Buddhism

The Buddha (c. 5th c. BCE). Modern scholarship has unsettled the old “563–483 BCE” textbook dates; since the 1988 Göttingen symposium the consensus is a later, looser placement — birth around 500–450 BCE, death (parinirvana) roughly 420–400 BCE. The Atlas marks this as the genuinely contested point it is, not a fixed year.

• Madhyamaka — emptiness (c. 2nd c. CE). Nagarjuna (fl. c. 150–250 CE) systematized sunyata (emptiness): all phenomena are empty of inherent, independent existence because they arise dependently. This is the philosophical engine of later Mahayana.
• Yogacara — “Mind-Only” (c. 4th c. CE). The half-brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu (c. 4th–5th c. CE) founded the consciousness-centered school; Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses and Thirty Verses are its core. Dignaga (c. 480–540 CE) and Dharmakirti (6th–7th c. CE) then built the rigorous Buddhist logic-and-epistemology (pramana) that carried into Tibet.
• Chan/Zen (6th c. CE onward). Tradition credits Bodhidharma (5th–6th c. CE) with bringing meditative “Chan” to China; Huineng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch, anchored the “sudden enlightenment” Southern school. In Japan, Dogen (1200–1253) founded Soto Zen and Hakuin (1686–1769) revived Rinzai koan practice.
• Tibetan/Vajrayana (8th–11th c. CE flowering). The Indian mahasiddha lineage Tilopa (988–1069) → Naropa (c. 1016–1100) carried tantric yogas that, via Marpa, reached Milarepa (1052–1135), Tibet’s great yogi-poet. Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) was transmitted into the modern era by teachers such as Namkhai Norbu (1938–2018).

A note on the evidence (important). Two tensions must be kept honest. First: anatta vs. a “deeper Self.” Buddhism’s anatta (no-self) is in real, not cosmetic, tension with the framing of a deeper Self (All Is One / Atman). Buddhism denies a permanent, substantial self; even “Buddha-nature” (tathagatagarbha) and the “luminous mind” are read by many schools as a potential or an emptiness, not a hidden eternal soul — and whether they amount to a covert Self has been debated within Buddhism for centuries. The Atlas does not resolve this; it lets the disagreement stand. Second: “Mind-Only” is not manifestation. Yogacara’s cittamatra is one idealist school’s analysis of how experience is constructed by consciousness — it does not mean Buddhism broadly endorses personal reality-creation, wish-fulfillment, or “manifesting” outcomes. Reading Yogacara as a license for New Thought manifestation overclaims badly.

The Four Noble Truths. Suffering exists; it arises from craving; it can cease; the Eightfold Path leads to its cessation. The foundational map of the whole tradition.

• Anatta — no-self. There is no fixed, independent ego behind experience; what feels like a self is a flowing bundle of processes (the five skandhas). (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, in the dissolution of the ego it implies.)
• Dependent origination (pratityasamutpada). Nothing self-arises; everything is conditioned by everything else — the ground of both sunyata and inter-being. (→ All Is One all is one.)
• Sunyata — emptiness (Nagarjuna). Phenomena lack inherent existence; this is liberation, not nihilism, because it dissolves the grasping that causes suffering. (→ All Is One inner gnosis.)
• Yogacara “Mind-Only” (cittamatra). The experienced world is a construction of consciousness; the “storehouse consciousness” (alaya-vijnana) carries the seeds (bija) that ripen into experience. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer-adjacent, but see the note on the evidence.)
• Buddha-nature & luminous mind. The awakened nature is already present, only obscured — so practice uncovers rather than manufactures it. (→ All Is One the seeker is what they seek.)
• Prajna & the present moment. Liberating wisdom (prajna) is direct seeing, cultivated through still, present awareness (samadhi, mindfulness). (→ Everything Happens in the Now present moment, The Inner Creates the Outer stillness.)
• Tibetan visualization / deity yoga. Disciplined imagination — generating and dissolving deity-forms, working with the clear-light and dream states — as a real transformative technology. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer imagination, The Inner Creates the Outer dissolution.)
• Zen direct pointing & the “Great Death.” Sudden seeing-through of the self, often via koan; ego-dissolution as the gateway to awakened life. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer.)

Nagarjuna — founder of Madhyamaka; Mulamadhyamakakarika (the root verses on emptiness).

• Asanga — systematizer of Yogacara; the Yogacarabhumi and Maitreya treatises.
• Vasubandhu — Yogacara’s sharpest voice; Twenty Verses and Thirty Verses on Mind-Only.
• Dignaga & Dharmakirti — founders of Buddhist logic/epistemology (pramana).,
• Tilopa, Naropa, Milarepa — the Indo-Tibetan mahasiddha transmission (the Six Yogas; the yogi-poet’s songs).,
• Namkhai Norbu — modern Dzogchen master who brought “the Great Perfection” west.
• Bodhidharma, Huineng, Dogen, Hakuin — the Chan/Zen lineage (the Platform Sutra; Dogen’s Shobogenzo).,
• Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) — contemporary Zen teacher who carried “inter-being” and mindfulness to a global audience.
• Mingyur Rinpoche (b. 1975, in prose; no node yet) — contemporary Tibetan teacher with wide reach in joining meditation and neuroscience.

Buddhism states several Atlas truths with unusual rigor: All Is One liberating gnosis (the prajna/vidya that ends the ignorance, avidya, at the root of suffering), All Is One that the awakened nature is already present (the seeker is what they seek — Buddha-nature), Everything Happens in the Now the present moment as the only ground of practice, The Inner Creates the Outer stillness (samadhi) as the soil of insight, The Inner Creates the Outer the “Great Death” of the ego, and — in its Tibetan tantric form — The Inner Creates the Outer imagination as a genuine instrument of transformation.

Its sharpest distinctive contribution is the analysis of how the felt self and felt world are constructed (anatta, cittamatra) — held here in honest tension with the deeper-Self framing rather than collapsed into it.

Grew from / alongside: the broader sramana (renunciant) and Upanishadic ferment of Iron-Age India; it shares ground and rivalry with the proto-Vedanta stream, and Nagarjuna’s emptiness sits in dialogue with later Advaita. → Seeded: when Buddhism met Chinese thought, Chan emerged from the synthesis of Mahayana meditation with Daoist naturalness and wu wei — making Zen a true crossroads tradition.

Its no-self / luminous-mind teachings are central to the modern nonduality current (Thich Nhat Hanh, and the wider “direct path” scene).,