Unit 7 · Buddhism: The Four Noble Truths

In the town of Lumbini, in southern Nepal, a stone pillar stands in a park. It was raised around 250 BCE by the Indian emperor Ashoka, and its inscription says that the Buddha was born here. It is the oldest physical marker of the Buddha’s life that we have. Buddhists from Thailand, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka and the United States travel to Lumbini to walk where they believe their teacher’s story began.

The man they honor is Siddhartha Gautama. Buddhist tradition says he was born a prince of the Shakya clan, which is why he is also called Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakyas. Scholars agree that he was a real teacher who lived in the Ganges valley of northern India. They do not agree on his dates. Older scholarly estimates place his death around 483 BCE, and Sri Lankan tradition earlier still; many historians today prefer a date closer to 400 BCE. This course follows common practice and says he lived in about the fifth century BCE.

Almost everything else we know comes from Buddhist texts written down centuries after his death, first in the Pali language and later in Sanskrit and Chinese. These texts were preserved as teaching, not as newspaper reports. That does not make them worthless as history, but it means a student should read them the way this course reads any sacred text: asking who wrote them, for whom, and why. Buddhists themselves hold a range of views, from taking every detail as fact to treating the life story as a pattern that every seeker can follow.

The title Buddha is not a name. It comes from a word meaning awake, so Buddha means the awakened one. In Buddhist teaching, Siddhartha became the Buddha at a specific moment, which this section will reach. Until then he was a prince, then a wandering seeker like thousands of others in an India full of new religious movements, including the Jain teacher Mahavira, who lived at about the same time.

A famous statue from Gandhara, in present-day Pakistan, shows a seated man so starved that every rib and vein stands out and his eyes have sunk into his skull. It is a portrait of Siddhartha during the years after he left home. According to tradition, he first studied with two meditation teachers, mastered what they taught, and found it did not end suffering. Then he joined five ascetics in the forest and tried to conquer the body by force.

An ascetic is someone who practices severe self-denial for a religious goal, and in ancient India there were many. The texts say Siddhartha ate a single grain of rice a day, held his breath until his head roared, and sat unmoving in the heat and cold. Tradition says that he grew so thin he could feel his spine through his stomach. After about six years he collapsed by a river. A village girl named Sujata offered him a bowl of rice cooked in milk, and he accepted it. His five companions, disgusted, left him.

Buddhists remember that bowl of rice as a turning point. Siddhartha had lived in a palace of pleasure and found it empty. He had lived in a forest of pain and found it useless. The body, he concluded, is the instrument of the search, and a broken instrument cannot play. In his first sermon he would name two extremes to avoid: devotion to sense pleasure and devotion to self-torment. Between them lies what he called the Middle Way.

The Middle Way is not a rule about eating. It is a general principle that later Buddhist thinkers applied to almost everything: to how hard to practice, to how to hold opinions, and to how to think about the self. A monk in Thailand today eats one or two meals before noon and none after, which is more than the starving ascetic ate and less than the prince did. Buddhists point to that schedule as the Middle Way made into a daily habit.

At Bodh Gaya, in the Indian state of Bihar, a large fig tree grows beside a stone temple. Pilgrims sit beneath it in silence, and some tie prayer flags to its branches. Buddhists hold that this tree descends from the one under which Siddhartha sat down one evening and vowed not to rise until he understood the cause of suffering. The species is now called the bodhi tree, from the word for awakening.

The texts describe that night as a struggle. A figure named Mara, whose name means death, tried to break Siddhartha’s concentration with armies, storms, temptations and finally doubt. Mara asked who could witness that Siddhartha deserved awakening. In a gesture that appears in countless statues, Siddhartha touched the ground with his right hand and called the earth itself as witness. Buddhists read Mara in different ways: some as a real being, many as a picture of fear and craving inside the mind.

