Buddha

The historical Siddhartha Gautama (probably c. 5th-4th century BCE, exact dates contested) is harder to recover than the legend. The legend is well-known: prince leaves the palace, sees suffering for the first time, renounces wealth, sits under the Bodhi tree, wakes up. What he claimed to have woken up *to* — that's the philosophical content, and it's more rigorous than the legend suggests.

The Four Noble Truths sit at the centre. Suffering (*dukkha*) is intrinsic to ordinary life. The cause is craving (*tanha*) — clinging to things that can't bear the weight of our clinging. The cessation of craving is possible. The Eightfold Path is how. This isn't a list of pieties; it's an analytic framework for diagnosing why life feels the way it does and what could be done about it.

The doctrine of *anatta* (no-self) is the radical part. Buddha argued that what we call "self" is a bundle of constantly shifting processes — bodily form, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness — with no underlying soul or essence holding them together. Modern philosophy of mind (Derek Parfit) and cognitive science have circled back to remarkably similar conclusions through entirely different routes.

The traditions diverge sharply after the early period. Theravada preserves what it takes to be the earliest teachings; Mahayana adds the *bodhisattva* ideal (delay your own liberation to help others) and the deep emptiness metaphysics of Nagarjuna; Vajrayana adds tantric methods; Zen strips back to the act of practice itself. They share the diagnostic core. Whether you treat the framework as religion, philosophy, or applied psychology is up to you — it functions in all three registers.