Buddhism began as a response within Hindu culture to decrepitude, death, suffering and the emptiness of luxury. In that context, it might be regarded as an athiestic religion, an alternative to Hinduism that is more concerned about how to transcend suffering and human psychology than it is about theological speculation, or reverance for gods. Sidhartha Buddha is acknowledged as the first to have preached the sermon on the Four Noble Truths, which find expression in most forms of Buddhism. Basic to all forms of Buddhism is the tenet of Dukkha, the First of the Four Noble Truths. This is the idea that all of life essentially consists of suffering.
Human life is itself the quality of suffering.
The Second Noble Truth maintains that the conflict implicit in Dukkha is a result of lust, human craving and desire. The idea implicit here is that the quest for personal fulfillment above everything else, egoistic obsession with oneself, linked with the lower passions, causes suffering. As a dynamic, this quality of suffering in turn continues to promote the illusion of selfhood which ends in alienation, as well as the deception of Maya, the false perception that things are separate and distinct. The objective then becomes the dissolution of the bundle of perceptions which contrive the notion of the self in a state of nirvana, which is the absence of these perceptions, and therefore, also the absence of suffering. The path that Sidhartha traditionally taught is called the Eightfold Path, and necessitated a monastic vocation, renunciation of the things that people tend to use in order to feed the lust for self-fulfillment.