Toward dawn, the tradition says, Siddhartha saw his past lives, saw how beings rise and fall according to their actions, and saw the chain of causes that produces suffering and the way to break it. At that moment he became the Buddha. He is said to have hesitated to teach, thinking no one would understand, and then to have walked to the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, where he found the five ascetics who had abandoned him. His first sermon to them is called setting the wheel of the teaching in motion.

For the next forty-five years, according to the texts, the Buddha walked the roads of the Ganges valley, teaching kings, farmers, merchants and outcasts, and gathering a community of monks and nuns. He died at about eighty near the town of Kushinagar, after eating a meal that made him ill. His last recorded words, in the Pali account, urge his followers to work out their liberation with diligence because all conditioned things pass away. Buddhists call his passing the parinirvana, the final release.

A doctor in an emergency room does not begin with the cure. She begins by asking what hurts. Buddhists often describe the Buddha’s first sermon the same way: as a physician’s four steps, which name the illness, its cause, whether it can be cured, and the treatment. These are the Four Noble Truths, the core of Buddhist teaching in every school. The first is the diagnosis: there is dukkha.

Dukkha is a Pali word usually translated as suffering, but that English word is too narrow. Dukkha includes obvious pain, such as sickness, grief and death. It also includes the frustration of not getting what we want and the anxiety of losing what we have. At its deepest, it means that nothing we grasp can be relied on, because everything changes. A good meal ends. A friendship shifts. A body ages. Even happiness carries dukkha, Buddhists say, because it cannot last.

The first sermon lists the forms: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha; being joined to what one dislikes, being parted from what one loves, and not getting what one wants are dukkha. Notice that the list is not a claim that life is only misery. Buddhists insist the first truth is not pessimism but honesty, in the way that a diagnosis is not pessimism. Its purpose is to make a cure possible.

Compare this starting point with others in this course. The Hebrew Bible opens with a good creation and asks how it went wrong. The Buddha opens with an observation about experience and asks what drives it. Neither tradition denies pain; they place it differently. A student comparing them should describe each on its own terms rather than deciding which is gloomier or more hopeful.

In the Pali texts the Buddha compares the mind to a fire that keeps burning as long as fuel is added. The second Noble Truth names the fuel. Suffering arises from tanha, a word that literally means thirst and is usually translated as craving. It is the pull toward pleasant things, the push away from unpleasant ones, and the wish for existence itself to go on as we like. Buddhists say craving is not the same as needing food or wanting a friend to be well. It is the grasping that turns a wish into a demand.

The teaching connects craving to a wider view of cause and effect. Buddhists hold that actions driven by craving, hatred and ignorance produce results, and that beings are reborn again and again in a cycle called samsara, carrying the fruits of past action, or karma. The word karma means action; in Buddhist usage it points to intentional action and its consequences. Rebirth in Buddhism differs from the Hindu idea in one key way, which a later lesson explains: Buddhists deny a permanent soul that passes from life to life.

The third truth is the good news of the diagnosis. Because suffering has a cause, removing the cause removes the suffering. When craving is extinguished completely, what remains is nirvana. The word means blowing out, like a flame. Buddhist teachers are careful to say nirvana is not nothingness and not a heaven; it is the end of greed, hatred and delusion, and with them the end of rebirth. The Buddha is said to have declined to describe it in ordinary terms, and in one parable he compares his teaching to a raft that a traveler leaves behind once he reaches the far shore.

Different Buddhists describe nirvana in different ways. Theravada texts emphasize the peace of the person who has fully let go, called an arhat. Some Mahayana texts speak of nirvana as not separate from this world, once the world is seen rightly. What all agree on is the logic of the truths: if the fire needs fuel, then stop adding fuel and the fire goes out.

Above the doors of many Buddhist temples, and on their gates and roofs, you will see a wheel with eight spokes. It is the dharma wheel, and in Buddhist art its eight spokes stand for the fourth Noble Truth: the Eightfold Path. The word dharma has many meanings in India. In Buddhism it means above all the Buddha’s teaching, and also the way things truly are. The path is the treatment the physician prescribes.

