Characteristics of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism

Characteristics of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism

When Buddhism spread from India into China in the second century AD, Confucianism and Taoism were the two major in religions in China. Buddhism grew from the teachings of Siddhartha Guatama, a Hindu prince who was conceived without intercourse and was a final reincarnation of great being who came back to earth to help the suffering people. He grew up in luxury and married and had a son but one day the gods showed him “four sights” which were a bent old man, a sick person, a dead person and a depressed and diseased person. Siddhartha so upset when he saw the suffering that his father kept from him and he renounced his comfortable lifestyle and left his wife and son. He shaved his head and put on a robe and left his home in northeastern India to seek solutions for liberation from suffering.

For six years Siddhartha almost starved himself with extreme self-denial techniques but found a Middle Way through meditation and he experienced an awakening that lead him to nirvana, and enlightened state. He saw all of his previous lives and how the good and bad deeds that reflected in future lives were the cause of suffering, and the only way to enlightenment was to escape suffering (craving, desire, hatred, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, fear, doubt, and delusions) and attain nirvana, a blissful state that will stop one from having to be reincarnated again. Siddhartha became a Buddha, meaning Awakened One.

Legend says that the Hindu goddess of death, Mara, tried to tempt and terrorize Siddhartha to not tell what he knew to the world but he was determined to help people understand. He spent the next forty-five years of his life teaching and he gained many followers, some of them became monks (bhikshus). Women were allowed to achieve enlightenment according to Buddha. This differed with Hinduism, which believed a woman could not become monks in society and leave their families and lives as was acceptable for a man to. It is said that Buddha was reluctant to allow women at first but when his stepmother and 500 women shaved their heads and put on yellow robes and walked to him, he allowed it with rules that deemed them subordinate to monks. The wheel of life, the cycle of reincarnation or is the same in Hinduism and Buddhism and their concepts of karma are similar and they both believe in the goal of reaching enlightenment. Hinduism and Buddhism differs in many ways though including that there is not a prophet in Hinduism and Buddhism is non-theistic and states that enlightenment can be obtained by anyone, whereas Hindus follow a caste system.

Buddha’s teachings became known as the Dharma and the core is known as the four truths: (1) There is suffering in life; (2) Suffering comes from transient things; (3) There is cessation of suffering when desires are eradicated; (4) There is path leading