Frequently asked questions about Buddhism

The Buddha is not a god, and it is not a name. “Buddha” (buddha) means “awakened one” and is more like a title, a mark of high attainment - roughly like the modern title “world champion” in some sport. A buddha is someone who worked out by his own effort how suffering is built and how it ceases, and managed to teach that to others.

The historical Buddha was called Siddhattha Gotama (Pali, with the stress in Gotama on the first syllable; in Sanskrit - Siddhartha Gautama), also known as Shakyamuni, “the sage of the Sakya clan”. He lived in northern India; the exact dates are disputed, and modern scholars tend to place his passing around 400 BCE. He speaks of his teaching as an ancient path found anew: a traveller stumbles on an overgrown road in the forest and follows it to a forgotten city (SN 12.65). Before Gotama’s time many awakened ones of the past had walked this road, but it gradually faded from human memory. To put it very briefly: by walking this forgotten path again, Siddhartha rediscovered the so-called “Four Noble Truths”. The fourth of them is the Noble Eightfold Path - that very road, overgrown with time. Gotama himself (the Buddha), his teaching (Dhamma, Dhamma) and the community of practitioners (Sangha, Saṅgha) are called the Three Jewels in Buddhism. On entering Buddhism, a person takes “refuge” in them.

There is no almighty creator in the early canon, but there are plenty of deities of varying power (none of them, however, all-powerful, eternal, omniscient or omnipotent). In DN 1 Brahma, having appeared in his world first, takes himself for the creator of the beings who arose there after him - and is wrong. In MN 49 the Buddha tells Baka the Brahma that out of ignorance he holds as eternal what is impermanent: his world and his standing in it. There are many devas (devā) in the texts; they live unimaginably long, but remain mortal inhabitants of samsara.

The Buddha did not place himself in any category of beings either. The brahmin Dona asked who he was: a deva, a gandhabba, a yakkha (yakkha) or a human. The Buddha answered that no category fits, because he had destroyed the causes for being born as any of them (by reaching awakening), and added: “Remember me as a buddha” (AN 4.36). Even though the Buddha is honoured in earnest in the suttas, he does not hand out or grant liberation by his own will: in MN 107 the Tathagata (“thus gone”, another synonym for “buddha”) is called “one who points out the path”. Walking that path is something each person has to do for themselves. The Buddha was turned into a deity outside Buddhism: in the Vaishnava Puranas (Vishnu Purana 3.17-18, Bhagavata Purana 1.3.24; datings and recensions are disputed, the tradition took shape roughly between the 4th and 8th centuries CE) the figure of the Buddha appears in the lists of Vishnu’s avatars. This is not part of what the Pali canon teaches.

By the canon, Gotama is not the only buddha in history. The suttas list many buddhas of the past (DN 14). In the general sense, a buddha is someone who discovered the Dhamma on his own, without a teacher, and then became a teacher for others. The buddha Siddhartha Gotama is simply the one best known to us. For convenience, when texts write “Buddha” with a capital letter, they mean the buddha Siddhartha Gotama. Written with a lowercase letter, it can refer to other buddhas of the past as well as to Siddhartha (depending on context).

Where to read: MN 26 (how Gotama searched for and found awakening), MN 49 (the argument with a Brahma who takes himself to be eternal), AN 4.36 (the direct answer to the question “who are you?”).

The Dhamma (Dhamma; dharma in Sanskrit) is first of all the teaching of the Buddha. The word has no single English equivalent: depending on the passage it is rendered as “teaching”, “truth”, “principle”, “quality”, “phenomenon”, “object of mind”.

Four uses come up often enough to be worth separating - keeping in mind that this is not a strict canonical classification.

1. The Buddha’s teaching. In the suttas it usually travels in a pair with the Vinaya, the monastic discipline. Before his death the Buddha said that the Dhamma and Vinaya he had taught and laid down would be the teacher for the community after him (DN 16). Dhamma here is something you practise, not only something you read.
2. What the teaching points at: impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), the absence of an unchanging self (anattā), dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda). These are specific regularities of experience, above all the causes of the arising and cessation of suffering (MN 38). In this sense the word does not mean prescribed duty or a single cosmic order - Sanskrit “dharma” carries those meanings outside the Buddhist teaching.
3. The path of practice through which the teaching is realised: virtue (sīla), collectedness or concentration of mind (samādhi), wisdom (paññā).
4. Dhammas in the plural - phenomena and contents of mind. Mind (mano) stands in the list of six sense bases alongside eye and ear, and dhammas are what it takes in, the way the eye takes in what is visible. The description of dharmas as elements of existence is set out in the third part of the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma, and a separate text, the Abhidharmakosha, is devoted to their detailed classification. But the term did not start there: in MN 10 the fourth foundation of mindfulness is called exactly that, “contemplation of dhammas”, and it covers the five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six internal and external sense bases, the seven factors of awakening and the Four Noble Truths.

The canonical formula describes the Dhamma this way: well expounded by the Blessed One (svākkhāta), visible here and now (sandiṭṭhika), immediate (akālika), inviting one to come and see (ehipassika), leading onward (opaneyyika), to be known by the wise, each for themselves (MN 7).

The Dhamma is one of the Three Jewels, together with the Buddha and the Sangha, and these are what one takes refuge in. Taking refuge in the Dhamma means deciding to rely on the Path and to walk it. At the same time MN 22 warns against clinging to the teaching itself: the Buddha compared the Dhamma to a raft, bound together to cross a river - once it has done its job, it should be left behind, not carried further on one’s head.

Where to read: MN 22 (the simile of the raft), MN 10 (contemplation of dhammas), MN 7 (the formula of the Dhamma’s qualities).

Sangha (saṅgha) literally means “assembly”, “community”. The word has two uses in Buddhism: the sangha as the monastic institution as a whole, and the sangha as the class of practitioners with certain spiritual attainments. The two overlap, but they do not coincide completely.

The monastic Sangha is the community of monks (bhikkhu-saṅgha) and nuns (bhikkhunī-saṅgha) who live by the Vinaya, the code of discipline. In other words, the whole Buddhist monastic organisation with its ordinations, rules and procedures.

The Sangha of the Buddha’s disciples (sāvaka-saṅgha), also called the noble Sangha (ariya-saṅgha), is both monks and lay people who have reached one of the four key “milestones” of the path. The canonical formula defines them as “four pairs, eight persons” (MN 7, AN 8.59):

• the one practising for stream-entry and the stream-enterer;
• the one practising for once-return and the once-returner;
• the one practising for non-return and the non-returner;
• the one practising for arahantship and the arahant (the highest spiritual attainment in Buddhism, short of being a “buddha”).

A noble disciple, then, can turn out to be a monk or a lay person alike. It should be added that this is the classification of the Pali canon. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism introduce the institution of bodhisattvas with gradations of its own.

The Sangha is one of the “Three Jewels” of Buddhism, in which refuge is taken (on entering Buddhism). The refuge formula means precisely the “noble Sangha”, the Sangha of the Blessed One’s disciples. Accounts of going for refuge sometimes mention “the Sangha of monks”, but the normative explanation of the Third Jewel is exactly the four pairs and eight persons.

These days the word “sangha” is often used as a collective name for the Buddhist community as a whole - the four assemblies (parisā):

• monks;
• nuns;
• laymen;
• laywomen.

And, beyond that, almost any group practising in the spirit of Buddhism, secular ones included.

In this sense our Majjhima Nikaya reading club can also be called a sangha - a gathering of people who read, argue and practise together. It is not, however, a canonical term.

A key theme for the Sangha is living in peace and concord. The suttas of the canon give it a great deal of attention. In particular, six principles of cordiality are laid down for the monastic sangha:

• kindness in deeds;
• kindness in speech;
• kindness in thought;
• readiness to share without stinginess with fellow practitioners whatever has been rightfully obtained, down to the food in the bowl;
• discipline held in common;
• view held in common (AN 6.12).

And if a dispute does arise, many ways of settling it are offered (MN 104).

Where to read: MN 7 (the formula of the Sangha’s qualities), MN 104 (how the community handles disputes), MN 118 (an exemplary monastic Sangha on a full-moon night).

The Four Noble Truths are the central teaching of the Buddha about suffering, its causes and the path to its cessation. They explain what is wrong with ordinary existence, where that comes from, whether it can end and what to do about it. According to tradition, the Buddha formulates them in his first discourse after awakening, set out, for example, in SN 56.11.

