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Buddhism’s Most Important Teachings: The Middle Way, Four Noble Truths, and Eightfold Path

Wheel of the chariot of the sun, Konark Sun Temple, Odisha. 1250 CE.
Wheel of the chariot of the sun, Konark Sun Temple, Odisha. 1250 CE. The temple is designed as a chariot with 24 such wheels. As a symbol, the wheel of dharma features in several Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

The Buddha was struck by human suffering and spent years trying to understand its causes and the means to overcome them.

After reaching enlightenment, he delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi). He preached the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.

In these core teachings lies the essence of Buddhism: why we desire, why we suffer, and how we might free ourselves from both.

The Middle Way and Dependent Origination

Two early insights that led the Buddha to enlightenment are the Middle Way and Dependent Origination.

According to the doctrine of the Middle Way, we are more likely to achieve insight and wisdom if we avoid extremes of self-gratification and self-mortification.

The Buddha had tried both. He had lived amid princely luxury and later practised such severe asceticism that he almost starved to death. Neither extreme had brought him enlightenment.

According to the doctrine of Dependent Origination, or Interdependent Arising, life is a continuous process of change, and every instance of change has manifold causes and effects. This means that all things are conditioned by other things, so that all things are interconnected.

Much of our suffering arises from a craving for permanence; but all permanence is an illusion that, in time, can only lead to pain and disappointment.

Although nothing exists permanently, it is equally wrong to say that nothing exists at all. This, too, is a middle way.

Does the self exist? In one sense, it does; in another, it does not—which is why, when asked the question, the Buddha, as was his way, simply remained silent.

The Four Noble Truths

The good news is that, if all things are conditional and subject to change, then so too is suffering.

It is said that, upon enlightenment, the Buddha understood the Four Noble Truths—more accurately translated as the ‘four truths for the noble of spirit’:

  1. Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life.
  2. The cause of all suffering is desire.
  3. There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.
  4. The Noble Eightfold Path is that way.

The first truth, dukkha, acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of existence. The second truth, samudaya (origin), attributes a cause to this suffering. The third truth, nirodha (cessation), posits a state comparable to the Greek ataraxia (tranquillity) that is free from suffering. And the fourth truth, marga (path), points to the method for achieving that state.

Although translated as ‘suffering’, dukkha refers more broadly to the inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory nature of all things, including the pleasant ones—for it is on account of those that we suffer most.

The cessation of suffering, nirodha, culminates in nibbana (‘blown out’, ‘extinguished’, as in a candle) in Pali or nirvana in Sanskrit, indicating that, rather than a positive state, nirvana is more of a negative state of absence of desire.

Nirvana is the state of wishing for nothing, not even Nirvana.

If the cause of dukkha is desire, the cause of desire is ignorance, pointing to knowledge or wisdom as the way forward. With proper perspective, there would be no desire, and so no suffering—and no (re)birth, which is the fruit of desire, and the source of all suffering.

Does this mean that people should not have children? No, insofar as being born is an opportunity to escape being born. The purpose of life is to provide us with an opportunity to escape it, by achieving wisdom. Otherwise, ‘we’ shall have to try again.

The Eightfold Path

Unfortunately, wisdom is hard to attain because it runs counter to everything we have learnt and everything we love, including the thing we love most: ourselves. On top of that, it confronts us with everything we fear, not least death and impermanence.

For these reasons and more, it takes long practice and training to attain wisdom, and even longer practice and training to hold on to it in the face of temptation, fragility, and adversity.

But even if we are unable or unwilling to commit to becoming a monk or nun, we can still embark on the Noble Eightfold Path:

  1. Right view (maintaining perspective on reality)
  2. Right intention or resolve (renouncing the worldly life for the life of wisdom)
  3. Right speech (e.g. no lies, slanders, or idle talk)
  4. Right action or conduct (e.g. no killing, stealing, or sexual misconduct)
  5. Right livelihood (earning a living through a profession that does not visit harm to others)
  6. Right effort (preventing unwholesome mental states, and encouraging wholesome, productive ones)
  7. Right mindfulness (paying due attention to thoughts, feelings, sensations, and external phenomena)
  8. Right concentration or meditation (cultivating the highest states of mind)

The eight categories are overlapping and mutually reinforcing, and to be worked on simultaneously rather than successively. Indeed, the Noble Eightfold Path is often represented by a dharma wheel, or dharmachakra, with eight spokes, none of which is either first or last.

The dharmachakra can also stand for dependent origination, change, and the cycle of rebirth (samsara), all in one. It is said that, with his first sermon, the Buddha set the wheel of dharma (‘law’, ‘rightfulness’) into motion.