The eight parts each begin with a word usually translated right, in the sense of complete or skillful rather than correct on a test. They are right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Buddhists do not treat these as eight steps climbed one after another. They are eight strands of one rope, practiced together, each supporting the others.

Teachers commonly gather the eight into three groups. Right view and right intention are wisdom: understanding the Four Noble Truths and intending kindness and letting go. Right speech, right action and right livelihood are ethical conduct, or sila: not lying or speaking harshly, not killing or stealing, and earning a living that does not harm others, such as avoiding trade in weapons or living beings. Right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration are mental discipline, or samadhi: training the mind through meditation.

A concrete example: a Buddhist shop owner in Chicago who refuses to sell counterfeit goods is practicing right livelihood and right action. When she notices irritation with a rude customer and lets it pass without a sharp reply, she is practicing right mindfulness and right speech. The path, Buddhists say, is not reserved for monks. Its parts fit an ordinary Tuesday.

In the Milindapanha, a Pali text compiled around the turn of the common era, a monk named Nagasena is questioned by a Greek king named Menander. Nagasena asks the king to point to his chariot. Is it the wheels? The axle? The pole? The king admits it is none of these parts, yet there is no chariot apart from the parts. Chariot, Nagasena says, is a useful name for the parts working together. And so, he argues, is the word I.

This story illustrates the third of what Buddhists call the Three Marks of Existence. The first mark is anicca, impermanence: everything that arises from causes will change and pass away. The second is dukkha, already studied: what is impermanent cannot give lasting satisfaction. The third is anatta, non-self. Buddhists teach that what we call a self is a flow of five changing bundles, the five aggregates: physical form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. No unchanging owner stands behind them.

Here Buddhism parts from the Hindu teaching studied in the previous unit. The Upanishads teach that the true self, atman, is eternal and one with Brahman. The Buddha, according to the Pali texts, declined to affirm any such self. Rebirth still happens, Buddhists say, the way one candle lights another: a process continues, but no unchanging thing passes across. Buddhist schools have debated for centuries how to explain this, and a student should present it as a teaching they hold, not as a puzzle they failed to notice.

The Three Marks are meant to be seen, not merely believed. Buddhist meditators watch a sensation arise and fade, and notice that the wish for it to stay is itself a source of distress. Seeing impermanence directly, they say, loosens grasping. That is why the Dhammapada connects knowing the three marks with the way to purity.

In a temple in Sri Lanka, in a meditation hall in Colorado, or in a family shrine room in Vietnam, a Buddhist ceremony often begins with the same short chant, in Pali or in translation: I go to the Buddha for refuge; I go to the dharma for refuge; I go to the sangha for refuge. Repeated three times, this is called taking refuge. For many Buddhists it is the act that marks a person as a Buddhist, the way the shahada does for a Muslim.

The three refuges are called the Three Jewels. The Buddha is the teacher and the proof that awakening is possible for a human being. The dharma is the teaching itself and the truth it describes. The sangha is the community: in its strict sense the order of monks and nuns, and in a broader sense everyone who follows the path. Refuge does not mean asking the Buddha to rescue anyone. Buddhists compare it to trusting a doctor, a medicine and the nurses who help you take it.

Along with refuge, lay Buddhists commonly undertake the five precepts: to refrain from killing living beings, from taking what is not given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants that cloud the mind. These are worded as training commitments a person takes on, not as commands from a god. Monks and nuns take many more rules. On holy days some laypeople keep eight precepts, adding, for example, not eating after noon.

Comparing traditions helps here. The Ten Commandments in Exodus are framed as words spoken by God to a people in covenant. The five precepts are framed as steps a person undertakes to reduce harm and clear the mind. Both forbid killing, stealing and lying. A student writing about them should attribute each to its tradition and describe the different frames rather than asking which list is better.