In the canon the truths are put like this:

1. The truth of dukkha (dukkha). Birth, ageing, illness, death, meeting what is disagreeable, parting from what is dear, not getting what one wants; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging (pañcupādānakkhandhā).
2. The truth of the origin of dukkha. It is craving (taṇhā) and the clinging born in its wake, leading to renewed existence and accompanied by delight and lust: craving for sensual pleasures (kāma-taṇhā), craving for existence (bhava-taṇhā), craving for non-existence or cessation (vibhava-taṇhā).
3. The truth of the cessation of dukkha. The remainderless fading away of the three “root” defilements of the mind - craving, hatred and ignorance - and, with their eradication, release from taṇhā and from the causes of suffering. This cessation is what is called Nibbāna (Nibbāna).
4. The truth of the path leading to the cessation of dukkha. This is the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. The eight factors fall into three groups - virtue (sīla), concentration (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā) (MN 44).

Dukkha is wider than “suffering”: it covers plain pain, the unsatisfactoriness of impermanence and of pleasant things that end, and the unreliability of everything constructed. The canon distinguishes three kinds:

• dukkha as pain (dukkha-dukkhatā), obvious physical suffering;
• dukkha of change (vipariṇāma-dukkhatā), the disappointment of pleasant things running out;
• dukkha inherent in the conditioned (saṅkhāra-dukkhatā), or “all-pervading unsatisfactoriness” (SN 45.165).

What matters in the Four Noble Truths is not only the list itself but what has to be done with each truth. The Buddha describes three turnings for each: knowing the truth, knowing its task, knowing the task has been done. The tasks differ:

• dukkha is to be fully understood (pariññeyyaṃ);
• its origin is to be abandoned (pahātabbaṃ);
• its cessation is to be realised (sacchikātabbaṃ);
• the path is to be developed (bhāvetabbaṃ).

Agreeing with four statements is not enough here; each one calls for an act of its own. So the truths do not stop at the diagnosis - they offer a “treatment”: the third says dukkha can cease completely, and the fourth describes what has to be done for that. Incidentally, the comparison with medical treatment - diagnosis, cause, prognosis, prescription - is a much-used analogy that helps grasp the point, but it does not occur in the suttas.

Moreover, right view, the first factor of the path, is itself defined through knowledge of these same four truths (MN 9, MN 141). The path, then, is not attached to the truths from outside - it is the fourth of them.

Where to read: MN 141 (a detailed analysis of all four truths, given by Sariputta), MN 9 (right view), SN 56.11 (the first discourse and the three turnings).

The first noble truth does not claim that life consists of suffering. It says that anything in our life that is subject to arising and decay cannot give reliable, final satisfaction. The word “dukkha” (dukkha) is wider than the English “suffering”: it covers everything from sharp pain to barely noticeable background unease. Dukkha is suffering, and pain, and futility, and nagging weariness.

The canon (see SN 38.14, SN 45.165) distinguishes three kinds of dukkha:

• dukkha as pain (dukkha-dukkhatā);
• the dukkha of change (vipariṇāma-dukkhatā);
• the pervasive dukkha of conditionality (saṅkhāra-dukkhatā).

The first kind is clear to everyone. The second is about the fact that everything good ends or spoils. The third concerns the nature of all things: any support assembled out of conditions holds exactly as long as the conditions do. The short general formula: what is impermanent is dukkha (SN 22.45).

The pleasant is not cancelled by any of this. Pleasure in the suttas (see MN 13) is called by its own name (sukha) and taken apart under three headings:

• what makes it attractive (assāda);
• where its danger lies (ādīnava);
• and what the way out of this situation is (nissaraṇa).

The problem is that pleasure, sukha, is almost always conditioned and ends as soon as its causes end. And the attempt to hold on to it creates a whole spectrum of new problems and new causes for suffering. There is also a happiness that does not depend on sensual pleasures: from the Buddhist point of view this is Nibbana, awakening.

Dukkha does not arise simply because everything ends. The second noble truth names the cause more precisely: craving (taṇhā). So the cessation of dukkha comes with the fading of craving, not with the abolition of impermanence.

Where to read: MN 141 (the full definition of all four truths), MN 13 (gratification, danger and escape), MN 22 (the Buddha on what he teaches).

The Noble Eightfold Path (also known as “the Middle Way”) is the fourth noble truth: the path that leads to the cessation of suffering and to liberation. In SN 56.11 it is called the middle way between indulgence in sensual pleasures and self-torment.

The eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path (SN 45.8):

• right view (sammā-diṭṭhi);
• right intention (sammā-saṅkappa);
• right speech (sammā-vācā);
• right action (sammā-kammanta);
• right livelihood (sammā-ājīva);
• right effort (sammā-vāyāma);
• right mindfulness (sammā-sati);
• right concentration (sammā-samādhi).

“Right” (sammā) here means “correct”, as opposed to wrong (micchā), not “perfect”. The factors are not steps to be passed through one after another - they are interconnected and develop together, though in MN 117 right view comes first and leads the other seven.

The eight factors are often gathered into three groups (for example, in MN 44): virtue, concentration and wisdom.

Virtue (sīla) - speech, action, livelihood.

• Right speech: no lying, no divisive speech, no harsh speech, no idle chatter.
• Right action: refraining from killing, from taking what is not given, and from misconduct in sensual pleasures (kāmesu micchācāra, usually sexual misconduct).
• Right livelihood: abandoning a wrong way of life and earning, or one that fosters the unwholesome. Lay people are separately given five kinds of trade to avoid: in weapons, in living beings, in meat, in intoxicants and in poisons (AN 5.177).

Concentration (samādhi) - effort, mindfulness, concentration.

• Right effort is aimed at four tasks: preventing new unwholesome (akusala) states of mind from arising, letting go of those already arisen, cultivating wholesome states (kusala) not yet arisen, and maintaining, developing and bringing to completion those already present.
• Right mindfulness: establishing attention and observation over four domains of experience - the satipatthanas (satipaṭṭhāna): contemplating body, feelings, mind and dhammas (mental phenomena), “ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world” (MN 10).
• Right concentration (per SN 45.8 and MN 141) leads to the four jhanas (jhāna). The higher attainments of concentration called the “formless spheres” are not part of this definition, and “access concentration” (upacāra-samādhi) is a term from the later commentaries.

Wisdom (paññā) - view and intention.

• Right view is understanding the four noble truths, the nature of suffering and the path to liberation. MN 117 separates the mundane view, which accepts that actions bear fruit, from the supramundane one, which is the factor of the noble path.
• Right intention comprises renunciation, first of all of passions and craving (nekkhamma), good will (abyāpāda) and harmlessness (avihiṃsā).

A widespread image illustrating the Noble Eightfold Path is the wheel of the Dhamma with eight spokes (the Dhammachakra). Buddhism borrowed the image from Indian culture and filled it with new meaning. Originally it was the emblem of the chakravartin - the ideal universal monarch turning the wheel of law and justice. The turning of the wheel of the Dhamma came to symbolise the exposition and spread of the teaching of the Buddha, which opens the path to release from suffering.

Where to read: MN 141, MN 117, MN 44.

The Middle Way (majjhimā paṭipadā) is the name the Buddha gave in his first discourse to the Noble Eightfold Path (the set of practices and views leading to final liberation, Nibbana). The name “middle way” was chosen because the practices the Buddha proposed lay between two extremes popular in his time:

• indulgence in sensual pleasures (kāmasukhallikānuyoga);
• extreme asceticism and self-torment (attakilamathānuyoga).

The first extreme the Buddha calls low, coarse and ignoble, the second painful and ignoble; neither leads to the goal (SN 56.11). The Middle Way itself leads to the cessation of suffering and to nibbana, and it constitutes the fourth noble truth (“there is a path of release from suffering”).

In MN 36 this approach is unfolded through Gotama’s account of his own search for awakening. The future buddha pushed his body to the limit: he starved, practised intense and life-threatening breathing exercises, up to the state where “the skin of his belly clung to his spine”. It brought him no awakening at all, only exhaustion. Then he remembered a special and pleasant state of concentration he had experienced in his youth (the first jhana), and asked himself whether that pleasure was to be feared. The answer was no - it has nothing to do with sensual desires or unwholesome states.

The Middle Way consists of the following eight aspects - factors (see SN 56.11 and MN 139):

• right view;
• right intention;
• right speech;
• right action;
• right livelihood;
• right effort;
• right mindfulness;
• right concentration.

This is where its other name comes from - the Noble Eightfold Path.

The word “middle” has another sense as well - with regard to views. There are the views “everything exists” and “nothing exists” (SN 12.15), eternalism (the “self” is eternal) and annihilationism (the “self” is destroyed completely at death) (DN 1). The view that corresponds to the Middle Way also lies midway between these extremes and rests on the principle of dependent origination: suffering takes shape when its conditions are present and ceases when they cease.

Where to read: MN 36, MN 139, SN 56.11.

Karma (karma) is the Sanskrit word; in Pali it sounds as kamma. Literally it translates as “action, deed”.

