Dukkha, Buddhism's key word, doesn't really mean suffering
Buddhism's central diagnosis is usually translated as life is suffering. The Pali word dukkha is subtler: it describes the built-in unsatisfactoriness of anything temporary, including pleasant experiences, because we expect lasting happiness from things that cannot last. The cure, taught around the fifth century BCE, is to stop clinging.
The Buddha, meaning the Awakened One, was a wandering ascetic in the eastern Ganges plain whose life story is hard to pin down; the early texts disagree, and the fifth century BCE is the best estimate. He was born in Lumbini in present-day Nepal and grew up in Kapilavastu. Legends make his father a king, but scholars such as Richard Gombrich doubt it, since the Shakya community seems to have been run by a council rather than a monarch.
According to early accounts, troubled by the endless round of birth and death, he studied with two meditation teachers, then tried severe fasting and breath control. Neither worked. Instead he meditated beneath a fig tree at Bodh Gaya, now called the Bodhi Tree, and attained awakening, confirming a Middle Way between self-indulgence and self-mortification. He founded a monastic community and taught until his death at 80 in Kushinagar.
The Four Noble Truths set out the logic. Dukkha exists; it arises with craving, literally thirst; it can end when craving is released; and the Noble Eightfold Path leads there. Underlying ignorance is the belief that anything is permanent or that beings possess a fixed self. The doctrine of non-self means rebirth, which can occur in six realms from heavenly to hellish, involves no soul passing from body to body. Nirvana, literally a blowing out, ends the cycle.
Buddhism is now the world's fourth-largest religion, with an estimated 320 to 540 million followers. It spread along the Silk Road and faded in India by the early second millennium. Mahayana, the largest branch, including Zen and Pure Land, dominates East Asia and stresses the bodhisattva who works to free all beings. Theravada, the School of the Elders, prevails in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar. Tibetan Buddhism, a form of Vajrayana using tantric techniques, reaches Mongolia and Russia's Kalmykia. The word Buddhism itself is a Western coinage.
Source: Buddhism
