The big idea: A Buddhist is someone who takes refuge in three things: the Buddha, the dhamma/dharma and the sangha.
The guide calls them the Three Jewels, and reciting them is how a person becomes and remains a Buddhist — which is the nearest thing the tradition has to a creed.
Buddha
- The enlightened or awakened one
- Theravada: Siddhartha Gotama, the historical Buddha
- Mahayana: the historical Buddha and prominent bodhisattvas
- Refuge in the fact that awakening is possible
Dhamma / dharma
- The teachings of the Buddha — and, the guide adds, also the truth
- Not a revelation but a description of how things are
- Held to be discoverable, which is why it could be taught
Sangha
- The community — monastic and lay
- The guide's gloss says both, which matters
- Joining it is how the guide describes taking this refuge
Why the third jewel is a community: Most traditions would put a scripture or a law in the third place. Buddhism puts people.
That is worth a sentence in almost any essay on Buddhist belief: the teaching is held to need a community to carry it, which is also why the Vinaya sits first in the Pali Canon.
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The tradition presents the Buddha as a physician: he names the illness, its cause, the fact that it can end, and the treatment. Step through the chain and notice that each link follows from the one before.
Diagnosis, cause, prognosis, treatment. Each truth follows from the one before it.
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This diagram IS the 10–12 band: The paper 2 markbands separate connections identified from connections developed.
"The Four Noble Truths are connected" is identified. "The third follows from the second, because if craving is the cause then removing it ends what it produces" is developed — and it is one sentence longer.
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The guide asks for their relationship: Not just the three marks — anicca, dukkha, anatta and their relationship with each other.
So learn them as a sequence: nothing stays, therefore clinging hurts, and there is no fixed self doing the clinging.
| Mark | What it says | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| Anicca | Change: nothing stays as it is | Anything clung to will be lost |
| Dukkha | Unsatisfactoriness | Clinging therefore sets a person up for loss |
| Anatta | No permanent self behind experience | There is no unchanging thing that the loss happens to |
The guide then supplies the machinery. What we call a person is five skandhas — aggregates — working together: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Nothing extra sits behind them.
And the chain of dependent origination explains how one state gives rise to the next, so that a process can continue across lives without any self travelling.
The distinction to have ready: Hindus hold that the atman — a self — travels through samsara. Theravada Buddhists hold anatta, and deny that any such self exists.
Both describe rebirth. They disagree about what, if anything, is reborn — and the skandhas and dependent origination are Buddhism's answer to the obvious follow-up question.
How this is tested. Theme 3 names eschatology and cosmology separately, and the guide's treatment splits by branch.
Theravada
- No creator god is claimed
- Birth, death and rebirth into samsara
- Desires cause suffering, kamma and rebirth
- Enlightenment extinguishes maya — desire and illusion — and frees one from samsara
- What we call "the body" is composed of the five skandhas
Mahayana
- The bodhisattva: attainment of nirvana not for oneself, but Buddhahood for the sake of others
- The guide names Avalokiteshvara, Amitabha, Manjushri and the Taras
- Buddhas in other realms
- Which is why Mahayana devotion has more objects than Theravada does
Cosmology — the guide's own detail
- Theravada: the cycle of existence
- Mahayana: Buddhas in other realms
- Lokas — thirty-one planes of existence within three realms
- Heavens and hells exist among them, and all of them sit inside samsara
The line that closes an eschatology answer: "Every one of the thirty-one planes is inside samsara, so a heavenly rebirth is a better turn of the wheel rather than an escape from it."
That sentence does the work of a paragraph.