ABSTRACT
Buddhist thought has a complex and venerable history, beginning in northern India about 2,500 years ago with its founder, Siddhartha Gautama, and spreading throughout Asia to cultures as diverse as Tibet, Thailand, China, and Japan. A common Buddhist teaching is that things have no unchanging essence, a point that can be applied to Buddhism itself, given that it has been subject to a wide variety of socio-historical transformations. Indeed, Buddhism is so internally diverse that it is dif cult to generalize about its philosophical concerns. And there is a vast wealth of scriptural and commentarial literature, much of which has not yet been translated into western languages or subjected to academic study; thus our knowledge of Buddhism is incomplete. Furthermore, there is a challenging hermeneutical issue, since Buddhist ideas are in many cases open to a range of interpretations. Moreover, the philosophy of religion has developed principally as a Judeo-Christian inquiry and so within a monotheistic rubric that does not apply to Buddhism. The very terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘religion’ are problematic as they are of western provenance, with no precise equivalents in Asian languages. With these provisos, what follows is a discussion of a number of key themes in what might be termed the Buddhist philosophy of religion.