What is kamma?

In AN 6.63 the Buddha says: “It is intention, monks, that I call kamma. Intending, one acts by body, speech and mind”. The key word here is intention (cetanā) - the volitional impulse that expresses itself in a deed of body, speech or mind. So the more precise meaning of “karma” in the Buddhist context is intention, or intentional action. The result of an intentional action, in turn, is the so-called vipāka, the “kammic fruit”. For example, cruel words said in anger and with the intention to insult will lead to obvious “negative” kammic fruits. A mosquito crushed by accident, though, will not turn into a kammic fruit based on killing: the person had no intention to kill.

Also, from the fact that deeds have consequences it does not follow that everything that happens is a consequence of deeds. The view “every experience is caused by past kamma” the Pali canon rejects outright (AN 3.61), and the suttas give no grounds for explaining other people’s illness or poverty by “their kamma”.

The kammic chain can be pictured like this:

• intention (cetanā) sets off a kammic action (kamma-patha);
• the action forms or reinforces a habit and a causal tendency;
• given the right conditions, the tendency bears fruit (vipāka).

The canon (in particular AN 6.63) distinguishes fruits experienced in this life, at the next birth and in a later existence. Sometimes this is spoken of as ripened kamma, whose fruit has already shown up in experience, and as unripened kamma - kammic potential already created but not yet fruiting. One could say it is a “seed” that has not yet met all the conditions needed to sprout.

Since kammic fruits are effectively determined by intention, Buddhism distinguishes two types of it:

• Unwholesome (akusala) intention - an intention born of one of the following:
  1. lobha - greed, clinging;
  2. dosa - hatred, aversion;
  3. moha - ignorance, delusion.
• Wholesome (kusala) intention - an intention born outside these defilements. An unwholesome intention will not yield a wholesome fruit, just as an apple tree will not grow from hogweed seeds.

What karma will a deed produce?

Karma is not retribution under whatever version of morality a society currently holds - that is, rather, a concept of Western religions. The law of kamma is a regularity of conditionality that shapes consequences:

• outwardly - as circumstances;
• inwardly - as inclinations, experiences, habits, clarity or cloudedness of mind;
• in the long run - as the direction of a future rebirth, to speak within the traditional Buddhist frame.

Nor does the canon give an exact calculus of the ripening of kamma. It is one of the four things the Buddha advised not to speculate about, lest one drive oneself to distress (AN 4.77). MN 136 warns that the whole of one’s kamma cannot be judged by the observed outcome: it happens that a person kills all his life and is reborn in a happy world, while another abstains and lands in a bad destination through a deed from the distant past.

What affects the kammic fruit?

The canon holds that the final kammic fruit and its “strength” are determined by a whole set of factors. Taking the killing of an animal as an example, for the act of killing to count as fully completed one usually lists:

1. there is a living being;
2. there is recognition of it as a living being;
3. there is the intention to kill;
4. there is effort directed at killing;
5. death occurs as the result of this action.

If some link is missing, the kamma may be incomplete or weaker. The same principle can be applied to other actions: object, recognition, motive, action, completion.

The courses of action

Clarifying how the law of kamma works, the suttas describe ten wholesome and unwholesome courses of action - kamma-patha (AN 10.176, MN 41). This is a list of deeds that lead to the formation of unwholesome kamma. Accordingly, if one does not commit these deeds (that is, follows the wholesome courses), no unwholesome fruits will form.

The wholesome courses are:

• bodily actions: not to kill, not to take what is not given, not to act wrongly in sensual pleasures (kāmesu micchācāra - first of all sexual misconduct: sex with those under the care of relatives, married, betrothed or protected by law);
• actions of speech: not to lie, not to divide people, not to speak harshly, not to chatter idly;
• intentions of mind: not to nurse covetous longing for anything, or enmity and ill will, and not to hold wrong views (denial of the law of kamma, of rebirth, of the Four Noble Truths).

Can karma or its fruits be changed?

A done deed cannot be rewritten, nor can karma be cancelled. But one can influence how it will manifest - for example, through remorse (not to be confused with self-flagellation out of guilt) and ceasing to repeat unwholesome deeds, as well as through acquiring wholesome merit.

If the wholesome courses of action are mostly about what not to do, the three bases for making merit (puñña-kiriya-vatthu, DN 33) define the formation of wholesome kamma:

• giving (dāna);
• virtue (sīla);
• development of mind (bhāvanā).

Such actions in the present do not erase the past, but they weaken its effect on us. A handful of salt makes a cup of water undrinkable, yet the same salt thrown into a full river will not change the taste of its water at all (AN 3.100).

The cessation of kamma

For all this attention to wholesome deeds and intentions, the goal of Buddhism is not to improve a person’s karma. Kamma is one of the factors of samsara - in essence, the motor that generates endless suffering. That is why a better rebirth cannot be the goal of a teaching that has set itself the task of ending that suffering. Wholesome karma and its fruits are seen only as necessary means for purifying the mind to the degree needed for the practice that leads to liberation.

That is why AN 6.63 calls the Noble Eightfold Path the way to the cessation of kamma. And arahants, beings who have fully realised the path, are described in the suttas as those who create no more new kamma and will have no new birth, which inevitably leads to suffering.

Where to read: MN 135, MN 136, MN 61.

The principle of non-self, anatta (anattā), does not claim that you do not exist. It claims that neither in the body nor in the mind is there a permanent owner - someone who directs the body, thoughts, emotions, feelings, consciousness and sensations, and does not change in the process.

Arguments appear in many suttas of the canon - for example, these two from SN 22.59:

• if the “self” were equivalent to our body, we could dispose of it completely: “let my body be thus”; it does not work that way;
• the body is impermanent, and what is subject to change inevitably leads to suffering (painfulness is not required here; the sense is closer to the absence of reliability, of a stable support). So it cannot be equated with an eternal and unchanging inner essence, taken as “this is mine, this I am, this is my self”.

The same logic is then applied to feelings (more precisely, their tone, vedanā), perception (saññā), volitional formations (saṅkhārā) and consciousness (viññāṇa). The Buddha breaks down what we call ourselves into these five aggregates (khandhā).

The question “is there a self or not” itself the Buddha leaves unanswered. For example, he stays silent at the direct question in the conversation with the wanderer Vacchagotta in one of the suttas. Answering “there is” would side with the teaching of an eternal essence; answering “there is not” would leave the questioner worrying that he existed and has now been destroyed (SN 44.10). In other words, anatta, non-self, is not so much the doctrine “I do not exist” as a way of looking at the whole of our experience.

But what, then, is the object of the law of kamma?

• In MN 109 a monk has exactly this thought: if form, feeling and the rest are not-self, then what “self” will be affected by deeds done by not-self? The Buddha replies that this is how a person trying to outwit the teaching might think, and returns the conversation to what can be checked: is form impermanent, is the impermanent reliable, is it reasonable to take such a thing as yourself.
• In SN 12.12, asked “who consumes the nutriment of consciousness?”, the Buddha says he does not claim that “someone consumes”; the right question is what consciousness serves as nutriment for, and the answer: for the future renewal of existence.

MN 38 opens up the theme of rebirth well. The monk Sāti decided that what is reborn is “the same consciousness, wandering from life to life”. That is entirely wrong, the Buddha corrects. Consciousness arises in dependence on conditions and is named after them, the way a fire is named after its fuel - a wood fire, a grass fire. In dependent origination, becoming (bhava) serves as the condition for birth (jāti). The conviction that the one who does the deed and the one who experiences its fruit in the next life are the same person leads to eternalism; the thought that they are different - to annihilationism. In place of both extremes stands dependent origination (SN 12.17).

Where to read: MN 109, MN 38, MN 22.

Dependent origination is the fundamental law of causality in Buddhism. It explains why any phenomenon exists and arises only owing to the presence of certain conditions - and with the cessation of those conditions, the processes and phenomena dependent on them cease to exist as well. First of all the Buddha applies this principle to the arising and cessation of suffering. The general formula runs: “When this is, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this is not, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases” (SN 12.37). It is not a linear chain but, rather, a dynamic web of mutual conditionality, explaining how the experience of individual existence unfolds within samsara.

It is one of the key teachings describing why suffering arises and how it can be brought to an end. MN 28 says: “One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma. One who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination”.

