Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)

Key ideas

The Buddha's central teaching begins with suffering and its cause. Suffering, he taught, comes from craving and clinging, and clinging rests on a mistaken picture of the world as made of fixed, independent things, above all a fixed self that owns our experiences.

Against that picture he taught anatta, 'not-self'. A person is a changing stream of five groups of processes: body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness. Look for a self among them, or behind them, and you find nothing that is permanent and in charge. On this view the self is a useful convention, not a thing. The idea is the starting point for the entry on the no-self view and has striking parallels with David Hume's bundle theory and Derek Parfit's reductionism.

Linked to this is dependent origination: everything arises in dependence on conditions, and nothing exists entirely on its own. Later Buddhist philosophers in India, Tibet, China and Japan built whole systems of logic, metaphysics and theory of knowledge on these foundations.

Life, briefly

The traditional account says Siddhartha was born a prince of the Shakya clan at Lumbini, in present-day Nepal, left a sheltered life after encountering old age, sickness and death, and reached awakening after years of ascetic practice and meditation. He spent the rest of a long life teaching across the Ganges plain. Scholars disagree about his exact dates, with estimates ranging over about a century.

He wrote nothing. His teachings were memorised and passed down orally by monastic communities before being written down, most fully in the Pali Canon.

Major works

• No writings of his own; teachings preserved in the Pali Canon and other early collections

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)
• WikipediaGautama Buddha