Before dawn in a monastery in Myanmar, a row of monks sits facing a wall. Each is doing something that looks like nothing: attending to the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils. When the mind wanders to breakfast or an old argument, the monk notices and returns to the breath. This is meditation, the mental discipline part of the Eightfold Path, and Buddhists have practiced forms of it for some 2,500 years.

Buddhist teachers commonly describe two families of practice. Samatha, calm, steadies the mind on one object, such as the breath, until it becomes still and clear. Vipassana, insight, then uses that clarity to observe experience directly: sensations arising and passing, thoughts appearing without an owner. The goal is to see the Three Marks for oneself. A third widespread practice is metta, loving-kindness, in which the meditator deliberately wishes well to herself, to friends, to strangers and finally to enemies.

Mindfulness is the seventh part of the path. In the Pali texts it means clear, steady awareness of the body, feelings, mind and mental states as they are, without adding or pushing away. Buddhist schools shape it differently. Zen practitioners in Japan sit in silent zazen; Tibetan practitioners may visualize a buddha in detail; Pure Land Buddhists repeat the name of Amitabha Buddha. Each school would say it is training the mind, and each has its own claims about what the training leads to.

Since the late 1970s, mindfulness practices drawn from Buddhism have been adapted for hospitals, therapy and schools with the religious framework removed, beginning with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s stress-reduction program at a medical center in Massachusetts in 1979. Some Buddhists welcome this; others argue that mindfulness without the ethical and philosophical parts of the path is something different. A public-school class may teach breathing exercises; it may study, but not lead, the Buddhist practice from which they came.

Open the Dhammapada and the first verse tells you what kind of book it is: All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The book is not a story of the Buddha’s life and not a set of monastic rules. It is a collection of 423 short verses in Pali, arranged in 26 chapters by theme: earnestness, thought, the fool, the wise man, anger, the self, the Buddha. Buddhist tradition attributes the verses to the Buddha himself; historians see a collection assembled over time from sayings preserved in the early community.

The Dhammapada belongs to the Pali Canon, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, which the next chapter treats in detail. It is among the texts most often memorized by Theravada laypeople in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and among the Buddhist texts most often translated into other languages. The name is usually understood as the path of the dharma or the verses of the dharma. Its style is memorable on purpose: images of flowers, arrows, chariots and water repeat, and many verses come in pairs that contrast the careless person with the careful one.

In 1881 the German-born Oxford scholar F. Max Müller published his English translation as volume 10 of the Sacred Books of the East, a fifty-volume series that brought Asian scriptures into English between 1879 and 1910. Müller was not a Buddhist. His translation is in the public domain and is the version this course quotes. It is accurate for its time but uses Victorian words, such as sin, church and Law, that carry Christian associations. Reading it well means noticing those choices, as the toolkit from the first unit taught.

Because the verses are short, the Dhammapada is a good place to practice reading a sacred text closely. Ask of each verse: what does it describe, what does it ask the reader to do, and which of the teachings in this chapter does it assume? A verse about a wheel following the ox assumes karma; a verse about the safe refuge assumes the Three Jewels. Buddhists read the Dhammapada for guidance, and students may read it to understand what that guidance is.

Just after sunrise in a town in northern Thailand, a line of monks in orange robes walks barefoot down the street. Each carries a covered bowl. Along the way, laypeople kneel and place rice, fruit and curry in the bowls, and the monks chant a short blessing in return. This is the alms round, and it has taken place in Buddhist countries for more than two thousand years. The monks do not ask for anything. They simply walk, and the community decides whether to give.

The alms round shows how the sangha works. In the strict sense the sangha is the order of fully ordained monks, called bhikkhus, and nuns, called bhikkhunis. Buddhist tradition says the Buddha founded the order of monks early in his teaching. It also says that his aunt and foster mother, Mahapajapati, asked to be ordained and became the first nun. Monks and nuns own almost nothing, do not marry, and devote their lives to study, meditation and teaching.