The Buddha set out the scheme of dependent origination as a chain of 12 links (SN 12.2):

1. Ignorance (Avijjā) - not knowing the nature of reality, and specifically the Four Noble Truths.
2. Formative factors (Saṅkhārā) - kammically conditioned impulses in the form of intentions, emotions, thoughts - everything that shapes the space of the mind and is born of ignorance.
3. Consciousness (Viññāṇa) - awareness of the “objects” arising in the space of the mind.
4. Name-and-form, or Mind and Body (Nāma-rūpa) - the mental and physical constituents of a being, arising in the presence of consciousness. “Name” (the mental) - feeling tone, perception, attention; “form” (the material) - the four great elements and what derives from them.
5. The six sense bases (Saḷāyatana) - the sources of sense perception: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind.
6. Contact (Phassa) - the coming together of a sense organ, its object and consciousness.
7. Feeling (Vedanā) - the tone of experience: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
8. Craving (Taṇhā) - passionate desire (attraction) or aversion (rejection) arising towards the feeling.
9. Clinging (Upādāna) - intensified craving grown into attachment to sensual pleasures, the “appropriation” of objects, views and notions of a “self”.
10. Becoming (Bhava) - the process of forming new kamma and a predisposition to a certain kind of existence.
11. Birth (Jāti) - appearance in a new form of existence (not necessarily physical birth, but also the arising of a new identity, a state of mind).
12. Ageing and death (Jarā-maraṇa) - the inevitable decay, suffering and dissolution that follow birth (and with them sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection and despair).

The main point: suffering exists because of the chain of conditioned links. If the chain is broken - especially at the stage of craving and clinging - the cycle stops, and dukkha (suffering) disappears.

In the canon Sariputta takes the chain apart link by link (MN 9): feeling tone arises with contact, craving - with feeling tone (vedanā); and as the path to the cessation of craving he names the Noble Eightfold Path. It is at the junction of feeling tone and craving that habit operates: the pleasant pulls us to hold on, the painful - to push away. The feeling tone itself - pleasant, unpleasant, neutral - does not go anywhere even for the trained disciple: he still experiences all three kinds of vedanā, but without clinging and without the “second arrow” (SN 36.6).

The standard formula as a sequence does not exhaust all the relations of conditionality. DN 15, for example, points to mutual conditioning: consciousness rests on name-and-form, and name-and-form - on consciousness. The formula of cessation runs in the same order: with the complete fading of ignorance the volitional actions cease, and so on to the end of the whole mass of suffering. Brief expositions begin the cessation with the fading of craving (SN 12.43).

Main interpretations

The classical commentarial explanation spreads the chain over three lives: past, present and future. Taken this way, it shows how ignorance, kamma and craving sustain samsara - precisely as the round of births and deaths - without an unchanging soul passing from body to body.

There is also an interpretation through present experience. Its emphasis is on how conditionality shows itself now: feeling supports craving, craving - clinging and suffering. Some teachers read the whole chain psychologically, including the “birth” of the sense of “I” at every moment - a new identity of sorts, with characteristic manifestations conditioned by this whole chain. On Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s interpretation, small psychological becomings and the large becoming that leads to a new birth are one and the same mechanism at different scales.

The Mahayana tradition, especially Madhyamaka, ties dependent origination to the understanding of emptiness (śūnyatā): since all things depend on conditions, on other phenomena and on designation, they have no independent, self-existent nature. “Empty” does not mean “non-existent” altogether; it means “existing dependently”.

Dependent origination makes it possible to avoid two extreme views - “I have an unchanging essence” and “everything is random, my actions change nothing”. Everything is conditioned, but conditions can change. Virtue, attention, wisdom and goodwill become new conditions that weaken suffering. Dependent origination is also the middle between eternalism (“everything always exists”) and annihilationism (“nothing exists and everything vanishes without trace”), which the Buddha frequently criticises in the canon.

In place of these polar views the Buddha describes new birth through an agrarian metaphor of creating the conditions for a seed to sprout (AN 3.76):

• kamma is the field: intentional actions that create the range of possibilities for experience and birth;
• consciousness is the seed: if passion, delight and craving are present, consciousness gets established and grows;
• craving is the moisture, without which consciousness cannot take hold and grow.

Under these conditions “a new becoming in the future” is produced. Upādāna, grasping, is built here into the mechanics of the interplay of kamma, consciousness and craving. Clinging directs our intentions (cetanā) and deeds (kamma), which in turn condition the “establishing and growth” of consciousness. So “rebirth” can be described as a process of forming a new mode of existence that has gathered momentum - the direction in which the next literal new birth ripens.

Such an account of rebirth implies no personal transmigrating soul. And that is why the Buddha objects to the monk Sāti, who decided that “the same consciousness” wanders on: consciousness arises in dependence on conditions and is distinguished by them (MN 38).

Where to read: MN 9, MN 38, DN 15.

Samsara (saṁsāra) is the continuing round of births, deaths and further births, in which beings are held by ignorance (avijjā) and craving (taṇhā). The word literally means “wandering on”. The way out is nibbāna: craving fades, ignorance ends, and with them the whole chain that produces suffering.

Samsara is not a place or a separate world you can enter or leave. It is a name for a process: one conditioned state gives rise to the next, with no discoverable beginning. The Buddha said the first point of this wandering cannot be found, however long you look for it (SN 15.3). The early texts list five destinations (gati) where rebirth can occur: hell, animals, ghosts (pettivisaya), humans, gods (MN 12). Rebirth among the gods is pleasant and lasts a long time, but it is no exit - it also ends in another birth.

None of this is driven by fate or by an outside power. In dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda), ignorance is the condition for the links that follow: craving leads to clinging, clinging to becoming (bhava), becoming to birth. Kamma is intention (cetanā), not a substance that drags us around the circle. Nothing transmigrates through death - no self, no unchanging consciousness. The monk Sāti, who thought otherwise, was corrected by the Buddha in sharp terms (MN 38). What continues is causal connection, not an entity.

The way out is set out in the second and third noble truths: craving that leads to renewed becoming produces suffering, and its complete fading brings that suffering to an end (MN 141). The means is the noble eightfold path, grouped as virtue, concentration and wisdom (MN 44). When craving and ignorance are pulled up by the root, no fuel is left for another birth. That is arahantship.

Two points cause most of the confusion. Leaving samsara does not mean relocating to a better part of it: MN 106 shows that even the refined formless attainments do not liberate while clinging remains. And the end of rebirth is not the annihilation of a person. Asked whether a Tathāgata exists after death, the Buddha answered neither yes nor no - those options do not apply here, any more than it applies to ask which direction a flame went when it went out (MN 72).

Awakening also comes in stages. A stream-enterer (sotāpanna) is still reborn, but the number of remaining births is now limited; the complete absence of further birth comes with arahantship.

Where to read: MN 38, MN 141, MN 72; on the undiscoverable beginning of samsara, SN 15.3.

Nibbāna (Sanskrit nirvāṇa) is the complete fading away of craving, and with it of suffering and of renewed becoming. It is not non-existence, and not a trance. It should not be confused with emptiness either: in the early texts emptiness (suññatā) means that phenomena are empty of self and of what belongs to a self (SN 35.85, MN 121), while the base of nothingness (ākiñcaññāyatana) is a separate meditative attainment, itself conditioned (MN 140).

The word means going out and cooling down - the way a fire goes out when its fuel runs out. SN 43.12 defines the unconditioned (asaṅkhata) as the destruction of greed (rāga), hatred (dosa) and delusion (moha). The third noble truth gives a direct definition too: the complete fading away, giving up and letting go of that same craving which leads to renewed becoming (MN 141). This is not an object lying somewhere waiting to be found; craving - for sense pleasures, for becoming, for non-becoming - ends and does not start up again.

The suttas give nibbāna many epithets, both negative and positive: the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned (Ud 8.3), the deathless (amata), the highest happiness, peace, the island (dīpa), the shelter (leṇa), the refuge (saraṇa) - a long list is collected in SN 43.14-43. These are epithets, not a description of a location.

Hence the usual worry: does all this amount to annihilation? When Vacchagotta asked whether a Tathāgata exists after death, the Buddha replied that none of the four alternatives applies, and compared it to a fire: once a fire has gone out for lack of fuel, asking which direction it went is meaningless (MN 72). He does not say that the Tathāgata simply vanished - he drops a badly formed question.

The canon distinguishes two elements of nibbāna (Iti 44). “With residue” (saupādisesa) is the arahant while alive: craving is exhausted, but the five sense faculties are intact and they still experience the pleasant and the painful. “Without residue” (anupādisesa) is when, after the arahant’s death, everything experienced, no longer fed by anything, grows cool. The word parinibbāna usually points to the second case, as in the account of the Buddha’s passing (DN 16), though in the early texts it is not always kept strictly apart from plain “nibbāna”.

The canon does not invite speculation about nibbāna. The Buddha compared the going out to an oil lamp that burns while oil and wick last and goes out when they are gone (MN 140), and described the liberated person’s knowledge in a dry formula repeated across the canon: birth is ended, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.

Where to read: MN 140, MN 141, MN 72; on the two elements of nibbāna, Iti 44.

