Buddhism
Form is emptiness; emptiness is form
The Tradition
Buddhism begins with a single question asked by a prince who had everything: why is there suffering? Siddhartha Gautama left his palace, spent years in extreme asceticism, and finally sat under a Bodhi tree until understanding arose. What he discovered was not a god but a pattern: suffering arises from craving and aversion, from the grasping ego’s insistence that things be other than they are. The path out is the same in every school, a loosening of the grip.
Buddhism spread across Asia in two great streams. Theravada (the Way of the Elders) preserves the earliest teachings and emphasizes individual liberation through monastic practice. Mahayana (the Great Vehicle) expanded the vision to include all beings, and from it arose Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Pure Land, each a distinct cultural flowering of the same root.
The concept of Sunyata, emptiness, is Buddhism’s most radical gift to the perennial conversation. It does not mean nothingness. It means that all phenomena, including the self, lack fixed and independent existence. They arise in dependence on each other, like Indra’s Net, each jewel reflecting all the others. What remains when the fixed self is seen through is not absence but the open ground of awareness itself, which is what every tradition’s deepest teaching points toward.
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.Heart Sutra
Teachings from this tradition 12
Neighbours on the Map
Among Buddhism’s nearest neighbours on the Map are Stoicism, where what is in our power makes the same cut as the Fire Sermon; the Christian mystics, where Eckhart’s eye through which God sees meets Dogen’s forgotten self; and Taoism, where subtracting daily is the same forgetting, practised one thing at a time.
Who Met Whom
Travelled with: Confucianism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism · Unsure: Gnosticism, Greek, Neoplatonism, Sufism, Zoroastrianism · Arose apart from: Christianity, Egyptian, Hermeticism, Indigenous, Judaism, Sikhism, Stoicism
Whether ideas moved between Buddhism and each other tradition, by what the record shows. The whole grid, with dates and sources →