Будда философиясының ежелгі дәстүрі

Buddhist philosophical tradition

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; with the expansion of early Buddhism from ancient India to Sri Lanka and subsequently to East Asia and Southeast Asia, However he also affirmed theories with metaphysical implications, such as dependent arising, karma, and rebirth.

Scholarly opinion varies as to whether Gautama Buddha himself was engaged in philosophical inquiry. Siddartha Gautama (c. 5th century BCE) was a north Indian Śramaṇa (wandering ascetic), whose teachings are preserved in the Pāli Nikayas and in the Āgamas as well as in other surviving fragmentary textual collections, collectively known as the early Buddhist texts. Dating these texts is difficult, and there is disagreement on how much of this material goes back to a single religious founder. While the focus of the Buddha's teachings is about attaining the highest good of nirvāṇa, they also contain an analysis of the source of human suffering (duḥkha), the nature of personal identity (ātman), and the process of acquiring knowledge (prajña) about the world. Thus, Buddhism's main concern is not with luxury or poverty, but instead with the human response to circumstances. Another related teaching of the historical Buddha is "the teaching through the middle" (majjhena dhammaṃ desana), which claims to be a metaphysical middle path between the extremes of eternalism and annihilationism, as well as the extremes of existence and non existence. This idea would become central to later Buddhist metaphysics, as all Buddhist philosophies would claim to steer a metaphysical middle course.

The Four Noble Truths or "Truths of the Noble One" are a central feature to the teachings of the historical Buddha and are put forth in the Dharmacakrapravartana Sūtra. The first truth of duḥkha, often translated as "suffering", is the inherent and eternal unsatisfactoriness of life. This unpleasantness is said to be not just physical pain and psychological distress, but also a kind of existential unease caused by the inevitable facts of our mortality and ultimately by the impermanence of all beings and phenomena. Suffering also arises because of contact with unpleasant events, and due to not getting what one desires. The second truth is that this unease arises out of conditions, mainly craving (taṇhā) and ignorance (avidyā). The third truth is then the fact that whenever sentient beings let go of craving and remove ignorance through insight and knowledge, suffering ceases (nirodhā). The fourth truth is the Noble Eightfold Path, which consists of eight practices that end suffering. They are: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samādhi (concentration, mental unification, meditation). The highest good and ultimate goal taught by the historical Buddha, which is the attainment of nirvāṇa, literally means "extinguishing" and signified "the complete extinguishing of greed, hatred, and delusion (i. e. ignorance), the forces which power saṃsāra". Nirvāṇa also means that after an enlightened being's death, there is no further rebirth. In earliest Buddhism, the concept of dependent origination (pratītya samutpāda) was most likely limited to processes of mental conditioning and not to all physical phenomena. Gautama Buddha understood the world in procedural terms, not in terms of things or substances. His theory posits a flux of events arising under certain conditions which are interconnected and dependent, such that the processes in question at no time are considered to be static or independent. Craving (taṇhā), for example, is always dependent on, and caused by sensations gained by the sense organs (āyatana). Sensations are always dependent on contact with our surroundings. Buddha's causal theory is simply descriptive: "This existing, that exists; this arising, that arises; this not existing, that does not exist; this ceasing, that ceases." This understanding of causation as "impersonal lawlike causal ordering" is important because it shows how the processes that give rise to suffering work, and also how they can be reversed. According to the Buddha's teachings as recorded in the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, we need to train the mind in meditation to be able to truly comprehend the nature of reality, which is said to have the Three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence, and non self (anātman). Understanding and meditation are said to work together to clearly see (vipassanā) the nature of human experience and this is said to lead to liberation.

Dignāga (c. 480–540) and Dharmakīrti (c. 6 7th century) were Buddhist philosophers who developed a system of epistemology (pramana) and logic in their debates with the Brahminical philosophers in order to defend Buddhist doctrine. This tradition is called "those who follow reasoning" (Tibetan: rigs pa rjes su 'brang ba); in modern literature, it is sometimes known by the Sanskrit "pramāṇavāda", or "the Epistemological School." They were associated with the Yogacara and Sautrantika schools, and defended theories held by both of these schools. Dignāga's influence was profound and led to an "epistemological turn" among all Buddhists and also all Sanskrit language philosophers in India after his death. In the centuries following Dignāga's work, Sanskrit philosophers became much more focused on defending all of their propositions with fully developed theories of knowledge. The "School of Dignāga" includes later philosophers and commentators like Santabhadra, Dharmottara (8th century), Prajñakaragupta (740–800 C. E.), Jñanasrimitra (975–1025), Ratnakīrti (11th century) and Śaṅkaranandana (fl. c. 9th or 10th century). The epistemology they developed defends the view that there are only two 'instruments of knowledge' or 'valid cognitions' (pramana): "perception" (pratyaksa) and "inference" (anumāṇa). Perception is a non conceptual awareness of particulars which is bound by causality, while inference is reasonable, linguistic and conceptual. These Buddhist philosophers argued in favor of the theory of momentariness, the Yogācāra "awareness only" view, the reality of particulars (svalakṣaṇa), atomism, nominalism and the self reflexive nature of consciousness (svasaṃvedana). They attacked Hindu theories of God (Isvara), universals, the authority of the Vedas, and the existence of a permanent soul (atman).