Samatha (samatha) is the practice of concentration and calming of the mind; vipassana (vipassanā) is the practice of insight. In the suttas these are two complementary lines of development: samatha develops the mind and helps cling less to habitual sensual pleasures, while vipassana develops wisdom and leads to the ending of ignorance (AN 2.31). Both practices are needed for final liberation (the attainment of Nibbana).

• Samatha techniques (as a rule, various kinds of meditation are meant) gather and settle the mind through concentration on a chosen object - the breath, goodwill, a kasina (a special visual object for meditation, for example a coloured disc, earth, water or fire). As a result the practitioner reaches one-pointedness of mind, a steady sharp focus of attention. That focus then makes it possible to reach the state of utmost concentration - samadhi (samādhi). Within such concentration four levels of absorption are distinguished, the so-called jhanas (jhāna).
• Vipassana observes experience so that its conditioning by the five aggregates of clinging becomes noticeable, along with impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and not-self (anattā). As a result the practitioner develops wisdom (paññā), which leads to insights into the qualities of perceived experience.

How the two practices are combined is often individual. A developed state of concentration, samadhi, does not by itself lead to insights and Nibbana. At the same time, insight practices also need a sufficiently steady, calm mind. So the question “where to start” is most often settled by temperament and by a teacher. In AN 4.170 Ananda says that all the monks and nuns who declared the attainment of arahantship in his presence had gone one of four ways: samatha before vipassana; vipassana before samatha; the two developed in tandem (yuganaddha); and the case where the mind is first seized by agitation about the Dhamma and then settles, becomes unified and enters samadhi. Mindfulness of breathing, for example, described in MN 118, joins samatha and vipassana. Splitting practice into a “samatha course” and a “vipassana course” is mostly a later and modern way of organising teaching.

Where to read: MN 118, MN 149; on the four routes - AN 4.170, on the pair itself - AN 2.31.

A jhāna is a stable state of deep concentration in which the mind is collected and lets go, step by step, of the coarser components of experience. The canon describes four such jhānas and uses them to define right concentration (sammā-samādhi), the eighth factor of the path (SN 45.8).

The formula recurs throughout the canon, for instance in MN 39:

• First jhāna: secluded from sensual pleasures and unwholesome states, with applied and sustained thought (vitakka, vicāra), and with rapture (pīti) and pleasure (sukha) born of seclusion.
• Second: applied and sustained thought subside; there remain inner confidence, unification of mind, and pīti and sukha born of concentration.
• Third: rapture fades; equanimity (upekkhā), mindfulness, clear comprehension and sukha remain.
• Fourth: with joy and grief already gone, both pleasure and pain are abandoned; the state is neither painful nor pleasant, with purity of mindfulness due to equanimity.

So this is not a scale of increasing pleasure: by the fourth jhāna sukha has been given up and neutral feeling remains.

Beyond these come the four formless bases (arūpa-āyatana): infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither-perception-nor-non-perception (MN 111). Later literature sometimes calls them formless jhānas, but the suttas keep a separate term for them, and describing them as a further increase of pīti and sukha is wrong: their standard formulas are defined by a shift in perception.

Entering jhāna is preceded by abandoning the five hindrances: sensual desire (kāmacchanda), ill will (byāpāda), dullness and drowsiness (thīna-middha), restlessness and remorse (uddhacca-kukkucca), and doubt (vicikicchā).

The suttas state no rule that you must master at least the first jhāna before taking up insight. They do define right concentration precisely as the four jhānas (SN 45.8), and they make jhāna a basis for the destruction of the taints: in AN 9.36 the practitioner regards the phenomena of the jhāna as impermanent, suffering and not-self. Commentarial Theravāda also allows a path of dry insight (sukkhavipassaka), in which mundane jhāna is not attained beforehand. These are different levels of description, and they are still read in different ways.

A jhāna remains a conditioned attainment - not nibbāna and no guarantee of liberation. In MN 111 Sāriputta goes through the jhānas and the formless bases, discerning their components one by one: these states, not having been, come to be; having been, they vanish. He is neither drawn to them nor repelled by them, and he sees that there is an escape beyond. Nor is the happiness of jhāna the highest available to a human being: MN 59 sets out a series of ever subtler kinds of happiness, in which the formless bases stand above the jhānas and the cessation of perception and feeling stands at the top.

Where to read: MN 39, MN 111, MN 59.

Mindfulness (sati; the Sanskrit counterpart is smṛti, “memory”) is recollection: the ability to keep in mind what is happening and what you are doing, without slipping into forgetfulness. In the suttas the term sati carries several different senses:

• Memory and recall (MN 53): the ability to remember what was said or done long ago (for example, “to remember deeds of the past”).
• Keeping in mind: reminding oneself of the important principles of the Dhamma, holding on to the reference points of practice.
• Presence of mind and awareness (mindfulness / awareness): direct perception of what is happening in the present moment without distraction, clarity of mind.

Sati is the first of the seven factors of awakening. In the Noble Eightfold Path right mindfulness (sammā-sati) is the seventh factor. In this context it is defined not as presence in the moment in general, but through the practice of the four foundations-domains of mindfulness (satipatthanas - body, feelings, mind, mental constructs - MN 141, MN 10). The full formula runs: the practitioner contemplates the domain “ardent (ātāpī), clearly comprehending (sampajāno), mindful (satimā), having put away covetousness and displeasure towards the world” (MN 10). So “non-judgemental observation” is not quite an accurate translation. The practice includes telling the wholesome from the unwholesome: in the section on dhammas, for example, the contemplator knows how a hindrance arose, how it is abandoned and how it does not arise again.

One can start practising recollection with the first steps of MN 118 (the Anapanasati Sutta), taking the breath as the domain of the body: sit down, straighten the back, know a long breath as long and a short one as short, then experience the whole body and calm bodily activity. The mind will keep switching to various other inner phenomena (emotions, sensations, thoughts). Noticing this, one should bring recollection back to the chosen object. In everyday affairs - walking, eating, talking - the same coupling works, but the emphasis shifts to sampajañña, clear comprehension of what you are doing.

Sati has its own image in the canon - the gatekeeper. In SN 35.245 the gatekeeper of the city is explicitly called a designation for mindfulness, and in AN 7.67 the disciple “with mindfulness as gatekeeper” abandons the unwholesome and develops the wholesome. The gatekeeper-sati, in the end, decides what to let into our life.

Where to read: MN 10, MN 118, MN 141.

We read the Majjhima Nikaya, part of the Pali Canon, which is the canon of Theravada. So yes, textually we work inside the Theravada corpus, though the club is not sectarian and people come with all sorts of backgrounds.

The names in the question refer to different kinds of things, which is where the confusion starts. Theravada (Theravāda, “the teaching of the elders”) is a living Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, historically descended from the Sri Lankan Mahāvihāra lineage; later tradition traces it back to the Vibhajjavāda. Mahayana (Mahāyāna, “the great vehicle”) is a broad body of texts and teachings that took shape gradually around the turn of the era. Vajrayana (Vajrayāna, “the diamond vehicle”) is the tantric layer within Mahayana: the first Buddhist tantras appear in the 6th-7th centuries, and the corpus grows through the 7th-12th.

Those regions overlap: the Tibetan tradition includes sutric Mahayana as well, and in Japan the Vajrayana school Shingon sits alongside other Mahayana schools. All three keep the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and the goal of freedom from suffering.

Theravada is not the same thing as “early Buddhism”. There were many early schools - the traditional lists count eighteen, though the names and genealogies vary from source to source. Early texts are reconstructed by comparing the Pali nikayas with the Chinese agamas and with fragments from other schools. The Pali Canon is the only complete surviving canon in a Middle Indic language and one of our most important sources, but it is not a transcript of the Buddha’s words and not the only witness.

The ladder “first Theravada, then Mahayana, then Vajrayana” is wrong, and the picture of three simultaneous branches off a common root also flattens the history: the inheritance is shared and early Buddhist, but the three took shape at different times and influenced each other.

On “Hinayana”. The Sanskrit hīnayāna, literally “inferior” or “deficient vehicle”, is a polemical label from Mahayana texts. No known school ever used it of itself, and it does not name any single historical tradition. The First General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists passed a resolution in 1950 to replace it with “Theravada” - an ecumenical recommendation about present-day traditions, not a name for all the early schools. Scholars write “early Buddhist schools” or “Nikaya Buddhism”, and where the doctrinal classification of the disciple’s path is specifically meant, śrāvakayāna. We do not use the term.