Their life is governed by the Vinaya, the collection of monastic rules. In the Theravada version, fully ordained monks keep 227 rules and nuns keep more than 300. The rules cover large matters, such as celibacy and not killing, and small ones, such as how to wear a robe and when to eat. Each year, during the rainy season, monks traditionally stay in one monastery for about three months of study and practice. This retreat is called vassa.

The relationship between monks and laypeople is an exchange. Laypeople give dana, meaning generosity: food, robes, medicine and support for the monastery. Monks give the teaching, blessings and an example of the path. Buddhists believe giving produces good karma, so the gift benefits the giver as well. In some Theravada countries the line of fully ordained nuns died out centuries ago. Since the 1990s some women have been ordained again, and Buddhists continue to debate whether that ordination is valid.

Across India and Pakistan, carved on rocks and on tall polished stone pillars, are more than thirty inscriptions left by one ruler in the third century BCE. They are the edicts of Ashoka, and they are among the earliest readable written records in Indian history. One of them, carved on a rock face, contains something rare in any age: an emperor admitting publicly that his own war caused terrible suffering and that he regrets it.

Ashoka ruled the Maurya Empire, which covered most of the Indian subcontinent, from about 268 to about 232 BCE. Around 261 BCE he conquered the region of Kalinga, on India’s east coast. In his thirteenth rock edict he says that about 150,000 people were carried away, about 100,000 were killed, and many more died. He writes that he felt deep remorse. After the war, according to the edicts, he devoted himself to dharma, which he describes as kindness, truthfulness, generosity and respect for all living beings.

Ashoka’s edicts do not demand that anyone become Buddhist. They urge respect among religious groups and praise both Buddhist monks and Brahmin priests. But other inscriptions and Buddhist texts make clear that Ashoka supported the sangha, visited Buddhist holy places, and raised the pillar at Lumbini mentioned in the last chapter. The edicts also say he sent envoys to the Greek kingdoms to the west to share his message of dharma.

Buddhist tradition in Sri Lanka adds that Ashoka’s son Mahinda, a monk, brought the teaching to the island, and that his daughter Sanghamitta, a nun, carried a branch of the bodhi tree there. Historians accept that Buddhism reached Sri Lanka in Ashoka’s time, while treating some details as tradition. Today Ashoka’s lion capital from Sarnath is the national emblem of India, and a wheel from his pillars stands at the center of India’s flag.

In a cave near the town of Dunhuang, at the western edge of China, a small side room was sealed up around the year 1000 CE. When it was opened in 1900, it held tens of thousands of scrolls in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and other languages. Among them is a printed Buddhist text from 868 CE, the Diamond Sutra, the oldest dated printed book known. Dunhuang sat on the Silk Road, and its caves show how Buddhism traveled with merchants and monks.

Buddhism spread from India along two main kinds of routes. By sea, monks and traders carried it south to Sri Lanka and east to the lands that are now Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. By land, it crossed the mountains of the northwest into Central Asia and followed the Silk Road caravan routes into China by about the first century CE. From China it reached Korea in the fourth century and Japan in the sixth. Tibet received it from both India and China from the seventh century on.

In India itself, Buddhism slowly declined. By around 1200 CE, after centuries of change and the destruction of great monastic universities such as Nalanda, few Buddhist institutions remained. Scholars describe many causes, including competition from Hindu devotional movements, loss of royal support and invasions. Buddhism remained alive in the Himalayan regions. In the twentieth century it grew again in India, especially after 1956, when the reformer B. R. Ambedkar led hundreds of thousands of Dalits to convert.

The result is that most of the world’s Buddhists today live far from the Buddha’s homeland. Common estimates count about 500 million Buddhists, roughly 7 percent of the world’s people. Counting is hard, especially in China and Japan, where many people join in Buddhist rites while also practicing other traditions. The numbers in this lesson are estimates, and scholars warn that they depend on how a survey defines a Buddhist.

