The Buddhist Worldview

The Vedic and the Shakti beliefs of the self-existent Being were soundly rejected by the Buddha 2,500 years ago. The Buddha therefore came to be considered a denier of Self/Being (nastika) by the Vedic schools. 

The Buddha believed that nothing was self-existent because everything in the world depended on other factors for its existence, which in turn depended on other processes, and so on. This theory of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) is a central tenet of Buddhism. The impermanence of the world (Pali anicca), the non-existence of the Self, or Non-Self (Pali anatta), and the existence of suffering (Pali dukkha) were the three marks of the world (Pali tilakkhana). 

The Buddha proposed that if there was anything constant to the world, it was change, and the appearance of stability was deceptive. He gave the example of a person composed of the five aggregates comprising processes related to the body, perception, feeling, action and consciousness. These processes fluctuated and depended on other processes. Nowhere in the person was an unchanging Self (Atman), and the Buddha proposed that this belief in the Atman was the ultimate source of suffering, since it led to selfishness, desire and a clinging to a false sense of permanence.   

After the Buddha’s death, the First Buddhist Council (400 BCE) collected his principal teachings (Pali Sutta), which were then elaborated upon in the 3rd century BCE by Buddhist texts called the Abhidhamma (Higher Teachings). A variety of Abhidhamma schools emerged, including the Sarvastivada (“Exist Across All Time” Way) and the Theravada (Way of the Elders). These schools were later called the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) tradition by the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) tradition that emerged in the 2nd century CE. 

The Abhidhamma schools believed that the ultimate components of reality were real events (Pali dhammas) that did not have a separate existence, instead depending on one another for existence and forming processes that gave substance to thoughts, feelings and the entities of the world. Reality was essentially a flux of transitory but real events. 

However, the Mahayana tradition rejected this concept of dhammas (Sanskrit, dharmas): Nagarjuna argued that the dharmas did not actually exist and that they were empty of an intrinsic nature or essence. A principal founder of the Mahayana tradition, Nagarjuna (circa 150-250 CE) was considered the greatest of all Buddhist thinkers after the Buddha. His philosophy, called the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), claimed that Emptiness is the ultimate reality – a teaching that is central to all Mahayana schools today. Moreover, this emptiness extended beyond sentient beings and their dharmas to everything in the world, including emptiness itself. Entities existed due to their dependence on external conditions rather than their own being. 

In the dedicatory verse of his philosophical text Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna summed up the essence of his argument through the famous eight negations: When the Buddha taught the doctrine of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), he meant that nothing really ceases nor arises, nothing is ever eternal nor ever annihilated, nothing goes away anywhere nor comes from somewhere, and nothing is many distinct things nor just one thing. These eight negations are meant to show that we can achieve the goal of liberation (nirvana) if we do not take our concepts (and other forms of speech) as the real thing-in-itself. Since nothing we say can really describe reality, it is essentially empty, and with this realization comes the cessation of suffering.

Later Mahayana Buddhism was greatly influenced by the Yogachara school, as I explore in another blog.