Buddhist philosophy

အခါခပ္သိမ္း ကိေလသာမီးေတာက္ ေလာင္ေနသူမ်ားျဖစ္လ်က္ အဘယ္ ေၾကာင့္ေပ်ာ္ျမဴး ရယ္ရြႊင္ျခင္း ျဖစ္ဘိ သနည္း။ အဘယ္႔ေၾကာင္႔ ႏွစ္လုိ၀မ္း သာျခင္း ျဖစ္ဘိသနည္း။ အ၀ိဇၨာအမုိက္ေမွာင္ၾကီးျဖင္႔ ပိတ္ဆီး ေနသူမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါလ်က္ အဘယ္ေၾကာင္႔ ပညာတည္း ဟူေသာ ဆီမီးကုိ မရွာဘဲ ေနၾကကုန္သနည္း။

(ရွင္ေတာ္ဗုဒၶ)




A little statue of Buddha by Mistvan, 2006

A little statue of Buddha by Mistvan, 2006

Buddhism is one of the major religions of the world, with up to 500 million adherents who pray to the celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, chant the name of Amitabha and other holy mantras, and engage in various other activities required by their particular religious organisation. However, a large body of Buddhist tradition is, in fact, philosophical in nature, and I tend to think that in the beginning, in the 5th century BCE India, Buddhism was purely a philosophy, a minor but ultimately successful branch of the large continuum of indian philosophies that existed then. Early Buddhist works discuss their similarities and stress their differences from contemporaneous philosophical schools and have little to say about religious icons of the time.

Like any complete philosophical system Buddhist philosophy deals with a number of broad issues. At the heart of its famous ethics code, known as Four Noble Truths, is the concept of human suffering, its causes and the prescription to ending it, called the Eightfold Path, implemented with The Five, Eight, and Ten Precepts. The Buddhist metaphysics is built upon the concept of dependent origination (“everything depends on everything else in the world at every moment in an equally significant way”), interestingly echoing certain pre-Socratic Greek philosophies. This was extended by Nagarjuna into the concept of emptiness, leading to the discussion of Three Seals of Existence, Five Aggregates, Twelve Nidanas, and other related concepts that detail the Buddhist view on existence, perception, and the cycle of life and death. Trying to distinguish itself from other philosophical schools, Buddhism stressed that reliance on canon and tradition is useless for spiritual development, and furthered that idea to the point where fixation on words and letters or logical reasoning as a whole was declared harmful, all the way to the Six Words of Advice (“don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest”), which, I think, was the key reason of the transition from philosophy to religion. Those who took the advice to let go of the attachment to reason to heart, inevitably switched to faith and ritual.

Of course, the ultimate goal of Buddhism is the well-known nirvana, the state of happiness achieved when the full infinite ineffable nature of the world is fully understood by the single human mind, the concept remarkably similar to the 1st-3rd century CE European concept of gnosis, transcendental knowledge, which, some say, may have been directly influenced by nirvana. But even if Buddhism did not create gnosticism, its influence in the world as we know it is incredible. Together with Taoism and Confucianism, the two Chinese philosophical schools, it shaped the mentality of the entire East Asia over the millennia.