In the hill city of Kandy, in Sri Lanka, stands the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Sri Lankan Buddhists believe it holds a tooth of the Buddha. Each year, in a festival called the Esala Perahera, a casket for the relic is carried through the streets on an elephant, with dancers and drummers around it. For centuries, whoever held the tooth was thought to have the right to rule the island. The festival shows how deeply Buddhism is woven into Sri Lankan life.

Sri Lanka is a center of Theravada, a name that means the teaching of the elders. Theravada Buddhists hold that they preserve the Buddha’s teaching in its earliest surviving form. Their scripture is the Pali Canon, also called the Tipitaka, or three baskets. The three are the Vinaya, the monastic rules; the Sutta, the Buddha’s discourses; and the Abhidhamma, a detailed analysis of mind and matter. According to Sri Lankan chronicles, monks first wrote the canon down on palm leaves in the first century BCE.

Before that, the teaching was memorized and chanted. Groups of monks specialized in different collections, and they recited together to check one another. That oral method explains why many passages repeat the same phrases. Scholars agree the Pali Canon contains some of the oldest Buddhist material that survives, though it was shaped over time. Other early collections also survive in Chinese translation, and comparing them helps scholars study the earliest teaching.

The ideal figure in Theravada is the arhat, a person who has followed the path to its end, extinguished craving and reached nirvana. Theravada teachers say anyone can walk the path, but that monks and nuns have the best conditions for walking it fully. Laypeople support the sangha, keep the precepts, meditate and build good karma. Many hope for a better rebirth in which they can go further. The whole system rests on the Buddha’s teaching that each person must walk the path themselves.

In Myanmar, a boy of about ten rides through his village on a decorated pony, dressed in silk like a prince. Musicians and relatives walk beside him. At the monastery his head is shaved, he puts on a robe, and he becomes a novice monk for a few days or weeks. The ceremony, called shinbyu, retells Siddhartha’s journey from palace to renunciation. For many Burmese Buddhist families it is one of the most important days in a son’s life.

Temporary ordination like this is common across Theravada Southeast Asia. In Thailand many young men have traditionally spent a rainy season as monks before marriage or a career. Families believe the practice earns merit, meaning good karma, for the son and for his parents. It also teaches the basics of the dharma and the discipline of the Vinaya. Afterward the young man returns to lay life, but he has lived the path from the inside.

The wat, or temple-monastery, is the center of many villages and city neighborhoods. It usually holds a shrine hall with a Buddha image, living quarters for monks, and often a stupa, a dome-shaped monument that holds relics. Laypeople come on the holy days of the lunar calendar to hear teaching and keep the eight precepts. Schools, festivals and community meetings have often taken place in the wat.

The largest festival is Vesak, held at the full moon of the lunar month that usually falls in May. Theravada Buddhists remember three events on that one day: the Buddha’s birth, his awakening and his final passing. Temples fill with lanterns and candles, and people bring flowers and release caged birds as an act of kindness. The United Nations recognizes the day internationally. Mahayana Buddhists in East Asia often mark these three events on separate dates.

In temples across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, one of the most beloved figures is a graceful being who holds a vase of pure water. In China she is called Guanyin, which means the one who hears the cries of the world. In Japan she is Kannon, and in Sanskrit texts Avalokiteshvara. Buddhists pray to her for help in illness, danger and childbirth. She is not a buddha. She is a bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is a being who has vowed to become a buddha, not for personal release alone but in order to free all living beings from suffering. This ideal is the heart of Mahayana, a name that means the great vehicle. Mahayana texts began to appear around the first century BCE and first century CE. Their followers called their path great because it aims to carry everyone across. They sometimes contrasted it with the arhat ideal, which Theravada Buddhists would describe in their own terms.