With desire under control, everything becomes a lot better, and a lot easier. In an absence of desire, why lie or steal, or be envious or greedy? Or why be anxious, or angry, or depressed? The opposite of envy is not merely an absence of envy but shared joy and admiration. The opposite of greed is not merely an absence of greed, but decency and generosity. The opposite of anger is not merely an absence of anger but compassion. The opposite of anxiety is not merely an absence of anxiety but tranquillity. The opposite of depression is not merely an absence of depression, but wisdom.

First and foremost, the Buddha’s solution to suffering was not to change the world so it could satisfy our desires. It was to change ourselves so that we might cease to be ruled by them. Some centuries later, the Stoics would arrive at the same fundamental insight.

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The Extraordinary Life of the Buddha

Prince Siddhartha (the Buddha) escapes his palace on horseback
The Buddha’s life has the structure of a mythical hero’s journey.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

The Buddha began as a prince whose father tried to protect him from every human suffering. For almost thirty years, his father succeeded. But one night, after sighting an old man, a sick man, and a corpse, the prince made his escape.

The Buddha’s dates are uncertain and range from 624 BCE (earliest birth) to 368 BCE (latest death). Whatever his dates, he is said to have lived for some eighty years. Buddhism emerged amid a broader culture of renunciation and philosophical experimentation that challenged aspects of the established religion, Vedic Brahmanism.

His followers came to revere him as more than an ordinary man and, accordingly, mythologised his life. It would be profitless to try, if that were possible, to separate the mythology from the reality. In any case, the mythology is as invaluable as the history, revealing how the Buddha came to be seen and interpreted.

Exceptional Birth

According to tradition, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, to King Shuddhodana of the Shakya clan. His mother, Mahamaya, dreamt of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side. Ten lunar months later, while strolling in a garden in Lumbini, she grabbed onto the drooping branch of a sal tree, and Siddhartha (‘He who has achieved his goal’) emerged fully formed from under her right arm. Siddhartha proceeded to take seven steps before announcing that this would be his last life.

Two Destinies

Seven days later, Mahamaya died. The court astrologers predicted that Siddhartha would become either a chakravartin(universal monarch) or a buddha (enlightened one). Not wishing to lose his son and heir—and, at that, a future chakravartin—to a life of renunciation, Shuddhodana confined him to a life of luxury within the precincts of the palace, where he would not be exposed to religious teaching or human suffering. At the age of sixteen, Siddhartha married the beautiful princess Yashodhara, and everything seemed on track for a life as a chakravartin.

But Shuddhodana’s attempts to shelter Siddhartha spectacularly backfired. For when the prince did finally encounter human suffering, it came to him as a revelation.

Four Sights

At the age of 29, having tired of the delights of the royal kitchen and harem, Siddhartha asked to make a chariot ride through the city. The king consented but had all the old, infirm, and otherwise poor cleared from the route. Even so, Siddhartha did, for the very first time, catch a glimpse of an old man. He asked Channa, his charioteer: ‘Am I also subject to this?’

With his curiosity piqued, Siddhartha made three more outings, seeing, in turn, a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and, finally, a meditating mendicant, whose serene smile inspired him to join the path in search of freedom from suffering.

The four encounters, known as the Four Sights, shattered Siddhartha’s illusions. The old man, the sick man, and the corpse were images of his own future—and of the future of everyone he loved. But although one could not prevent ageing, sickness, and death, perhaps one could prevent the suffering that comes with them. 

The Great Departure

Siddhartha renounced his position, wealth, and family to take up the life of a wandering ascetic. As night fell and he prepared to make his escape, he was told that a son had been born to him. He went into Yashodhara’s chamber to look upon his sleeping wife and son and named the boy Rahula (‘Fetter’).

That night, in what has come to be called the Great Departure, Siddhartha escaped from the palace on his beloved horse, Kanthaka, accompanied by his faithful servant, Channa.

Having crossed the Anoma River into the forest, he sent the reluctant Channa back along with his weapons and jewels, and even his hair. He sent back Kanthaka too, who died from a broken heart.

A Beggar in the Forest

In the forest, Siddhartha adopted the life of a mendicant, or beggar. He practised successively under two meditation teachers before, with five friends, subjecting himself to extreme forms of self-mortification, progressively reducing his daily meal to a single grain of rice.

One day, he accepted a bowl of milk-rice from a woman called Sujata, who had mistaken the skeletal ascetic for a wish-granting tree spirit. With some food in the belly, he concluded that extreme asceticism would not advance him along the path to freedom from suffering, but serve only to cloud his mind.

The prince who had rejected luxury now rejected its opposite. Neither indulgence nor self-mortification offered the answer. Between the two lay what he would call the Middle Way.