“Pratyekayana” in the question means pratyekabuddhayāna (Pali paccekabuddhayāna), the path of the pratyekabuddha, who awakens on their own but founds no teaching. It is neither a movement nor a school, but one of the three vehicles in a common Mahayana scheme (śrāvakayāna, pratyekabuddhayāna, bodhisattvayāna), which some Mahayana texts then collapse into one. Theravada commentarial systematics likewise distinguishes three kinds of awakening: sāvakabodhi, paccekabodhi, sammāsambodhi.

An arahant, by the way, is not half-liberated: an arahant and a sammāsambuddha are equally free of the defilements. The difference is that a sammāsambuddha discovers a path nobody had found and makes it known to others, while an arahant walks it as a disciple.

Emptiness is not a Mahayana invention either: the Pali suññatā is there in the early suttas - the world is empty of self and of what belongs to a self. The Mahayana śūnyatā, above all Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka with its critique of intrinsic nature (svabhāva), takes the theme further and in a different direction.

Where to read: MN 121 and MN 122 on the practice of emptiness; SN 35.85 on the world being empty of self and of what belongs to a self; SN 22.58 on how a Buddha differs from liberated disciples.

An arahant is already free of the defilements; a bodhisattva is still on the way - to buddhahood, that is, to the state of one who rediscovers and proclaims the path. The two categories are hard to compare: “arahant” names an attained result, while “bodhisattva” is rather the name of a path.

First, the terms. Arahant (Pali - arahant; Sanskrit - arhat) comes from the root √arh, “to be worthy”. It is the highest attainment (short of a buddha) from the point of view of Theravada Buddhism.

An arahant has completely uprooted greed, hatred and delusion. He realises Nibbana already in this life, produces no new kamma and is not reborn after death.

Nibbana as the final spiritual attainment is exactly the same for an arahant and for the Buddha. But describing the Buddha as “the very first arahant” is not correct. SN 22.58 puts the difference this way: the Buddha discovers the previously undiscovered path and teaches it to other living beings, while the disciples gain it after him, becoming arahants. This does not mean, of course, that an arahant cannot teach the Dhamma to others; the difference is only that the Buddha is its discoverer.

Bodhisatta (bodhisatta, Sanskrit bodhisattva) as a term in the Pali canon means, as a rule, Gotama himself before his awakening, or more broadly any being on the way to awakening. There is no bodhisattva vow to save all beings yet.

Mahayana (Mahāyāna) made the bodhisattva path its central ideal and developed it, adding the practice of cultivating the so-called bodhichitta (bodhicitta, “the mind of awakening”) and the aspiration to bring all living beings to unsurpassed perfect awakening (anuttarā samyaksaṃbodhi). The bodhisattva path takes many lives and is mapped out in stages (bhūmi; ten in the Daśabhūmika-sūtra, with other schemes in other texts).

The formula “a bodhisattva postpones his own nirvana” is a popular simplification. In the developed Mahayana systems apratiṣṭhita-nirvāṇa means abiding neither in samsara (saṃsāra) nor in a nirvana understood as departure from the world: wisdom does not let one settle in samsara, and compassion does not let one rest in the peace of nirvana.

Besides the arahant and the bodhisattva there is a third class of spiritual seekers: the paccekabuddha (paccekabuddha, Sanskrit pratyekabuddha). This is a being who, without having met the Dhamma, awakens on his own, through his own work and merit, but does not found a teaching or a community.

Assessments of these paths differ across traditions. Some Mahayana sutras treat the arahant’s path as preliminary: the Lotus Sutra in chapters 2-3 predicts buddhahood for Sariputta, and the Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanāda-sūtra denies that the nirvana of arahants and pratyekabuddhas is final. Other Mahayana traditions venerate arahants. Late Theravadin literature, for its part, distinguishes:

• sāvakabodhi - the awakening of a disciple who reaches liberation thanks to the Buddha’s teaching (in essence, the arahant’s path);
• paccekabodhi - the independent awakening of a paccekabuddha, who finds the path without a teacher but does not open the teaching to the world;
• sammāsambodhi - the perfect independent awakening of a Buddha, who rediscovers the path to liberation and is able to pass it on to others.

Medieval Lankan and Southeast Asian texts and inscriptions testify to the aspiration to buddhahood among some monks, rulers and lay people.

Where to read: MN 26 and MN 36 - Gotama the bodhisatta before awakening; SN 22.58 - how the Tathagata differs from liberated disciples.

In a creator God, no - the early texts do not sidestep the question, they argue with it directly. Devas (deva, plural devā), celestial beings, do exist in Buddhist cosmology, but they remain inside saṃsāra and count as neither creators nor a source of liberation.

The argument against a creator is made concretely in the suttas. In DN 1, as a world-period unfolds again, one being is reborn first in an empty palace of Brahmā; others appear there later, and it concludes that it made them, while they take its word for it. In MN 49 the Brahmā named Baka holds his world to be eternal and beyond death, and the Buddha takes that delusion apart piece by piece. In DN 11 a monk tours the heavens asking where the four great elements cease without remainder; the Great Brahmā, in front of his retinue, first recites his titles of creator and lord, then draws the monk aside and admits he does not know. AN 3.61 rejects issaranimmānahetu, the claim that everything a person feels - pleasant, painful or neutral - is caused by the creative act of a lord; it rejects total karmic determinism and pure causelessness in the same breath.

Devas live long, wield great power and enjoy great pleasure, but their span runs out: they die and are reborn according to their kamma, sometimes lower down. Iti 83 describes the five signs by which other devas recognise that one of them is about to die, and calls a human birth a good destination for the one departing. Not all heavens are alike: the Brahmā realms are not a matter of sense pleasure at all. Brahmā in the Pali Canon names a class of high celestial beings, Baka being one of them, and is not the impersonal brahman of the Upanishads.

A Buddhist takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, not in a deva. Devas, meanwhile, come to the Buddha and ask him questions all through the suttas - the whole Devatā-saṃyutta opens that way (SN 1.1). Rebirth among the devas is called a good fruit of virtue (MN 41), but not the end of the path: a heaven is not nibbāna and guarantees no liberation.

“The Buddha left questions about the origin of the world unanswered” is not quite right. Of the ten undeclared questions (avyākata, MN 63, MN 72), four concern the world (whether it is eternal or not, finite or not), two the identity of soul and body, and four the existence of a Tathāgata after death. Who made the world is not among them. Cosmogonic accounts do exist: DN 27 and DN 1 describe the world contracting and expanding again, AN 4.156 distinguishes four incalculable phases of an aeon (kappa), and no starting point for saṃsāra is assigned (SN 15.1). The arising of suffering and its ending are explained through conditions (paṭiccasamuppāda) rather than through anyone’s will.

So the word “atheistic” needs a qualification. Buddhism is non-theistic with respect to a creator God: it does not deny that deities exist, it just gives them no role as creator or saviour. That does not stop it from being a religious tradition with a path to liberation (nibbāna).

All of the above concerns the Pali Canon. Many Mahayana traditions have well-developed devotional practices addressed to Amitābha, the Buddha of the Pure Land schools, and to Guanyin, the Chinese form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, usually depicted as female. Those figures and practices belong outside the Pali Canon, and they are not regarded as creators either.

The canon states the general principle plainly: “You yourselves must make the effort; the Tathāgatas only proclaim the way” (Dhp 276).

Where to read: MN 49 on the Buddha and Baka the Brahmā; DN 11 on the Brahmā with no answer; AN 3.61 on the doctrine of creation by a lord.

The early suttas do not forbid care and goodwill, but they warn against craving, appropriation and the fear of loss. Love can turn into one of these. At the same time, not every bond and not every desire falls under the ban.

The suttas have no direct terms for “love” and “attachment”, let alone an opposition between them. Pali has several different words for the shades of these notions. What one is instructed to develop is:

• metta (mettā, active friendliness);
• and karuna (karuṇā, compassion - the active wish to lessen another’s suffering).

These are two of the four so-called immeasurable qualities (the brahmaviharas; the other two are sympathetic joy, muditā, and equanimity, upekkhā). These qualities are to be extended “immeasurably”, to all beings.

The different shades of what we often put into the word “love” look like this in Pali:

• taṇhā - craving, thirst;
• rāga - passion, lust;
• pema - tender affection;
• piya - “dear”, “beloved”.

Of the feeling for someone close one would rather say pema, and the person himself would be called piya. Buddhism and the Pali canon speak of pema with utter clarity (Dhp 213): from pema sorrow is born, from pema fear is born. In MN 87 and Ud 8.8 the theme of attachment is developed more fully still: sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection and despair are born from what is dear. The more dear ones, the more suffering. It is worth noting, at the same time, that Snp 1.8, for example, takes a mother’s readiness to protect her only child as the image of the strength with which one should develop a boundlessly kind heart towards all beings.

