42 China in World History
supernatural god or creator, and depended on no deity or divine revela-
tions as the basis of his teachings. He simply claimed to have insight
into the nature of the human condition and ways to improve it. Born
an Indian prince—Siddhartha of the Gautama clan—the Buddha lived,
interestingly enough, at about the same time as Confucius. India was
already an old civilization with a very rich tradition of Hindu scriptures
and teachings about the need to transcend or move beyond the physi-
cal world to the world of pure spirit. Raised in luxury and married to
a beautiful princess who had borne him a son, Siddhartha turned his
back on all that at age twenty-nine, when he vowed to embark on a
religious search for enlightenment; in particular, he wished to solve the
riddle of human suffering. He studied with a variety of Hindu teachers
and sages for a period of six years. At age thirty-fi ve, while meditating
under a Bo tree in the northern Indian state of Bihar, he had a sense
of great awakening (Buddha means “awakened one”) and felt that he
fi nally understood the causes and the cure for human suffering. In his
fi rst sermon after this, he summarized his new insights, which have
come to be known in Buddhism as the Four Noble Truths. The fi rst is
thatdukkha—a Sanskrit term meaning suffering, pain, imperfection,
or anguish—is unavoidable in human life. The second is that dukkha
has an identifi able cause: human desire or craving. We desire to escape
pain and never to be separated from our loved ones, but pain in life
and separation through death are unavoidable. The third noble truth
is that we can end our suffering if we understand and accept our own
impermanence and eliminate our many desires for life to be different
from the way it is. The forth noble truth is that the way to achieve this
acceptance and this end of suffering is to follow a moral, compassionate
life of spiritual discipline, meditation, and concentration.
In addition to these teachings, Buddhists shared the common Indian
assumptions of the time: that all human beings are spirits reborn again
and again into a succession of physical bodies, working toward enlight-
enment over a period of many lifetimes. Rebirth is governed by laws
of karma, whereby every act has consequences equal to the act. Good
actions have good consequences in this life or the next incarnation, and
bad actions likewise have bad consequences.
The Buddha’s teachings were suffi ciently general and varied that
different people emphasized different aspects of his thought, and by the
time Buddhist missionaries carried their religion to China, it was a very
complex religion with many different schools and branches. In Thera-
vada Buddhism, which thrived in India and spread especially in South-
east Asia, the Buddhist path of self-discipline was seen as so strict and