Sandstone head of the fasting Buddha, whom Sujata mistook for a wish-granting tree spirit. Gandhara, second or third century CE. British Museum, London. The Greco-Buddhist Gandhara school produced the first representations of the Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

Enlightenment

On the full moon of May, six years after having left the palace, the 35-year-old Siddhartha sat in meditation under a peepul tree. The demon Mara tried to disrupt him, including by sending his daughters to seduce him.

When Mara challenged his right to occupy the ground on which he sat, Siddhartha touched the earth with his right hand, and the goddess of the earth confirmed with a tremor that he had earned this right—on account of a great gift that he had made in his previous life as Prince Vessantara.

Through the night, Siddhartha had visions of his many, innumerable past lives. At dawn, he attained enlightenment. The prince who had escaped the palace had become the Buddha, ‘the Awakened One’.

The peepul tree, Ficus religiosa, is now better known as the Bodhi tree, and the place where the Buddha sat in meditation as Bodh Gaya (‘Place of Enlightenment’). Representations of the Buddha often include his earth-touching gesture, known as the bhumisparsha mudra.

First Sermons

The Buddha remained in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree to savour his enlightenment. When a seven-day storm blew up, the serpent king Mucalinda encircled him seven times with his coils and sheltered him with his seven-headed hood.

At first, he hesitated to teach. What he had discovered seemed too subtle to communicate to people lost in desire and attachment. But the god Brahma Sahampati implored him to share his secrets. 

After seven weeks by the Bodhi tree (note the preponderance of the number seven), the Buddha got up to teach. He delivered his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, on the outskirts of Kashi (modern-day Varanasi), preaching the Middle Way between luxury and austerity, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path.

In his second sermon, he presented his doctrine of anatman (no-self). So eloquently did he speak that, upon hearing him, his five ascetic friends rose up into arhats (those who have gained such insight as to escape the cycle of rebirth). They became the first members of the Buddhist monastic order known as the sangha.

Naga-enthroned Buddha, Angkor, twelfth century CE.

Life on the Road

For the next 45 years, the Buddha spread his teachings across northeast India, followed by wandering ascetics and laypersons who supported the ascetics. Although many of his followers imitated him in renouncing the life of the householder, most were not so ambitious.

Over the years, many of the renouncers settled into monasteries funded by prominent members of the laity. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, the capital of Kosala, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada.

When Mahamaya’s sister Mahapajapati, who had raised Siddhartha after his mother’s death and became his stepmother, asked to be ordained, the Buddha refused her, perhaps owing to fears about the safety of nuns. But when pressed, he relented, and Mahapajapati became the first bhikkhuni (Buddhist nun). In time, Yashodhara, too, became a bhikkhuni. When Rahula asked for his patrimony, his father ordained him a monk.

However, the Buddha refused to appoint his radically austere cousin Devadatta as his successor. Bitterly aggrieved, Devadatta tried three times to kill him by means of assassins, a boulder, and an elephant, which arrested its charge to bow at his feet. The schism was repaired when the earth sucked Devadatta down into Naraka, or Hell.

Death

In Kushinagara, the Buddha, now around 80 years old, ate a meal containing sukara-maddava, an obscure term that has variously been interpreted as pork, mushrooms, or some other delicacy. He became gravely ill and prepared for death.

His chief disciple, Mahakashyapa, ignited the funeral pyre, after which his relics were distributed and enshrined in large mound-like structures called stupas.

According to Buddhist tradition, in the third century BCE, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka gathered the relics from seven of the eight stupas and erected 84,000 stupas to distribute them across India. Some of Ashoka’s stupas, such as the Great Stupa at Sanchi and the Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, remain important pilgrimage sites.

Enlightenment had not exempted the Buddha from growing old, falling ill, and dying. What had changed was his relationship to those things. You can read about his most important teachings—the Middle Way, Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path—in my article, The Buddha’s Solution to Desire and Suffering.

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Why the Ancient Indian Doctrine Is Far More Profound Than ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’

Konark Sun Temple wheel of dharma (karma)

The stone wheel of the Konark Sun Temple, Odisha, India.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.

Why do good people suffer while bad people prosper?

It is one of the oldest problems in philosophy and religion. Every civilisation has wrestled with it. If the universe is just, why do the virtuous endure hardship, while the vicious flourish? Why are some people born into privilege while others are burdened from the very beginning?

The Indian traditions developed one of history’s most striking answers: karma.

Today, karma is widely misunderstood, even by Indians themselves. It is often confused with fate or destiny, or reduced to the cliché that ‘what goes around comes around’. Both are misconceptions. Properly understood, karma is a law of moral causation by which our modes of engagement come to determine our station and situation.

According to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and several other Indian religions, every instance of thought, speech, and action is a cause, and every experience an effect. Reward and punishment are not arbitrary. Instead, the universe is governed by an intricate web of causes and consequences extending beyond a single lifetime.