Besides the various senses of love and attachment above, there is also upādāna, which is literally translated as “attachment”, but in the Pali canon it is, rather, a technical term: one of the links of dependent origination, coming after taṇhā and before bhava. Buddhism distinguishes four kinds of clinging:

• kāmupādāna - to sensual pleasures;
• diṭṭhupādāna - to views;
• sīlabbatupādāna - to rules and observances;
• attavādupādāna - to the notion of a “self”.

What we call love is usually a bundle of different feelings. In parental care there is genuine care and there is anxious holding on. Romantic love often starts well and degenerates into jealousy and control. We say “I love this person” and mean “I need this person, I am afraid to lose him, I feel bad without him”. That is exactly how the other becomes “mine”.

Is attachment always bad? For taṇhā and upādāna the answer is unambiguous: they are to be abandoned. But not every desire is taṇhā. For example, chanda (chanda - wholesome desire, interest, readiness to act) is one of the four bases of spiritual power (iddhipāda). In a certain sense a paradox arises: leaning on desire, one abandons craving - a person hears of another’s liberation, wants the same, and in the end abandons that desire too (AN 4.159). When Ananda calls good friendship (kalyāṇamitta) half of the holy life, the Buddha corrects him: it is the whole of the holy life (SN 45.2). And even the Buddhist teaching itself is compared to a raft: after crossing to the other shore (reaching awakening), one does not carry it further on one’s head or shoulder (MN 22).

Where to read: MN 87 - on how sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection and despair are born from what is dear; Snp 1.8 - the Karaṇīyametta-sutta, on boundless goodwill; MN 22 - the simile of the raft.

To begin, no - the suttas ask for no oath at the door. But the reverse is false too: rebirth and kamma are built into the early teaching, and they cannot be pulled out without damaging the structure.

MN 95 shows how the canon handles belief. The young brahmin Kāpaṭhika raises the question of the Vedic tradition, which the brahmins hold to be the only truth. The Buddha introduces the “safeguarding of truth” (saccānurakkhaṇā): if you have faith (saddhā), it is honest to say “such is my faith” and stop there - but not to add “only this is true, everything else is false”. The same holds for preference (ruci), oral tradition (anussava), reasoning (ākāraparivitakka) and a view accepted after reflection (diṭṭhinijjhānakkhanti). None of the five grounds licenses that certainty. The same sutta then lays out a long sequence: the student first examines the teacher himself for greed, hate and delusion, and only then come trust, listening, memorising, examining the meaning, considered acceptance, zeal, application, weighing - and only at the end the personal realisation of the ultimate truth. Saddhā here is trust after inspection, an advance against work to be done, not a finished answer.

MN 60 is blunter. The brahmin householders of Sālā admit they have found no teacher they trust, and the Buddha sets out the apaṇṇaka dhamma, the incontrovertible teaching. He does not stay neutral: there is another world, and denying it is called wrong view. But the argument he develops is a pragmatic one. From someone holding the nihilist view - no gift, no fruit of good and bad actions, no other world - bad conduct of body, speech and mind is to be expected; he is blamed here already, and if there is another world, he loses there as well. The one who holds the opposite wins either way. AN 3.65, the discourse to the Kālāmas of Kesaputta, makes a similar move: a noble disciple (ariyasāvaka) who has cleared his mind of hostility and ill will gains four assurances. The first two say his position holds up whether or not there is another world with fruit of action. The other two are conditional: if evil comes to the one who does evil, then no suffering threatens him, who does none; and if it does not, he is pure either way.

This is not reducible to “believe just in case”: the wager argument sits next to the Buddha’s plain statement that there is another world. But it cuts both ways. For someone who does not know and does not see, “there is definitely nothing after death” is an equally unproven claim, and it is not free - it changes what a person finds it reasonable to do.

Rebirth will not come out of the text either. MN 117 distinguishes two kinds of right view. The mundane kind (sāsavaṃ puññabhāgiyaṃ upadhivepakkaṃ - “affected by taints, partaking of merit, ripening in the acquisitions”) spells it out: there is what is given and what is offered, there is fruit of good and bad actions, there is this world and the other world, there is mother and father, there are beings reborn spontaneously, there are ascetics who have realised both worlds themselves. The second kind, noble and supramundane, is a factor of the path, the wisdom that discriminates. Kamma, meanwhile, is in the suttas first of all intentional action (cetanā), and some of its results are visible in this life, not only after it.

An honest secular position sounds roughly like this: I do not know what happens after death, I assert neither answer, and I work with what I can check - greed, hate, attention, actions and their consequences now. You can practise that way, and MN 95 defends such caution. But caution is not yet the whole of right view, and the four truths are not confined to one life: suffering there is defined through birth, ageing and death, and the goal is the ending of further becoming. Early Buddhism is not neutral about rebirth, and making it neutral is no longer reading - it is editing.

Where to read: MN 60, MN 95, MN 117.

Sit down, straighten your back, know your breathing, and bring the mind back to it when it wanders off. Part of that is in the suttas, part is modern practical scaffolding, and the difference is marked below.

From the suttas. MN 118 sets the frame like this: the practitioner goes to the forest, to the root of a tree or to an empty hut, sits down cross-legged, holding the body erect, having established mindfulness in front; mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. The first four steps: breathing in long, he understands that the breath is long; the same for short; he trains in breathing in and out experiencing the whole body (sabbakāya - read both as the physical body and as the whole process of breathing); he trains in calming the bodily formation (kāyasaṅkhāra, that is, the breath itself). The sutta assigns no duration, only development and repeated cultivation (bhāvitā, bahulīkatā).

The modern scaffolding, without which it is hard to start at home:

• Ten minutes on a timer, at the same time of day. These numbers are not canonical, they are simply convenient at the start.
• A chair is a modern adaptation. Pick a stable posture you can sit in calmly, and shift position if it hurts. Feet on the floor, hands on your knees, eyes closed or gaze lowered.
• Find the place where the breath is most noticeable - nostrils, chest or belly - and stay with it. MN 118 names no such spot; this is a later device.
• Do not adjust the breath, notice what it is doing.
• The mind will wander into plans and conversations. You notice, you come back. There is no sutta formula for this either, but it is what the practice consists of in the first weeks. Arguing with yourself about it (“distracted again”) adds nothing.

What to expect. The five hindrances (pañca nīvaraṇāni): sensual desire (kāmacchanda), ill will (vyāpāda), dullness and drowsiness (thīna-middha), restlessness and remorse (uddhacca-kukkucca), doubt (vicikicchā). MN 10 prescribes knowing, for each of them, whether it is present, how it arose, how it is abandoned and how it does not arise again. So drowsiness and restlessness on the cushion are not a sign of failure but the material the sutta tells you to work with directly. A collected mind is a result of practice, not the ticket into it, and measuring your first weeks against descriptions of the jhānas is pointless.

Breathing is not the whole of it. To Rāhula (MN 62) the Buddha gives the practice that is like earth, water, fire, air and space, the four immeasurables - goodwill, compassion, appreciative joy, equanimity - contemplation of the unattractive, perception of impermanence, and only then the detailed practice of mindfulness of breathing. If the breath brings on anxiety or tension, a common later approach is to begin with goodwill (mettā): wishing well to yourself, then to people you know. MN 62 says to develop mettā in order to abandon ill will, but gives neither a formula of wishes nor that sequence, and it does not suit everyone.

A safety note. Meditation does not replace treatment. In acute psychosis, mania or a suicidal crisis, urgent professional help is what is needed; if your state noticeably worsens, stop practising on your own and go to the clinician treating you. With panic attacks, trauma or severe depression, agree the format with your specialist and stay away from intensive solo sessions and long retreats. Our club reads suttas; it replaces neither a doctor nor a meditation teacher.

Where to read: MN 118, MN 10, MN 62.

The Vinaya prescribes no disciplinary penalty for a lay person who breaks these rules (secular law is a separate matter). But the five precepts (pañcasīla) are not advice either: they are pañca sikkhāpadāni, five training rules a person takes on themselves and keeps themselves.

The canonical five are abstention from:

• killing living beings (pāṇātipātā veramaṇī);
• taking what is not given (adinnādānā veramaṇī);
• sexual misconduct (kāmesu micchācārā veramaṇī);
• false speech (musāvādā veramaṇī);
• intoxicating drinks that are a ground for heedlessness (surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī).

The third precept does not require celibacy of a lay person: MN 41 spells it out with a historical list - women protected by mother, father, brother, sister, relatives or the Dhamma, married women, those whose company carries a penalty, and women who are betrothed.

AN 8.39 calls these five abstentions great gifts: whoever keeps them gives limitless beings freedom from fear and hostility, and gains a share in that freedom themselves.