The central virtues of the bodhisattva are compassion and wisdom. Compassion is the wish that all beings be free of suffering. Wisdom, in Mahayana, is above all insight into emptiness, in Sanskrit shunyata. Emptiness does not mean that nothing exists. It means that nothing exists on its own, apart from causes and conditions. The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, around the second century CE, developed this idea in depth. The Heart Sutra, chanted daily in many East Asian temples, puts it briefly: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

Mahayana also produced new scriptures, called sutras, that Mahayana Buddhists regard as the Buddha’s teaching. The best known is the Lotus Sutra, which teaches that all beings can become buddhas. One of its parables describes a father who lures his children out of a burning house by promising them carts to play with. Mahayana readers take the burning house as the world of suffering and the carts as teachings suited to each listener.

In a Japanese American temple, and in countless homes in Japan, Buddhists repeat a short phrase: Namu Amida Butsu, which means I take refuge in Amida Buddha. The phrase is called the nembutsu. Some say it once; some say it thousands of times a day. For some of the largest schools of Japanese Buddhism, this simple act of calling a Buddha’s name lies at the center of religious life.

Amitabha, called Amida in Japanese, is a buddha described in Mahayana sutras that were popular in China from early on. According to these texts, long ago as a bodhisattva he made a series of vows. One promised that anyone who sincerely called on him would be reborn in his Pure Land, a realm of beauty and peace in the west. There, free of the distractions of ordinary life, beings could reach awakening easily. Pure Land practice spread widely in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan.

In Japan, the monk Honen (1133–1212) taught that in a troubled age most people could not master the difficult practices of monks. They could, however, call on Amida with trust. His follower Shinran (1173–1263) went further. He taught that awakening comes entirely through Amida’s power, called other-power, not through one’s own effort. For Shinran the nembutsu is an expression of gratitude. He also married, and priests of the school he inspired, Jodo Shinshu, may marry and raise families.

Pure Land shows how varied Buddhism is. A Theravada teacher stresses that each person must walk the path alone; a Shinran follower stresses trust in the power of another. Both call themselves followers of the Buddha, and each can explain from its own texts why its approach fits. A careful student describes both without deciding which is the real Buddhism. Pure Land temples are among the oldest Buddhist congregations in the United States.

At the temple of Ryoanji in Kyoto, visitors sit on a wooden porch facing a rectangle of raked white gravel with fifteen stones set in it. There are no plants except moss, no water and no explanation. The garden is usually dated to the late fifteenth century, and no one knows for certain what it means. Many visitors simply sit and look. The garden is a product of Zen, a school of Buddhism that values direct seeing over words.

Zen began in China, where it was called Chan. Both words come from the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning meditation. Chan tradition traces its lineage to Bodhidharma, an Indian monk said to have come to China around the fifth or sixth century; historians treat much of his story as legend. Chan teachers stressed that awakening is not learned from books but seen directly, and that every person already has the nature of a buddha. Chan grew in dialogue with Daoist ideas of naturalness and simplicity.

Zen reached Japan in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The monk Eisai (1141–1215) brought the Rinzai school, which uses the koan, a puzzling question or story that a teacher gives a student, such as the question of what one’s face was before one’s parents were born. The koan cannot be solved by logic, and working on it is meant to break through ordinary thinking. The monk Dogen (1200–1253) founded the Soto school, which centers on zazen, simply sitting in meditation, which Dogen treated as awakening itself.

Zen shaped Japanese culture well beyond the temple. The tea ceremony, ink painting, calligraphy, rock gardens and some martial arts all developed under its influence. In the twentieth century, writers such as D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen to American readers, and Zen centers opened in many American cities. Some Zen teachers caution that the art and style are only the surface of Zen. At its core, they say, is the daily discipline of sitting.

In a school gym or museum hall, four Tibetan monks lean over a wooden platform for days. Using thin metal funnels, they tap out colored sand grain by grain into a detailed circular design of palaces, gates and symbols. When the design is finished, they chant, then sweep it all into a pile and pour the sand into a river. This sand mandala has been made in many American cities. The monks say its destruction teaches impermanence.

