Buddhism is one of the world’s major religious traditions, but it doesn’t fit very neatly into the categories Westerners often use when thinking about religion. If you begin by asking a Buddhist, “What do you believe about God?” you may already be asking the wrong first question.

Buddhism begins somewhere else.

It begins with the problem of suffering.

According to Pew Research Center’s latest global estimates, about 324 million people identified as Buddhists in 2020, representing roughly 4% of the world’s population. Measuring Buddhism is unusually difficult, particularly in East Asia, because people may participate in Buddhist practices without identifying Buddhism as their exclusive religion. Nearly all of the world’s self-identified Buddhists live in the Asia-Pacific region. Pew Research Center

And it all began with a man searching for an answer to a very old human problem.

Siddhartha Gautama

Buddhism traces its beginnings to Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in ancient India sometime around the middle of the first millennium B.C. The precise dates of his life are uncertain.

Traditional accounts describe Gautama as growing up surrounded by privilege and protected from the harsher realities of life. That protection eventually failed.

According to the traditional story, he encountered an old man, a sick man, a dead body, and finally a religious ascetic. Aging, sickness, and death confronted him with a problem that wealth and comfort couldn’t solve. Buddhism from 2015

So Gautama left his former life and became a religious seeker.

He initially pursued severe asceticism, denying himself ordinary comforts in an effort to find liberation. Eventually he rejected both luxurious self-indulgence and extreme self-denial. This became known as the Middle Way.

Tradition says that while meditating beneath a tree at Bodh Gaya, Gautama attained enlightenment. From that point he became known as the Buddha, meaning the “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One.”

He spent the remainder of his life teaching others the path he believed led beyond suffering.

The Four Noble Truths

The heart of the Buddha’s teaching is traditionally summarized in the Four Noble Truths.

They can be stated simply:

There is suffering.

Suffering has a cause.

Suffering can cease.

There is a path leading to its cessation.

That can sound rather gloomy at first. Buddhism isn’t necessarily saying that every moment of existence is miserable, however. The concept usually translated as “suffering”—dukkha—is broader than physical pain.

Life is unstable. Things change. Bodies age. Relationships end. Possessions disappear. Pleasant experiences don’t last.

Even when we get what we want, we discover that we can’t keep it forever.

There’s a frustrating amount of truth in that observation.

The problem, according to Buddhism, is that we respond to this impermanent world with craving and attachment. We desperately want temporary things to provide permanent satisfaction.

They can’t.

The old article put the idea rather well: pleasure isn’t denied; it’s recognized as fleeting. Buddhism from 2015

The Buddha’s solution wasn’t to find better things to crave. It was to overcome the craving and ignorance that produce suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path

The Fourth Noble Truth leads to the Noble Eightfold Path, the practical path toward liberation.

Traditionally it consists of:

Right View
Right Intention
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

These aren’t eight stages that a Buddhist simply checks off one after another. They’re interconnected dimensions of a disciplined life involving ethical conduct, mental development, and wisdom.

That last point is important because Western culture has enthusiastically adopted mindfulness while frequently detaching it from the Buddhist worldview from which it came.

In Buddhism, mindfulness isn’t simply a technique for calming down after a stressful Tuesday.

It belongs to a much larger understanding of reality, suffering, attachment, consciousness, and liberation.

The Three Jewels

Another basic expression of Buddhist identity is taking refuge in the Three Jewels, sometimes called the Triple Gem:

The Buddha — the awakened teacher.

The Dharma — the Buddha’s teaching and the truth it communicates.

The Sangha — the Buddhist community, particularly the community of practitioners and traditionally the monastic order.

The old article correctly recognized these as central to Buddhist identity. Buddhism from 2015

This also illustrates why describing Buddhism simply as a “philosophy” is inadequate. Buddhism certainly contains profound philosophical traditions, but historically it has also included monasteries, rituals, sacred texts, devotional practices, ethical commandments, pilgrimage, meditation, cosmology, and religious communities.

It’s a religion.

It just isn’t organized around a Creator God in the way Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are.

Does Buddhism Believe in God?

This question requires a little care.

Classical Buddhism doesn’t teach that the universe was created and governed by one eternal, personal Creator comparable to the God of Christianity.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Buddhism says that no spiritual beings exist.

Traditional Buddhist cosmology can include gods, heavenly beings, spirits, hells, and multiple realms of existence. Some Buddhist traditions also contain highly developed devotional practices surrounding Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

But these beings aren’t the Creator of everything.

They also don’t solve the fundamental human problem.

A god existing within the cycle of rebirth is still within the cycle.

The Buddha’s teaching is concerned primarily with awakening and liberation, not reconciliation between humanity and a Creator.

That difference becomes enormously important when Buddhism and Christianity are compared.

Karma and Rebirth

“Karma” may be one of the most abused religious words in modern English.

Someone cuts you off in traffic and ten minutes later gets a flat tire.

“Karma!”

That’s not really what Buddhism means.

Karma is fundamentally connected with intentional action and its consequences. Our actions help shape our present and future condition. Good and harmful actions therefore matter beyond their immediate effects.

