 3,515 participants and active controls found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programs improved anxiety, depression and pain, and low evidence for stress and mental health-related quality of life. It found low or insufficient evidence for positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep and weight, and no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment.

These results should not be read as findings about Buddhist religious practice or belief. The review searched trials through November 2012, and the searches run for this page on PubMed for Buddhism combined with religion, health, chaplaincy and loving-kindness returned 147 records that were not individually assessed.

Adverse events in meditation

A 2020 systematic review of meditation adverse events searched five databases to October 2019 and included 83 studies with 6,703 participants. Of these, 55 studies (65 percent) reported at least one adverse event. The pooled prevalence was 8.3 percent, 3.7 percent in experimental studies and 33.2 percent in observational studies. The most common events were anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies, and the authors report that events can occur in people with no prior mental health history.

Challenging experiences among Western Buddhists

A mixed-methods study interviewed Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen and Tibetan traditions. It identified 59 meditation-related experiences in seven domains, with valence from very positive to very negative and distress and impairment from minimal and transient to severe and enduring. A follow-up analysis reports that worldviews could act as a risk factor for some practitioners and as a remedy for others.

Care boundaries and cultural attribution

Meditation difficulties are described as relevant to both practitioners and clinicians, and this page is not a substitute for medical or mental health care. The sources reviewed do not report harms from coercive groups, teachers or costs in Buddhist communities, and that absence reflects the sources searched, not the absence of such harms. Buddhism spans many regional schools with different texts and goals, so statements about one branch should not be applied to another.