How did it become what it became (and for whom)?

So how did Buddhist philosophy develop? They had the example of a man’s life, what he taught and themselves in relation to the world to consider. The foremost dictum for Buddhists has always been that Buddhists take refuge in three jewels: the Buddha (perhaps partly in the way Christians see Jesus as still in some sense living in and for them – the term may refer to any or all of the Buddhas), the Dharma (the way, the method, the religion) and the Sangha (the community of monks and nuns and also other lay Buddhists). It is the 'shahada' of Buddhism.

The monks and nuns still live by monastic rules (vinaya) based on those laid down by Siddhartha. Part of the duty of monks in particular ‘naturally’ came to be to be the foremost interpreters of Buddhism as a philosophy and what they wrote about in developing that vinaya and their abhidharma forms the basis of what we now know of the history of the development of Buddhist thought.

Lay people were generally seen as having little chance of being a Bodhisattva in this life; their job was to seek to be good so that they might hope to be a novice monk in a future life (especially in the time of the next Buddha) and part of that being good was respecting the monks. The laypeople seek to earn merits (punya) often by Dana (giving) especially to monks and nuns, as they have virtually from time immemorial. The merit level required to avoid hell is apparently quite high.

Merit can also be earned by performing rituals in a temple and one idea goes that a family may walk many miles to a temple for this purpose even though they possess a motor vehicle so that others might witness this act of devotion, become happy and thereby earn merit themselves in some way.

Siddhartha specifically approved veneration and circumambulation of the tombs of enlightened ones and even arranged for his own remains to be divided into eight sections so that they might be venerated in many places at once. The funerary-remains monuments venerated by Buddhists are known as Stupas.

The fashion for them in India apparently caught on especially under king Asoka. He is himself supposed to have had 4,000 Stupas built and to have officially approved the four main places of Buddhist pilgrimage: the place of Siddhartha's enlightenment (Buddhagaya), the place of his first teaching (Isipatana) and the places of his birth (Lumbini) and final parinibbana (Kusinagara). At least two of the columns indicating the locations of the four places are still extant having been apparently lost and rediscovered only in the 19^th Century.

According to some scholars, the Hindu liking for pilgrimages appears to have developed at around the time of Asoka’s reign as a result of his influence.

The epistemology, metaphysics and ethics that the monks (rarely nuns) came up with was the abhidharma and I’ll get into its development over the centuries a bit later. Together the sutras (discourses) of Siddhartha, the vinaya (rules) of the religious and the abhidharma in a sense sum up what it is to be Buddhist for three distinct classes of people: respectively, laypeople, the novice religious and Bodhisattvas.

Now on (in the next four posts) to some more detail of the Four Noble Truths as elucidated by the abhidharma.