The Foundations of Buddhism

Introduction The term 'Buddhism' refers to a vast and complex religious and philosophical tradition with a history that stretche ...

2 Introduction Shinto, and, more recently but less happily, Communism; it remains a significant religious tradition for a popula ...

Introduction 3 reason it seems worth while trying to introduce Buddhism in a more explicitly focused way. The approach I have ad ...

4 Introduction mean that those ideas fail to affect our view of the world. The principles of, say, Newtonian physics, Darwinian ...

Introduction 5 'mainstream' Buddhism;^3 and while the Mahayana certainly criticized aspects of mainstream Buddhist thought and p ...

6 Introduction In sum, what distinguishes the present volume is that it con- tains rather more sustained expositions of Buddhist ...

1 The Buddha The Story of the Awakened One The historical Buddha In January 1898 an Englishman, W. C. Peppe, digging into a moun ...

8 The Buddha confines of India right across Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to Japan in the east, affecting and touching the ...

The Buddha 9 For the following reasons he is a Blessed One: he is an Arhat, a per- fectly and completely awakened one, perfect i ...

IO The Buddha The tradition is sometimes called the 'renouncer (sarrmyiisin) tradition'. What we are concerned with here is the ...

The Buddha II various philosophical views providing the intellectual justifica- tion for particular practices and the theoretica ...

I2 The Buddha century BCE, the Aryas had been in India perhaps a thousand years and their cultural influence extended down the G ...

The Buddha 13 make up the fourth class, the sildras or servants, whose basic duty it is to serve the three other classes. While ...

r4 The Buddha year when he died, and the dates for his life most widely quoted in modern published works are 566-486 BCE. These ...

The Buddha IS In representing the Buddha as a rajan or k$atriya the tradition is effectively recording little more than that he ...

16 The Buddha founder.'^13 Given this premiss, none of the bare details of the Buddha's life is particularly problematic for the ...

The Buddha I7 of the great stories of the world. Part of the common heritage of Buddhism, it is known throughout Asia wherever B ...

18 The Buddha spent as a 'god' (deva) in the heaven of the Contented (Tu~ita/ Tusita). Here the bodhisattva (Pali bodhisatta)-th ...

The Buddha 19 try' of the great continent of Jambudvipa (India) was the place in which to take birth, for its inhabitants would ...

20 The Buddha the Bodhisattva: he had no memory of his dwelling in Tu~ita or any of his other previous births. However, certain ...