Four Noble Truths
Suffering, its origin, its ending and the path. The Buddha’s teaching in excerpts from the early discourses.
Explore a teaching.
62 topics
View & philosophy
Accounts of experience, causality, selfhood and reality.
Karma & intention
Intention, action and consequences, and why past action does not explain every experience.
Dependent origination
The arising and cessation of suffering, right view, and the conditions supporting liberation.
Impermanence
Change, death and the impermanence of the five aggregates.
Five aggregates
Form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness, and the distinction between aggregates and clinging.
Self & identity
The five aggregates, identification and the teaching of not-self.
Ṭhānissaro frames not-self as a strategy for releasing clinging. Mipham makes an explicit philosophical case against a truly existing self and phenomena. Thích Nhất Hạnh explains the aggregates through their lack of separate existence. These are different formulations of what the teaching is doing.
Emptiness
Emptiness in MN 121, the Heart Sūtra and Mipham’s teaching on selflessness.
MN 121 follows a progressively refined dwelling in emptiness. The Heart Sūtra and Mipham address the emptiness of persons and phenomena in Mahāyāna settings. Their questions and explanatory frameworks overlap without being identical.
Mind, knowledge & consciousness
Perception, reasoning, selfhood and consciousness in Buddhist philosophy.
Dharmakāya & the three bodies
Dharmakāya, saṃbhogakāya and nirmāṇakāya in Mahāyāna accounts of Buddhahood.
Subtle body
Channels, winds, chakras and drops in Tibetan Buddhist tantric teachings.
Śāstra · Buddhist treatises
Buddhist treatises, their authors and their relationship to sūtras and commentaries.
Mind & emotions
Mental states, emotional patterns and Buddhist psychology.
Mind across traditions
Mindfulness of mind, changing consciousness and Dōgen’s account of zazen.
Feelings & emotions
Pleasant, painful and neutral feeling, and the states of mind that accompany them.
Kleśas
Mental afflictions, the three unskillful roots, and a Tibetan Buddhist account of six root afflictions.
Craving
The three kinds of craving and their place in the arising and cessation of suffering.
The early discourse calls for the abandonment of taṇhā. It also recognizes desire that supports the path. Lama Yeshe describes a tantric use of desire’s energy within a different method and set of prerequisites. The shared English word “desire” covers several distinctions.
Aversion
Ill will, resistance to pain and the cultivation of goodwill.
Anger
Restraint, goodwill and patience in responding to anger and resentment.
Abandoning resentment, patiently caring for anger and recognizing the nature of an emotion involve different instructions. The Tibetan example presupposes its teaching context; these approaches should be understood with their aims and prerequisites.
Fear & anxiety
Fear, mortality and separation in early discourses and contemporary teachings.
Grief & loss
Death, separation and sorrow in Buddhist texts and teachings on grieving.
Doubt & uncertainty
Investigation, confidence and doubt as a hindrance to meditation.
Buddhism & psychology
Buddhist teachings, psychological theories and research on meditation.
Ethics & daily life
Conduct, generosity, relationships and life as a householder.
Generosity
Giving, its motivations, and care for donor and recipient in the early discourses.
Five Precepts
The five ethical commitments undertaken by Buddhist lay practitioners.
AN 8.39 presents the commitments as gifts of safety; Sn 2.14 adds householder guidance and distinguishes an eightfold observance. The guide’s contemporary practice examples are editorial applications. Plum Village’s Five Mindfulness Trainings are a separate modern formulation.
Right Speech
Timely, true, gentle, beneficial, and loving speech, in the early Buddhist discourses.
Householder
Lay practice through livelihood, relationships, community, ethics, generosity and meditation.
Parenting
Caring for children, family relationships, and practice for parents, caregivers and educators.
Eight worldly concerns
Gain and loss, praise and blame, reputation and disrepute, pleasure and pain—and attachment or aversion toward them.
Meditation
Methods and qualities cultivated in meditation.
Meditation approaches
Breathing, goodwill, contemplation and other meditation practices in the early discourses.
Buddhist meditation includes training attention, cultivating qualities, investigating experience and enacting or recognizing realization. The following are selected entry points; each belongs within ethical training and a particular path.
Four Foundations of Mindfulness
Body, feeling tone, mind and dhammas in the Satipaṭṭhāna discourse.
Mindfulness of breathing
The sixteen breath trainings and their connection with mindfulness and awakening.