Buddhist teachings about karma are connected with rebirth. Beings remain caught in samsara, the continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

This cycle isn’t something Buddhism ultimately wants to preserve.

It’s something from which one seeks liberation.

And this raises another concept Westerners frequently misunderstand.

Nirvana

Nirvana isn’t Buddhist heaven.

It isn’t simply a beautiful paradise where good Buddhists go after they die.

The word conveys the idea of extinguishing or “blowing out,” traditionally associated with the extinguishing of craving, hatred, and ignorance. Nirvana represents liberation from the conditions that keep beings trapped in suffering and samsara.

Trying to describe exactly what Nirvana is can become difficult because Buddhist traditions themselves approach the subject carefully and sometimes differently.

But one thing is clear:

The goal isn’t merely getting a more pleasant next life.

It’s liberation from the cycle itself.

That is a fundamentally different idea from the Christian hope of resurrection and eternal life with God.

Is There a Soul?

Here’s where Buddhism gets even more interesting.

Buddhism teaches anatta, usually translated as “no-self” or “not-self.”

We ordinarily imagine ourselves as possessing some permanent inner essence that remains fundamentally unchanged while everything else about us changes.

Buddhism challenges that assumption.

What we call a “person” is understood through changing physical and mental processes rather than an eternal, independent self.

Naturally, that raises an obvious question:

If there is no permanent self, what exactly gets reborn?

Welcome to Buddhist philosophy. 😄

Buddhist thinkers have spent centuries developing sophisticated answers to that question. Generally, rebirth is understood in terms of causal continuity rather than the migration of an eternal soul from one body to another.

One life gives rise to another without requiring an unchanging soul to travel between them.

That is very different from many Western ideas about reincarnation.

The Major Buddhist Traditions

Like Christianity, Buddhism developed into several major traditions rather than remaining one completely uniform movement.

Theravada Buddhism is especially prominent in Sri Lanka and much of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. It places considerable emphasis on the early Buddhist teachings and monastic tradition.

Mahayana Buddhism developed into a broad family of traditions that became especially influential in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Mahayana places particular emphasis on the bodhisattva, one committed to awakening who acts compassionately for the liberation of other beings.

Mahayana itself contains numerous traditions, including Zen and Pure Land Buddhism.

Vajrayana Buddhism developed forms of Buddhist practice involving elaborate rituals, mantras, visualization, and tantric traditions. Tibetan Buddhism is its most familiar expression to many Westerners.

These traditions share important Buddhist foundations while sometimes looking remarkably different in practice.

A quiet Zen meditation hall in Japan and an elaborate Tibetan Buddhist ceremony may not initially look like the same religion.

But both belong to the enormous historical family that grew from the teachings attributed to the Buddha.

Buddhism and Christianity

Buddhism and Christianity actually begin with an observation they can both appreciate:

Something is wrong with the human condition.

We suffer.

We desire things that don’t satisfy us.

We behave selfishly.

We grow old.

We become sick.

We die.

But from there, the two religions diagnose the problem very differently.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem involves ignorance, craving, attachment, and the cycle of suffering and rebirth.

Christianity identifies the human problem fundamentally in terms of sin and separation from God.

Consequently, their solutions are also very different.

Buddhism offers a path of ethical discipline, wisdom, and mental cultivation leading toward awakening and liberation from samsara.

Christianity proclaims reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ, forgiveness of sin, resurrection, and eternal life.

One seeks liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

The other looks forward to resurrection.

Those aren’t two different ways of saying the same thing.

They’re profoundly different understandings of what human beings are, what has gone wrong with us, and what our ultimate destiny should be.

Jesus and the Buddha

There’s a popular tendency to place Jesus and the Buddha beside each other as two great spiritual teachers who basically taught people to be compassionate.

There are certainly ethical points of contact. Both traditions can speak powerfully about compassion, self-denial, generosity, and freedom from destructive desires.

But reducing either figure to “a really nice teacher” does justice to neither one.

The Buddha taught a path toward awakening.

Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God and placed Himself at the center of that proclamation.

The Buddha points toward Dharma.

Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

That’s a rather different claim.

Christianity ultimately stands or falls not merely on whether Jesus gave good advice, but on who He is and whether He actually died and rose from the dead.

Buddhism asks whether the Buddha correctly diagnosed suffering and discovered the path to liberation.

Those are different questions.

And they lead to very different destinations.

Understanding Buddhism

Buddhism deserves more careful consideration than the watered-down version frequently encountered in Western popular culture.

It isn’t simply meditation.

It isn’t just mindfulness.

It isn’t “being spiritual without believing in God.”

And karma isn’t the universe getting revenge on somebody who annoyed you.

Buddhism is an ancient and diverse religious tradition built around a serious diagnosis of human suffering and an equally serious program for overcoming it.

Its teachings about impermanence are particularly difficult to dismiss. Everything around us really does change. Wealth disappears. Youth disappears. Health disappears. Eventually life itself disappears.

Buddhism asks whether our suffering comes from trying to hold onto things that were never permanent in the first place.

Christianity eventually asks a different question.

What if the answer isn’t escaping impermanence, but resurrection?

And once again, that brings Jew & Greek back to the question that seems to follow us everywhere:

Who is Jesus?