The Buddha. There is no longer any doubt among scholars and historians that the Buddha was an historical figure who was born among the Sakyan people of Northern India about 2500 years ago. He was the son of a powerful and wealthy leader of the Sakyans, a member of the Gotama clan; his given name was Siddhattha and he was known as Siddhattha Gotama. All of the evidence indicates that he was uncommonly intelligent and well-educated, with a charismatic personality. At the age of 29, dissatisfied with the transient nature of human life and the inability of even great wealth and power to deliver lasting happiness, Siddhattha left home and accepted the discipline of a renunciant wanderer; for the next six years he traveled on foot through northern India, studying with some of the finest teachers of his time, learning the techniques of yoga, living on alms, practicing severe austerities, and developing the meditative method that would form the basis of the practice he came to teach.

At the age of 35, sitting in meditation under a fig tree close to the village of Bodh Gaya, near the modern city of Rajgir, Siddhattha achieved the enlightenment he had been seeking: he came to an understanding of how things unfold in this world, and especially how the inescapable impermanence of the world is experienced as pain and distress, and how a person can live and train the mind to reduce or end that experience of pain.

With the attainment of that direct and powerfully experienced insight, Siddhattha became “The Buddha”, a term meaning “Enlightened One” or “Awakened One”. For several weeks following the experience, the Buddha contemplated the implications of his insight and developed his Dharma, his formulation of the truth that he’d come to understand about the world and the human condition. He then proceeded, over the next 45 years, to teach that Dharma to a growing community of male and female followers, disciplined, loyal, and self-reliant.

The Texts. When the Buddha died, at the age of 80, that community, known as the Sangha (“assembly”), conceived and implemented a deliberate, well-organized effort to remember and regularly recite to one another the teachings that the Buddha had delivered over the years. Those teachings were retained as an oral tradition, with an unknowable but probably high degree of fidelity, for about 200 years. The entire body of teachings was written down at the Fourth Buddhist Council, in Sri Lanka, early in the 1st Century BCE, in a language which became known as Pali. Prior to the Fourth Council, the oral tradition had spread throughout India, into Southeast Asia, and North into China; large portions of the teachings, in languages other than Pali, were also written down in those other areas; all of these various textual canons have a high level of agreement, in substance, organization and detail, which gives us more reason to trust that they represent a true recording of a tradition that extends back to the Buddha himself.

We have none of the original texts of what became known as the Pali Canon—the climate of South Asia is not conducive to the preservation of texts written on palm leaves—but most scholars agree that the content has not changed significantly since the teachings were first recorded. There has, however, been extensive evolution in the tradition of doctrine and practice that began with the texts of the Pali Canon, the doctrine and practice that has become known as Buddhism. As the teachings moved into new lands and were translated into new languages, many different Buddhist traditions emerged: in the North—in China and Tibet, Korea and Japan—various forms of what is called Mahayana Buddhism developed, each with its own texts overlaid on the texts of the Pali Canon, each with its own interpretation of those parts of the Buddha’s teachings that invite interpretation, each with its own particular history and honored sages. In South Asia and large parts of Southeast Asia, traditions emerged that acknowledged the centrality of the canonical texts, but those traditions too, collectively known as Theravada, developed their own interpretations of the texts and added their own commentaries to them. More recently, as Buddhism has set down roots in Europe, Australia, and North American, still other traditions are emerging, yet to be named, with their own practices, their own honored teachers, and their own take on the eternally relevant teachings of the Buddha.

The Courses. In the course, “The Teachings of the Buddha”, we will keep our focus on the texts of the Pali Canon; our method will be historical, in that we will try to understand the cultural context in which the discourses were delivered, and we will use the texts we read as a starting point for learning about the Buddha’s life. But we will also see how the pain and suffering that the Buddha diagnosed in those teachings are still with us, and how the prescription he delivered to end that pain and suffering is relevant to our lives today.

Our approach in the course, “Topics in Mainstream Buddhism”, will be somewhat different. While we will still start with the canonical texts, the method will be more analytical and philosophical; we will try to derive a coherent doctrine from those texts (and from other texts in the various Buddhist traditions), building an outline of a distinctive Buddhist ethics, metaphysics, and psychology. Again, we will focus on how the Buddhist understanding of those things—how to live well, how the world works, and how we interact with the world—retains an immediacy and a normative force in our troubled times.