MN 118 is a shared point of reference for these sources. The differences here concern wording and the relationship among the sixteen trainings, rather than incompatible objects of meditation.
Four immeasurables
Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity: the brahmavihāras.
Goodwill & loving-kindness
Mettā: goodwill toward all beings and its cultivation.
Equanimity
Balance amid gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain.
Five Hindrances
Sensual desire, ill will, dullness, restlessness and doubt, and the conditions that sustain them.
Jhāna
The four absorptions, with the methods and criteria taught by named meditation teachers.
Ajahn Brahm requires the five senses to be absent in jhāna. Ṭhānissaro’s presentation allows background sense impressions while attention remains with the breath. This is a disagreement about what qualifies as jhāna within Theravāda-derived teaching, as well as a difference in method.
Seven Factors of Awakening
Mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, calm, concentration and equanimity.
Deity yoga
Buddha forms, visualization, generation stage and completion stage in Vajrayāna.
Six Yogas of Naropa
Inner heat, illusory body, dream yoga, clear light, bardo and transference.
Jokgom · placement meditation
Placement or settling meditation: resting steadily with an object, understanding or cultivated state, often alternating with analytical reflection.
Chegom · analytical meditation
Examining a teaching or experience through reasoning and reflection to deepen understanding and transform the mind.
Lhaktong · insight
Insight or clear seeing: discerning the nature of experience, cultivated alongside calm abiding in Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Tonglen · giving and taking
A compassion practice of imagining receiving suffering and offering happiness and well-being, often coordinated with the breath.
Paths & awakening
Training frameworks, stages of development and awakening.
Three trainings
Ethical conduct, concentration and wisdom, and their relationship to the Eightfold Path.
MN 44 groups the eight path factors under ethics, concentration and wisdom. The six perfections offer a Mahāyāna framework that gives these qualities a place within the bodhisattva path.
Eightfold Path
The eight factors of the path as defined in SN 45.8.
The eight factors here follow SN 45.8 and MN 117. A Mahāyāna account may explain these trainings within the bodhisattva path and its perfections; that wider context changes how the path is presented.
Gradual training
The sequence of ethical and meditative training described in MN 107.
37 qualities of awakening
Seven sets of teachings comprising the 37 qualities associated with awakening.
MN 103 lists the seven sets together. Ṭhānissaro’s anthology groups their factors under five faculties to explain connections; this regrouping provides the highlighting on this page.
Awakening
Liberation, Buddhahood and practice-realization in Buddhist texts and traditions.
These sources describe the path through the ending of afflictions, the Lotus Sūtra’s one Buddha vehicle, and Sōtō practice-realization. Their goals, language and criteria require their own context. Scientific studies below examine specified experiences and outcomes.
Three yānas · vehicles
The vehicle frameworks used in Tibetan teachings and Mahāyāna sūtras.
Bodhicitta
The wish to awaken for all beings, and its expression in the training of a bodhisattva.
Lojong · mind training
Bodhicitta in everyday life, Chekhawa’s seven points, and the teachers and commentaries of the mind-training tradition.
Six perfections
Generosity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom on the bodhisattva path.
Ten bodhisattva bhūmis
The ten grounds of bodhisattva realization and their relationship to the five paths.
Sūtra and tantra
Sūtra, tantra and the role of transmission in Vajrayāna.
The four thoughts
Precious human life, impermanence and death, karma, and the suffering of saṃsāra: four contemplations that turn the mind towards the Dharma.
Devotion & ritual
Refuge, prayer, sacred figures and ritual practices.
Refuge
Refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma and Saṅgha, as presented in early Buddhist texts.
Avalokiteśvara & forms of compassion
The bodhisattva of compassion, known as Guanyin, Kannon and Chenrezig.
Tārā & the Twenty-One Forms
Green and White Tārā, the twenty-one praises and their practice and art lineages.
Guru Yoga
Prayer, visualization and meditation connecting the practitioner with the teacher’s awakened qualities in Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche
Invoking Padmasambhava through prayer, with traditional instructions and a teacher’s visualization guide.
Empowerment
Initiation, transmission and commitments in Tibetan Vajrayāna and Shingon.
Ngöndro
Common and uncommon preliminary practices in Tibetan Buddhist lineages.
Chöd
Cutting through attachment to self: the Tibetan practice associated with Machig Labdrön.