The Strongest Case for Buddhism

The Pali discourses give reasons for trust and practice, and invite people to test the teaching and judge it by its results.¹ Later Indian teachers, followed by Tibetan ones, added formal arguments.² Items 1 to 4 below draw on the Pali discourses, which Theravada Buddhism holds record the Buddha's sermons. The Pali canon is the only scripture Theravada recognizes.³ Tibetan teachers add their voices in items 1, 2, 4, and 5, and the Indian logician Dharmakirti in item 4. Theravada teachers respond in items 1 and 4, Jodo Shinshu teachers in item 1, Zen teachers speak in item 3, and an Indian Mahayana philosopher in item 5.

Each item names the branches it speaks for. For how the branches differ, see the Branches page.

Five reasons Buddhist teachers give

1. Test the teaching for yourself

The Pali discourses teach that the Buddha told one audience not to accept teachings on authority alone, but to test them by their results. In one discourse, the Kalama people of the town of Kesamutta tell him they are confused. Teacher after teacher has come through, each praising his own doctrine and attacking the others.¹

The Buddha answers that their doubt is fitting,¹ and gives them a list of things not to go by: don't go by oral transmission, don't go by lineage, don't go by testament, don't go by canonical authority (AN 3.65)¹. Nor should they rely on logic or on respect for a teacher.¹ Instead: But when you know for yourselves: 'These things are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by sensible people, and when you undertake them, they lead to harm and suffering', then you should give them up. (AN 3.65)¹

Another discourse describes the teaching itself as apparent in the present life, immediately effective, inviting inspection, relevant, so that sensible people can know it for themselves. (AN 6.10)¹

Tibetan teachers make a parallel appeal. In teachings in 2019 and 2021, the Dalai Lama, a teacher of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, cited a verse he attributes to the Buddha: As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it, so, bhikshus, should you accept my words⁴, only after testing them and not out of mere respect.⁵⁴ Since the eighth century, he says, Tibetans have followed the Middle Way philosophy through logic and reason.⁴⁶

The Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi adds a caution.⁷ The Kalama discourse does make a vigorous call for free investigation⁸, he writes, but it should not be read as dismissing all doctrine and faith. The Buddha was speaking to people not yet ready to place faith in him.⁸ Jodo Shinshu, a school devoted to Amida Buddha, puts the weight elsewhere. Yuki Sugahara, a minister of the Buddhist Churches of America, writes that what truly matters in our tradition is not our thinking, but the working of Amida Buddha to save us.⁹

2. The Four Noble Truths

Buddhists of every branch hold that the Buddha taught four truths. Life as usually lived is marked by dukkha, a word meaning suffering or unsatisfactoriness. Dukkha has a cause, craving. It can end. And the Noble Eightfold Path leads to its end.¹⁰¹ The scholar John Ross Carter writes that all strands of Buddhism recognize the four truths, though in the Mahayana they became less central while still revered.¹⁰

Theravada tradition counts this as the Buddha's first sermon.³ In the Pali discourses, he gives it to five mendicants, or wandering monks, in the deer park near Varanasi.¹ He begins by rejecting two extremes, indulgence in pleasure and harsh self-denial, and names the eightfold path as the middle way between them.¹ Then he states each truth and describes the insight it brought him: Such was the vision, knowledge, wisdom, realization, and light that arose in me regarding teachings not learned before from another. (SN 56.11)¹

Early schools read the truths as a kind of diagnosis. Carter notes that, though they differed on details, they all understood the truths through the image of healing: the illness, its cause, its removal, and the remedy.¹⁰ Tibetan teaching gives them the same foundational place. The Dalai Lama says: The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of the Buddha's teaching.⁴

Historians' views: see the Sacred Texts page.

3. Results visible in this life

The Pali discourses teach that practice bears fruit now, not only after death. In one discourse, a king asks the Buddha a practical question. Soldiers, cooks, and potters all enjoy the fruits of their work in this life; can the Buddha point out a fruit of the ascetic life that's likewise apparent in this very life? (DN 2)¹ The Buddha answers stage by stage. A monk who keeps the precepts feels a blameless happiness inside themselves. (DN 2)¹ As the mind settles, joy and calm follow, and then clear knowledge.¹

The Kalama discourse closes with four consolations that hold whether or not there is a next life. The second reads: If it turns out there is no other world, and good and bad deeds don't have a result, then in this very life I'll keep myself free of enmity and ill will, untroubled and happy. (AN 3.65)¹

Teachers of the Zen tradition also stress the present. Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 to 2022), a Zen teacher ordained in Vietnam, adapted the five precepts as the Five Mindfulness Trainings.¹¹¹² One of them, in the Plum Village community's 2022 wording, reads: I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy.¹² The Soto school follows Dogen, who taught that meditation is not a means to a later reward. The Soto scholar Kenshu Sugawara sums up his view: Practice is the immediate, original realization.¹³

