Philosophy

In order to understand the ideas on the self and on meditation in early  Buddhism and in some other contemporary Indian religions, one has to  take into consideration the doctrine of karma as it existed at that time. This  doctrine is older than Buddhism, and constitutes the background for other  religious movements of ancient India besides Buddhism. There are few  records describing the doctrine of karma in its earliest form, but the  evidence we have supports the following presentation. Deeds constitute the decisive factor that cause rebirth to take place  and that determine what the new life will be like: good deeds lead to a good  rebirth, bad deeds to a bad one. The religious movements of ancient India that accepted this fundamental belief shared in common that their highest aspiration was not to obtain a good rebirth, but to avoid any rebirth whatsoever. How could this aspiration be realised? Moral behaviour would obviously not be of any hel...

Early Buddhist literature is acquainted with both Jainas and Aj ıvikas.It calls the former nirgrantha,Pali nigantha, and the latter aj ıvika or aj ıvaka. The former are sometimes presented as followers of Nigantha N ataputta or N athaputta, who has been identified as Vardham ana, better known as Mah av ıra, the last t ırthankaraof the Jainas; the name N ataputta corresponds to Ardham agadh ı N ayaputta, known from theearliest surviving canonical texts of Jainism. The latter are presented in (Svet ambara) Jaina canonical literature as the followers of Gos ala Mankhaliputta, identified by modern scholars with the Makkhali Gos ala whose views are reported in Buddhist literature. By combining datafound in the Jaina and in the Buddhist canon, scholars have tried to reconstitute the ideas which belonged to the early Jainas and Aj ıvikas. Scholars rarely seem to have addressed the question what picture arises if one bases oneself exclusively on Buddhist literature. What image did the early B...

In this brief introduction to the Buddha’s thought I hope to give it a context by showing how it was influenced by earlier ideas, whether by assimilating them or by reacting against them. I further hope to show that its power and coherence make it understandable that it had a great impact on human history. But I shall also try to expound it in terms which allow readers to see that that thought contains ambiguities, or possibilities of divergent interpretation, which explain how the later thinkers discussed in this volume could all claim, without palpable absurdity, to be following in the Buddha’s footsteps. Historical Setting The Buddha lived, probably for 80 years, in the fifth century B.C.. The hegemonic culture of his environment was that of the brahmins. According to their own theory of society, the brahmins constituted a hereditary class, the highest, and owed that position primarily to being the guardians of sacred knowledge. This sacred knowledge was embodied in a large collecti...