BUDDHISM, one of the great religions of Asia, receives its name from its founder, Gotama the Buddha (see BUDDHA). Accord ing to Buddhist belief, all the doctrines and disciplinary rules of the religion were promul gated by the Buddha himself during his lifetime and were faithfully handed down by oral tradi tion for several centuries before being com mitted to writing; but Western scholars have shown that much of the contents of the sacred books must be subsequent to his time. The earliest complete records that we possess are the scriptures preserved by the Ceylonese Buddhists, which are written in the Pali lan guage and known as the Tipitaka (see PALI LITERATURE and PITAKAS). These date in their final form from the 1st century B.C., though their substance is much older. The Buddhists of northern India possessed from early times their own recensions of the canon, only frag ments of which are extant, but these show no fundamental differences from the Pali version. The later Buddhist works composed in India after the Christian era display a marked de velopment in both legend and doctrine. The Pali canon may therefore be taken as the best authority for early Buddhism, although it af fords no certain means of distinguishing be tween the basic doctrines of Gotama himself and the scholastic expansion and classification of them by later minds. ' Even in the oldest texts Buddhism appears as an elaborate system with a long array of technical terms, and its doctrines show an evi dent relationship with earlier Indian specula tion, which from the polytheism of the Rig veda had advanced to the monistic or dualistic conceptions of the universe tentatively expressed in the Upanishads. From such sources Bud dhism derived its world-weariness, its notion of rebirth in existence after existence, and its theory of karma, °the act,* namely, that a man's acts in one life are the cause of his lot in the next. The combination of these views results in the doctrine that all sentient ex istence is suffering continued through an endless succession of lives under the inexorable law of retribution. This is °The Noble Truth concern ing Suffering,* the first of the °Four Noble Truths,* or cardinal doctrines, which Gotama is said to have enunciated in his first sermon, and which may almost surely be regarded as his authentic utterances.
The °Second Noble Truth,* concerning the origin of suffering, declares it to be °thirst,* that is, craving or desire, whether in a lower form for sensual enjoyments or in a higher for con tinued existence. Thirst, however,— and herein Buddhism shows the characteristic intellectual ism of most Indian thought— is caused ulti mately by ignorance. This doctrine is set forth in the important formula of the °Chain of Causation,* or °Wheel of Life,* the details of which are obscure, but in which Ignorance, Consciousness, Thirst, Birth and Suffering in its various forms are terms of the series.
The °Third Truth* declares that the cessa tion of suffering is brought about by the aban donment of desire. This brief statement is elaborated in other texts, which show' that the emancipation is obtained through true knowl edge, summed up in the sentence: °Whatso ever is subject to origination is subject to cessation.* This doctrine of universal im permanence, that all existence is merely a process of becoming without any substratum of permanent being, is the most distinctive tenet of Buddhism, which rejects the Upanishads' conception of an All-Soul. In regard to human personality Buddhism refuses to recognize an indestructible soul-entity and analyzes con sciousness into a mere series of transitory states. Hence the knowledge both that all objects of desire are impermanent and that there is no personal subject to desire them leads to the destruction of desire itself. It is evident that this doctrine of the illusory nature of individuality is at variance with the inherited notions that the individual himself is reborn and reaps the consequences of his acts in a future life; but Gotama and his early disciples seem to have evaded the dilemma by dismissing all such questions as useless and improper. Whatever absolute reality there might be apart from the world of phenomena, they considered only the latter, i.e., the realm of suffering, and the means of escaping from it.