The five precepts are not the whole of it. MN 41 works through the ten courses of action: three bodily, four of speech - false speech, divisive speech, harsh speech, idle chatter - and three of mind: covetousness, ill will, wrong view. Intention here is kamma itself: intending, a person acts by body, speech and mind (AN 6.63). And virtue (sīla) is only one division of the path: right speech, action and livelihood make up the aggregate of virtue, with concentration and wisdom following (MN 44). On uposatha days a lay person may take eight precepts for a day and a night (AN 8.41), including complete celibacy for that period; that is a voluntary load, not a standard.

Alcohol. Surā, meraya and majja are names of intoxicating drinks; extending the rule to modern substances is reasonable, but the Pali formula contains no literal list of them. It is worded as abstention, not as moderation: the suttas single out no permitted “glass of wine with dinner”, and it is more honest to say so than to bend the text to a habit. The argument is not about sin - intoxication takes out mindfulness, and with it the ability to hold the other precepts, though that is practical reasoning rather than a line of a sutta. DN 31 lists six everyday consequences of the habit: loss of money, quarrels, illness, a bad reputation, indecent exposure, weakened wisdom.

Meat. The early texts prescribe no general vegetarianism. MN 55 gives the threefold rule, and it is addressed first of all to monks receiving almsfood: meat is not to be eaten if you have seen, heard or suspect that the animal was killed for you specifically. It is not a ready guide to shopping in a supermarket. Devadatta demanded that five ascetic points be made compulsory, including lifelong abstention from fish and meat; the Buddha refused and confirmed the allowance of meat pure by the three conditions (Kd 17). Killing and the meat trade are nonetheless judged negatively: AN 5.177 lists trade in living beings and in meat among five occupations a lay follower should avoid, and MN 55 spells out separately how much demerit is accumulated by whoever kills an animal for an offering.

Morality still does not reduce to what is on the plate. The line that what defiles a person is not meat but cruelty, deceit and malice stands at Snp 2.2.

Where to read: AN 8.39, MN 41, MN 55.

The Pali Canon (Tipiṭaka, “three baskets”) is the canonical collection of the Theravāda, preserved in Pali. The Majjhima Nikāya is the second of its collections of discourses, and the club picked it itself, on editorial grounds.

The three baskets. The Vinaya Piṭaka holds the monastic code with the stories of how each rule came about, sections on the running and procedures of the community (Khandhaka), and a late reference digest (Parivāra). The Sutta Piṭaka holds the discourses of the Buddha and the senior disciples. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is a technical analysis of the same material; it is placed in a later layer than the body of the suttas, though the early mātikās may have taken shape before its final redaction. The club does not read the Abhidhamma.

The Sutta Piṭaka consists of five Nikāyas. The Dīgha Nikāya - 34 long discourses. The Majjhima Nikāya - 152 discourses of middle length. The Saṃyutta Nikāya - thousands of short suttas grouped by topic, by person and by doctrinal heading. The Aṅguttara Nikāya - suttas arranged by numerical groups, from one item up to eleven. The Khuddaka Nikāya - a mixed collection with the Dhammapada, the Sutta Nipāta, the Theragāthā and other texts; its contents differ between Theravāda recensions. The first four Nikāyas, together with their parallel Āgamas, make up the main core of the early Buddhist texts. That does not mean everything inside them is of one age, or that the Khuddaka and the Vinaya hold no early material.

Why the Majjhima. The length of a sutta lets us work through the whole of it in one session, and the interlocutors are as varied as they come - brahmins, ascetics of other schools, kings, monastics, doubtful lay people; alongside the doctrine there are descriptions of practice and biographical episodes. In the Dīgha the discourses are too long for a single conversation, while the Saṃyutta and Aṅguttara are shorter and more scattered - handier as a reference, worse as continuous reading.

Translations. In English the club works from Bhikkhu Bodhi (The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Ñāṇamoli’s draft translation as edited by Bodhi, with his introduction and notes) and from Bhikkhu Sujato’s open translation on SuttaCentral. In Russian the main body of texts is SV’s translations on SuttaCentral and theravada.ru; these were made from English rather than directly from Pali.

How far they can be trusted. The texts were transmitted orally for several centuries - in lineages of specialist reciters (bhāṇaka) and through group recitation; they were written down in Sri Lanka, by the Sri Lankan chronicles, at the end of the 1st century BCE. The repetitions and fixed formulas are at once a mnemonic device and a mark of oral formulaic style. They held the wording, but did not rule out divergences between lineages of transmission. There is an external check as well: the main surviving Chinese parallel collection is the Madhyama Āgama (Taishō 26, translated in 397-398, usually associated with the Sarvāstivāda); it corresponds to the Majjhima largely, but not completely and not one to one. Individual parallels turn up in Sanskrit and Gāndhārī fragments.

That leaves three different levels of trust, and they are worth keeping apart. Comparative evidence supports the preservation of a large part of the shared early material across independent lines of transmission, though it does not by itself confirm the accuracy of all the later transmission of the Pali text specifically. It supports the reconstruction of teaching that existed before the schools divided too, with caveats: divergences show up not only in framing and in who is addressed, but sometimes in structure and doctrine. What historical and comparative methods do not establish is that any given sutta holds the verbatim words of the historical Buddha.

The canon offers its own test - the four great references (AN 4.180). What is heard from the Buddha himself, from a community with authoritative elders, from a group of such elders or from a single one of them is neither to be accepted outright nor rejected: it is to be set against the suttas and the Vinaya. This is an internal criterion of authority, not historical proof. MN 95 adds caution of another kind: neither faith, nor preference, nor oral tradition, nor reasoning, nor a view accepted after reflection entitles anyone on its own to say “only this is true”. “Faithfulness to the suttas” means exactly that here - look at what the text says, and do not swap it for a retelling.

Where to read: MN 95, AN 4.180.

All three words are European categories, and none of them covers the subject. The Buddha calls his teaching the Dhamma and the Vinaya, the teaching and the discipline: a path with a practice, a community and a goal.

Structurally it is closest to a religion. There is refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha, a monastic community with a code, a cosmology with worlds and rebirth, veneration and offerings, and a final goal - nibbāna, the fading of greed, hatred and delusion, the complete ending of suffering. None of that comes off as a cultural shell: MN 117 places the denial of the fruit of action, of another world and of spontaneously reborn beings squarely under wrong view.

There is plenty of philosophy too: the suttas argue, take apart other positions, and warn that faith, tradition and reasoning are not on their own sufficient grounds for categorical certainty (MN 95). But speculation is subordinate to the goal. In MN 63 the monk Māluṅkyaputta threatens to leave unless the Buddha answers ten questions: whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the same as the body, and four options about the existence of the Tathāgata after death. The Buddha compares him to a wounded man who will not let the surgeon pull out the poisoned arrow until he knows the caste, name, clan and height of the archer and how the weapon and the arrow were made: he will die without finding out. These questions the Buddha leaves undeclared - he does not call them meaningless, he says they do not lead to dispassion, peace, cessation, direct knowledge, awakening, nibbāna. What he does declare is the four noble truths: suffering, its origin, its ending and the path.

A detailed treatment of experience and of training the mind is there as well. MN 19 describes how the bodhisatta before his awakening divided thoughts into two classes - thoughts of sensuality, ill will and cruelty against thoughts of renunciation, goodwill and harmlessness - and drew the rule that whatever a person thinks about often is what the mind inclines towards. MN 20 gives five means against unwholesome thoughts: switch to a wholesome object, examine their danger, pay them no attention, still the very forming of thoughts, and, as a last resort, beat down the mind by force of will. That last one is a last resort, not an all-purpose self-help technique. Identifying any of this with modern psychology is anachronistic, though the overlaps are obvious.

You can borrow particular exercises, as long as you do not present them as the whole Buddhist path. What they do for you depends on the person and the circumstances, and in the suttas virtue, concentration and wisdom (sīla, samādhi, paññā) are three parts of one training. Dropping kamma and rebirth does not empty the word “liberation”: the suttas describe the fading of greed, hatred and delusion here and now as well. But the scale changes. The goal of the canonical path is not that things get easier but the ending of suffering, which includes birth, ageing and death. How the four truths, the eightfold path, not-self and dependent origination work is covered in separate answers in this FAQ.

The Dhamma does call itself a means, plainly. In MN 22 the Buddha likens it to a raft: you build it in order to cross, and having crossed you leave it behind rather than carry it with you. No licence to pick the convenient parts of the teaching follows from that - the same sutta holds a second image: a teaching grasped wrongly wounds you like a snake seized by the wrong end.

Our club reads the suttas without demanding faith at the door, and does not pass them off as a psychology textbook.

Where to read: MN 63, MN 22, MN 117; on working with thoughts, MN 19 and MN 20; on the grounds of certainty, MN 95.