Buddhism
A path of clear seeing: understand the nature of suffering, trace it to its cause, and follow a practice that leads beyond it.
Origin & history
Buddhism was founded in the 5th–4th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, in the Indian subcontinent. The core insight is empirical: suffering has a cause, and a path leads beyond it. As the teaching spread across Asia it generated three major vehicles.
Theravāda (the School of the Elders) — the oldest form, emphasising monastic discipline and individual liberation through meditation and the Pāli Canon. YogoLogo's primary source.
Mahāyāna (the Great Vehicle) — centred on compassion and the liberation of all beings, and the Bodhisattva path; includes Zen and Pure Land.
Vajrāyāna (the Diamond Vehicle) — rooted in Tantric practice and esoteric ritual, aiming at rapid awakening; primarily Tibetan.
YogoLogo draws primarily from Theravāda and the early teaching, with selected Mahāyāna contributions where they illuminate the convergence.
The core teaching
Buddhism begins not with a god or a cosmology but with a problem everyone recognises: lived unawake, life carries a persistent ache. The Buddha met it the way a physician meets an illness, and the Four Noble Truths are his diagnosis: suffering exists, it has a cause, it can end, and there is a path to its ending. That path keeps to the middle way between self-indulgence and self-denial: the balance the path itself is named for.
The teaching of all Buddhas folds into three lines: refrain from the unwholesome, cultivate the good, purify the mind.
The nature of existence
Look closely at any experience and three characteristics appear, the three marks of existence: everything changes, nothing conditioned fully satisfies, and no fixed, separate self can be found in it, only process. What we call "I" turns out to be five aggregates mistaken for an owner.
Beneath the marks lies one structural insight, dependent origination: everything arises from causes and conditions, nothing stands alone. Later Buddhists drew it as Indra's net, and Thich Nhat Hanh renamed it interbeing, whose plainest modern echo is systems thinking. It is why this site is built as a web rather than a checklist.
Suffering itself grows from three roots, the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. The mind then compounds its own trouble through papañca, conceptual proliferation: a bare sensation spun out into story and reactivity. The Buddha named three layers of this distortion: perception (misreading a rope as a snake), mind (the feelings that follow the misreading), and view (a fixed belief that evidence cannot shift, the deepest to uproot).
The path
The fourth truth opens into the noble eightfold path: eight factors gathered into wisdom, ethical conduct, and mental discipline, developed together rather than climbed in order. Its ethical ground is the five precepts, everyday commitments that steady the mind and clear the ground for everything else.
Practice was always carried in community, through the three jewels: the Buddha (the teacher), the Dharma (the teaching), and the Sangha (the community). Worth naming plainly: these traditions were practised together, and this site is read alone.
Practice
At the centre of practice are two complementary movements, Samatha and Vipassana, calm abiding and clear seeing, applied across this framework as Dharana and Dhyana. The classical scaffolding around them stays simple. The four foundations of mindfulness (body, feeling-tone, mind-states, and mental objects) anchor the practice, and the seven factors of awakening ripen through it. In the way stand the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth, restlessness, and doubt, the same territory Patanjali's antarayas (obstacles) name.
Key terms
- Dukkha — suffering, unsatisfactoriness; the sense that conditioned experience is not quite right.
- Tanha — thirst, craving; the engine of samsara, the cycle the path leads out of.
- Nirvana — liberation; the cessation of craving and clinging, the end of the conditions for suffering. Part of the core equation. → Full treatment: Samadhi.
- Sīla — ethical conduct, the moral foundation; the Buddhist parallel to Yama and Niyama.
- Pañña — wisdom; direct, experiential insight, not conceptual knowledge.
- Indriya-samvara — sense restraint, guarding the sense-gates; the parallel to Pratyahara.
Love in action — the Brahmaviharas
The four divine abodes: Mettā (loving-kindness), Karuṇā (compassion), Muditā (sympathetic joy), and Upekkhā (equanimity). One heart, turned four ways toward the world. → Explored in full on the four divine abodes; applied as one of the three priorities on the Love page.
Common questions
What is Buddhism?
Buddhism is a path of clear seeing that starts from one honest observation: life involves suffering, and much of it comes from craving and from clinging to things that change. Its four noble truths name the problem and the way out, and the eightfold path is the practice that walks it.
What are the four noble truths?
Buddhism's starting point, in four steps: suffering exists, it has a cause in craving, it can end, and there is a path that leads to its ending. They are framed less as doctrine than as a diagnosis and a course of treatment.
What is nirvana?
The cool peace that remains when craving and its suffering burn out. It is not a place you go but a way of being free, here and now, that the whole path is pointed toward. In YogoLogo it sits beside the eighth limb, Samadhi, as one tradition's name for the same clear ground.
Key teachers
Behind the tradition stands Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, not a god but an exemplar, a man who claimed only to have woken up. YogoLogo's working voices are the scholars and meditation teachers who keep the early teaching practical:
- Walpola Rahula — whose What the Buddha Taught is the clearest short entry to the core. The primary source.
- Thich Nhat Hanh — the Zen teacher whose plain language on mindful living threads through the whole framework.
- Ajahn Brahm — Theravāda monk and teacher of the jhanas.
- Joseph Goldstein — a founding Western teacher of Vipassana.
Key texts
- What the Buddha Taught — Walpola Rahula (primary)
- The Pāli Canon — especially the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Ānāpānasati Sutta (mindfulness of breathing), and the Alagaddūpama Sutta (the raft parable, MN 22)
- The Mind Illuminated — Culadasa (John Yates)
- Waking Up — Sam Harris
- Breath by Breath — Larry Rosenberg
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The First Complete Translation — edited by Graham Coleman (the Vajrayana Bardo Thödol; a different school from the suttas above, drawn on for the Death and impermanence material)
Across the limbs
Buddhism is a home tradition: its concepts originate here and are applied across the limbs.
- Sīla ≈ Yama / Niyama — ethical conduct as the non-negotiable ground of practice; the five precepts echo the five Yamas.
- Indriya-samvara ≈ Pratyahara — guarding the sense-gates is the Buddhist name for sense-withdrawal.
- Samatha ≈ chitta vritti nirodhah — calm abiding, applied as concentration on Dharana; Vipassana matures into inquiry on Dhyana.
- The five hindrances ≈ Patanjali's antarayas — the same obstacles to meditation, met on Dhyana.
- Nirvana — part of the core equation, treated fully on Samadhi.
- The Brahmaviharas — Buddhism's map for love in action, given in full as the four divine abodes and applied on the Love priority page.
The genuine difference, Anatta (no permanent self) versus Purusha (pure awareness as ground), is named honestly rather than papered over. See The Convergence.