The mandala belongs to Vajrayana, the diamond or thunderbolt vehicle, the form of Buddhism that grew in India and was carried to Tibet from the seventh and eighth centuries CE. Vajrayana accepts the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal and adds practices its followers regard as especially powerful. These include the mandala, a sacred diagram of an awakened world; the mantra, a sacred phrase such as Om mani padme hum, linked with the bodhisattva of compassion; and visualization of buddhas in meditation.

Vajrayana stresses the bond between student and teacher. A Tibetan teacher is called a lama. Tibetan Buddhists hold that some lamas are reborn again and again to continue their work, and that each rebirth, called a tulku, can be recognized as a child. The most famous line is the Dalai Lama, the most prominent teacher of the Gelug school. Tibetan Buddhists regard him as a human form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

The fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was born in 1935. After China took control of Tibet in the 1950s, he fled to India in 1959, and he has led a Tibetan community in exile from Dharamsala. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Tibetan Buddhism is also practiced in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal and parts of India and Russia. Questions about Tibet’s government and about who will choose the next Dalai Lama remain political as well as religious.

Every summer, in the seventh lunar month, Chinese families in China, Taiwan, Singapore and overseas communities hold the Ghost Festival. They offer food to ancestors and to wandering spirits, and temples hold services for the dead. The festival is linked to a Buddhist story about a monk named Mulian. He discovers that his mother is suffering in a hell and, on the Buddha’s advice, rescues her by making offerings to the sangha.

The story answers a real problem. When Buddhism arrived in China, it met a culture shaped by Confucian teaching, which places filial piety, loyalty and care owed to one’s parents and ancestors, at the center of a good life. Critics asked how a son could be filial if he shaved his head, left his family and had no children to continue the ancestral rites. The Mulian story shows a monk whose religious life saves his mother. That message made Buddhism fit Chinese family values.

Buddhism also met Daoism, the Chinese tradition centered on the Dao, the Way. Early translators sometimes borrowed Daoist words to explain Buddhist ideas; the word dao itself was used for the path. Great translators such as Kumarajiva, around 400 CE, produced Chinese versions of many sutras, and the monk Xuanzang traveled to India and back in the seventh century to collect texts. His journey later inspired the famous Chinese novel Journey to the West.

The meeting was not always peaceful. Some emperors supported Buddhism generously, while others restricted it; in 845 CE the Tang emperor Wuzong closed thousands of monasteries and forced many monks and nuns back to lay life. Over time, however, many Chinese came to speak of the three teachings, Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, as complementary. A family might honor ancestors in Confucian ways, visit a Daoist temple and hold Buddhist funeral rites. The next unit studies Confucianism and Daoism in depth.

In September 1893, at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, a young man from Sri Lanka in a white robe rose to speak. He was Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist reformer. Also on the program was Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Zen abbot. For many in the audience it was their first chance to hear Buddhists describe their tradition in their own words. Soyen Shaku’s student and translator, D. T. Suzuki, later spent years in America and became one of Zen’s best-known writers in English.

By then Buddhism was already in America through immigrants. Chinese workers built temples in California in the 1850s, and Japanese immigrants founded Pure Land temples in Hawaii and on the West Coast; their national organization became the Buddhist Churches of America. During World War II the U.S. government forced Japanese Americans on the West Coast into camps. After release, thousands resettled in Chicago, and they founded or strengthened Japanese Buddhist temples on the city’s North Side.

A second wave came after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the country to more Asian immigrants. Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Korean, Chinese, Tibetan and Sri Lankan Buddhists built temples across the country. The Chicago area now holds dozens of them, from Japanese and Thai temples to Vietnamese, Cambodian and Tibetan centers. Some serve mainly one immigrant community and use its language, while others draw many converts.

Scholars often describe two broad groups among American Buddhists. Heritage Buddhists come from families and cultures where Buddhism has long been practiced. Convert Buddhists come from other backgrounds, and many first met Buddhism through meditation. The two groups sometimes practice quite differently, and people debate how they should relate. Surveys suggest that about 1 percent of American adults are Buddhist, while many more practice meditation without calling themselves Buddhist.