Buddhism

Buddhist Symbol

Buddhism is an eastern religion originating from India, and widely popular across all of asia. Mostly focusing on the journey to overcoming suffering and understanding the true nature of the world and the self, it often straddles the fence between a Religion and a Philosophy. Founded around 400 BC by Prince Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) after he achieved Nirvana in Bodh Gaya. Most Buddhist theology was laid out by the Buddha, and consists mostly of the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path, and ideas such as reincarnation, karma, and meditation.

The Four Noble truths are the first teachings of the Buddha, and go as follows:

* **Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful)**: An innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara.
* **Samudaya (origin, arising, combination, cause)**: Together with dukkha arises tanha (craving, desire or attachment, thirst). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it.
* **Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement)**: Dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this tanha; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha.
* **Magga (path, Eightfold Path)**: The path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha.

Along with the Four Noble Truths is the Eightfold Path, which itself goes as follows:

1. **Right View**: our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death. The Buddha followed and taught a successful path out of this world and the other world (heaven and underworld/hell). Later on, right view came to explicitly include karma and rebirth, and the importance of the Four Noble Truths, when "insight" became central to Buddhist soteriology.
2. **Right Resolve or Intention**: the giving up of home and adopting the life of a religious mendicant in order to follow the path; this concept aims at peaceful renunciation, into an environment of non-sensuality, non-ill-will (to loving kindness), away from cruelty (to compassion). Such an environment aids contemplation of impermanence, suffering, and non-Self.
3. **Right Speech**: no lying, no rude speech, no telling one person what another says about him to cause discord or harm their relationship.
4. **Right Conduct or Action**: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual misconduct, no material desires.
5. **Right Livelihood**: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, and poisons.
6. **Right Effort**: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states, the bojjhaga (Seven Factors of Awakening). This includes indriya-samvara, "guarding the sense-doors", restraint of the sense faculties.
7. **Right Mindfulness (Sati, Satipatthana, Sampajanna)**: a quality that guards or watches over the mind; the stronger it becomes, the weaker unwholesome states of mind become, weakening their power "to take over and dominate thought, word and deed." In the vipassana movement, sati is interpreted as "bare attention": never be absent minded, being conscious of what one is doing; this encourages the awareness of the impermanence of body, feeling and mind, as well as to experience the five aggregates (skandhas), the five hindrances, the four True Realities and seven factors of awakening.
8. **Right Samadhi (Passaddhi, Ekaggata, Sampasadana)**: practicing four stages of dhyana (meditation), which includes samadhi proper in the second stage, and reinforces the development of the bojjhaga, culminating into upekkha (equanimity) and mindfulness. In the Theravada tradition and the vipassana movement, this is interpreted as ekaggata, concentration or one-pointedness of the mind, and supplemented with vipassana meditation, which aims at insight.

The Eightfold path is the Buddhas step-by-step process towards Nirvana, these two (Eightfold Path and Four Noble Truths) fulfil the central idea of overcoming suffering and coming to understand the true nature of the world around you.

Buddhism is very popular in regions outside India, in areas like China and East Asia, the Asiatic Steppe, and South East Asia, although it maintains a population in its native India. Buddhist Temples, Monasteries, and Statues of the Buddha are common to find across all of Asia.