4. The teacher can be checked

The Pali discourses describe a faith that rests on evidence, and they apply this even to the Buddha. In one discourse he tells his monks that a student should scrutinize the Realized One to understand whether he is a fully awakened Buddha or not. (MN 47)¹ The student is to watch what can be seen and heard of his conduct, ask him directly, and hear his teaching. Confidence comes after the student has understood some part of it firsthand.¹ Faith reached this way, the discourse says, is grounded faith that's based on evidence. (MN 47)¹

Indo-Tibetan teachers built this into formal argument. The Indian logician Dharmakirti's dates are uncertain; the scholar Erich Frauwallner proposed 600 to 660 CE, while others place him earlier.² The philosopher Tom Tillemans writes that Dharmakirti's logic was used to defend core Buddhist doctrines, including the argument that the Buddha is a reliable authority.² The Dalai Lama, teaching in 2019, explained that Dharmakirti argues by reason that the Buddha is a reliable authority.⁵

Theravada teachers describe the same movement from testing to trust. Bodhi writes that a student begins with only provisional trust and puts the teaching to a personal test. That test yields a confidence grounded in experience, which deepens faith in the Buddha as teacher.⁸

Historians' views: see the Sacred Texts page.

5. The awakening mind: from no-self to care for all

Mahayana teachers such as Shantideva argue that Buddhist insight leads to compassion. The Indian monk and philosopher Shantideva (late seventh to mid-eighth century CE) urged the awakening mind, or bodhicitta. The philosopher Charles Goodman describes it as the intention to become a Buddha, and then to remain in the cycle of rebirth to help others, until all beings are free of suffering.¹⁴ Goodman quotes Shantideva's own vow: As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world¹⁴.

Shantideva also argues from the teaching of no-self to concern for others. If there is no lasting, separate self, he asks, why guard "my" future from pain and not guard others? If I give them no protection because their suffering does not afflict me, why do I protect my body against future suffering when it does not afflict me?¹⁴

Shantideva denies that any real personal identity binds the one who acts today to the one who suffers tomorrow. Suffering, he concludes, belongs to no one, and should be prevented simply because it is suffering. Goodman calls this the Ownerless Suffering Argument, and reports that the scholar Stephen Harris reads it as a teaching device rather than Shantideva's final view.¹⁴

The awakening mind is also central to Tibetan teaching. At a 2019 teaching, the Dalai Lama led the crowd in the verse for taking refuge and generating the awakening mind.⁵ Goodman notes that Shantideva's poem, the Bodhicaryavatara, is immensely popular in Tibet, and that the Dalai Lama calls it his favorite religious work.¹⁴

The hardest objection: who is reborn if there is no self?

Buddhist teaching, from the Pali discourses through the classical Indian schools, holds that there is no lasting self. It also teaches rebirth and karma, the moral law of cause and effect. If no self passes from one life to the next, who is reborn? And why should the new being answer for the old one's deeds?¹⁵¹⁶

This page takes the question as the hardest objection because Buddhist texts pose it to themselves and give it sustained answers. The Questions of King Milinda, a dialogue between a king and the monk Nagasena, raises it twice in one chapter, and the philosopher Mark Siderits gives a full section to the reply.¹⁷¹⁶

Asked whether the one who is born is the same as the one who went before, Nagasena answers: Neither the same nor another.¹⁷ A lamp burns all night: the flame in the last watch is not the flame of the first, yet The light comes from the same lamp all the night through.¹⁷ On responsibility, he offers a mango thief who pleads that the mangoes he took were not the ones the owner planted. The king replies that the thief is still guilty, because the fruit he took grew from the planted one. So too, Nagasena says, the new being is not released from the deeds that led to it.¹⁷

Later thinkers gave fuller accounts. One school, the Vatsiputriya, proposed an inexpressible "person" that travels between lives, an idea much debated because it seemed to contradict no-self. Theravada thinkers hold that the last moment of consciousness in one life directly conditions the first moment of the next.¹⁵ The later tradition added the two truths: a person is real by convention, though not ultimately, and moral responsibility holds at that conventional level.¹⁶ Siderits, writing as a philosopher, judges that this answer is consistent: Rebirth without transmigration is logically possible.¹⁶

Tibetan teaching grounds the answer in the mind itself. The Dalai Lama argues that a stream of awareness can arise only from earlier awareness, not from matter, so nothing can eliminate the continuity of subtle clarity and awareness.¹⁸ Most Buddhist schools, he writes, hold that this mind-stream never comes to an end, though rebirth driven by karma does.¹⁸

Where to go next

The comparison page sets this case beside Christianity's own account: Christianity vs Buddhism. The book Christianity vs Buddhism: The Strongest Case for Each Path sets Buddhism's strongest ground beside its hardest objection, and lets each tradition question the other.