Tradition

Buddhist philosophy

Overview

Buddhist philosophy is the ancient Indian philosophical system that developed within the religio-philosophical tradition of Buddhism. It comprises all the philosophical investigations and systems of rational inquiry that developed among various schools of Buddhism in ancient India following the parinirvāṇa of Gautama Buddha (c. 5th century BCE), as well as the further developments which followed the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia.

Buddhism combines both philosophical reasoning and the practice of meditation. The Buddhist religion presents a multitude of Buddhist paths to liberation; and with the expansion of early Buddhism from ancient India to Sri Lanka and subsequently to East Asia and Southeast Asia, Buddhist thinkers have covered topics as varied as cosmology, ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of time, and soteriology in their analysis of these paths.

Pre-sectarian Buddhism was based on empirical evidence gained by the sense organs (including the mind), and the Buddha seems to have retained a skeptical distance from certain metaphysical questions, refusing to answer them because they were not conducive to liberation but led instead to further speculation. However, he was also claimed to have affirmed theories with metaphysical implications, such as dependent arising, karma, and rebirth.

Particular points of Buddhist philosophy have often been the subject of disputes between different schools of Buddhism, as well as between representative thinkers of Buddhist schools and Hindu or Jain philosophers. These elaborations and disputes gave rise to various early Buddhist schools of Abhidharma, the Mahāyāna movement, and scholastic traditions such as Prajñāpāramitā, Sarvāstivāda, Mādhyamaka, Sautrāntika, Vaibhāṣika, Buddha-nature, Yogācāra, and more. One recurrent theme in Buddhist philosophy has been the desire to find a Middle Way between philosophical views seen as extreme.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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For all such historical philosophy, whatever airs it may give itself, regards _time_ just as if Kant had never lived, as a quality of the thing-in-itself, and thus stops at that which Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing-in-itself; which Plato calls the becoming and never being, in opposition to the being and never becoming; and which, finally, is called in the Indian philosophy the web of Mâya.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Buddhist philosophy is; the author is tied to Buddhist philosophy in the knowledge graph.
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But in the universities of Europe, where philosophy was taught only as subservient to theology, it was natural to dwell longer upon these two chapters than upon any other of the science. They were gradually more and more extended, and were divided into many inferior chapters; till at last the doctrine of spirits, of which so little can be known, came to take up as much room in the system of philosophy as the…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
States what Buddhist philosophy is.
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In the first beginnings of culture, however, we are more often met by this admixture of Philosophy and general knowledge. There comes a time to a nation when mind applies itself to universal objects, when, for example, in seeking to bring natural things under general modes of understanding, it tries to learn their causes. Then it is said that a people begins to philosophize, for this content has thought in common…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Buddhist philosophy is.
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Philosophers who discussed Buddhist philosophy

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