Finally, what do the last forty odd posts add up to?

Here's what I think the life and legacy of Siddhartha Gautama is all about (bear with me as I summarise forty odd earlier posts):

There were forms of theism in India around 500 BCE that Siddhartha had a critical dialogue with during his lifetime of around 80 years. He was a persuasive and wise fellow and his message as it was understood also resonated and was appreciated by many for political and social reasons as well as for purely religious ones (ultimately even beyond India).

The actual message was really down to: everything is suffering but at least it's not permanent so enjoy each moment without clinging to anything and appreciate your lives and develop your communal connectedness and compassion.

That was expressed as four "noble truths" and a "Buddhist path" that had both moral-teaching and self-learning elements was instituted.

After Siddhartha's death this was all finally written down in various forms and argued about at length for centuries. Buddhism (in the various forms that thus emerged) became and remains the religion of around a billion people (essentially throughout much of East and South East Asia (though no longer India) and its peoples' diasporas).

Some forms have inspired the West recently (significantly, for Western and modern (or postmodern) reasons) via people like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.

The problem with all of the above is that this inspiring religion for the West that began to be written about more than two millenia ago may not be what Siddhartha actually taught and this idea is brought out in a fascinating book called "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" written by a former monk. The ex-monk (in both Tibetan and Korean Zen traditions) was born as and now goes again by the name Stephen Batchelor.

I highly recommend the book. It brings out the real story of Siddhartha based on the earliest Pali canon and reveals how this earliest extant evidence shows that he didn't actually believe in either reincarnation or gods (key beliefs of most forms of Buddhism today).

So what then does the extensive development of Buddhism discussed in my posts amount to if it is apparently so clearly contradicted by the clearest of evidence. Simply, it produced a culture valued by almost as many people today as Christianity or Islam so it deserves to be understood. I hope the earlier posts and this post give an understanding of the Buddhism we know today and also how it may develop in the future to become an even more valuable and truly atheist and scientific worldview.