Buddism

• Enlightenment


  Knowing and understanding how to overcome suffering
• Dhamma

  The teachings of the Buddha
• Buddha


  The one who has gained enlightenment
• Sangha


  The community of Buddha's disciples
• Theravada


  The Teachings of the Elders, the earliest form of Buddhism
• Mahayana


  The Greater Vehicle, Buddhism that spread into Northern Asia

  
• Vajrayana

  The Thunderbolt Vehicle, a form of Tibetan Buddhism
• Ascetics


  People who believed that by eating and drinking as little as possible and spending a lot of time thinking they would come to understand the meaning of life
• Life of the Buddha


  1. Born as Siddhartha Gautama

  2. Life in the palace

  3. Four sights

  4. Great renunciation

  5. Life with the ascetics

  6. Discovering the middle way

  7. Becoming enlightened

  
• The Buddha lived until he was 80 years old and during the rest of his life he travelled about teaching and preaching
• Today there are 300 million people in the world who follow the teachings of the Buddha
• Buddhism was spread from India to Sri Lanka and Thailand by its early followers

  
• Buddhism spread into China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Bhutan and Tibet

  
• Buddhism became more widely known in the west during the twentieth century

  
• Anicca


  The truth that all life involves impermanence, nothing lasts forever, everything changes all the time
• Anatta


  The truth that all beings are empty, they do not have a separate, fixed and inherent existence
• Dukkha


  The truth that all life involves suffering
• Conditioned existence

  The belief that everything is linked together, everything depends on other things for their existence
• Emptiness (sunyata)

  The belief that all beings are empty in that they do not have a separate, fixed and inherent existence
• The Diamond Sutra: 'Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.'
• The Heart Sutra: 'Avalokita, the Holy Lord and Bodhisattva, was moving in the deep course of the Wisdom which has gone beyond. He looked down from on high, He beheld but five heaps, and he saw that in their own-being they were empty. Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form.'
• Nagasena: '"No real person can here be apprehended"'
• Anatta


  The belief that living beings have no soul
• Skandhas

  Five bundles of impermanent existence - body, feeling, sensations, mental formations and consciousness
• Anicca (impermanence)


  Anatta (no-self)
• Anatta


  Skandhas
• Me

  Chariot
• Souls

  Anicca (impermanence)
• When a person is reborn, Nagasena says they are neither the same nor another, like how milk turns into curds and butter