Good karma is often referred to as punya (‘merit’), and bad karma as paap (‘demerit’). Even if punya does not immediately seem to pay off, it does in the longer term. This is why karma is closely tied to samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—with future births conditioned by the accumulated balance of punya and paap.

Although karma is fundamentally individual, it can also, in certain circumstances, be transferred. The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes a rite in which a dying father passes his karma to his son, declaring, ‘Let me place my speech in thee… Let me place my breath in thee…’, with the son replying, ‘I take thy speech in me… I take thy breath in me…’

More ordinarily, the paap of a living or deceased person may be mitigated by the prayers, rituals, or pilgrimages of others.

Justice Beyond This Life

Why should justice extend beyond a single lifetime? Because a lifetime is simply too short. Vice and virtue do not always seem to receive their due. But over many lives, the moral balance can finally be restored.

Some ancient Greeks arrived at a strikingly similar solution. At the outset of Plato’s Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that it is not the just but the unjust who flourish, and that the tyrant, being the most wicked of people, is also the happiest. At the end of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Plato turns to reincarnation to guarantee that the genuinely just always come out on top, with each soul choosing its next life according to its accumulated store of wisdom. In this, as in much else, Plato was influenced by Pythagoras (d. 495 BCE), who, like the Indians, believed in the transmigration of the soul.

In the Catholic tradition, heaven serves much the same moral purpose as karma. The soul of the newly deceased is judged and sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then, there is also a Last Judgement that takes place after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

In the Letter to the Galatians, St Paul warns: ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’

According to the Old Testament, punishment might even be extended to subsequent generations, that is, to future selves: ‘The Lord is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’ (Numbers 14:18, and repeated almost verbatim in Exodus 34:7).

Whether through repeated rebirths or a final judgement, all these traditions share a common conviction: justice must ultimately prevail.

The Philosophy of Karma

Karma serves the same purpose as Eden in providing the major motivation to live a moral life. But it serves other purposes too, such as accounting for the existence of evil, rationalising rebirth (which could also operate independently of karma), and providing a soteriological goal of final liberation.

In determining our circumstances and even our temperament, karma may constrict our options, but it does not deprive us of choice and deliberation, enabling it to condone social inequities and the caste system while at the same time affirming human freedom.

The importance of karma, and the degree of freedom and determination within it, have long been debated in and between the Hindu schools.

But even if karma theory is not literally true, it is at least metaphorically true. Being good does pay off, if only in peace of mind and mental health.

In which case, is karma theory a firm basis for morality, or an appeal to naked self-interest?

One way around this problem, which has been taken, is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions, so that the system becomes impossible to game.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. More than two millennia later, Immanuel Kant would arrive at a remarkably similar conclusion with his Categorical Imperative. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome. For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddhist Solution

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.

Aristotle makes a similar if more circumscribed move in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says that there is no conflict between helping a friend and helping oneself insofar as a perfect friend is like another self.

When we are good to another, we are good to all, including ourself, because the distinction is an illusion, and karma travels.

If we have no self, why did the Buddhists not altogether give up on karma and samsara?

In part, because karma can still operate in the absence of a Self, or Atman, with future incarnations being conditioned by the sum of all the karmic actions that have been put into the world.

The Deeper Insight

Whether or not one believes in reincarnation, the deeper insight of karma remains compelling.

Every person—their parents, their teachers, and their parents and teachers—is the embodiment of every karmic action that has ever gone before. Our every action reverberates to the end of time. 

Our every kindness changes the person who receives it, and our every cruelty does the same. Those people, in turn, shape others.

We inherit the moral world created by all those who came before us, and leave behind the moral world that our successors will inherit.

Thus, karma is not merely a mystical doctrine, but a profound truth about what it means to be human.

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The Bronze Age Harappans had nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.

India’s first civilization was remarkably advanced. But even more astonishing is what they did not have: no king, standing army, or organised religion.

In the mid-1850s, a few years after the British annexation of the Punjab, some railway builders stumbled upon an ancient mound of terracotta bricks at Harappa in the valley of the Ravi. Despite reports of their antiquity, they carted off the bricks for track ballast to support nearly 100 miles of railway between Multan and Lahore.

In 1920, John Marshall, the director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), ordered a full excavation of the site. Around that time, he heard of another site some 400 miles to the south, which locals called Mohenjo-daro (‘The Mound of the Dead’) after the human and animal bones that lay strewn among the artifacts. Initial digs at Mohenjo-daro uncovered striking similarities between the two sites, and it became apparent that they belonged to an ancient civilization that pushed back the history of India by several thousand years.

In an article for the 24 September 1924 issue of the Illustrated London News, Marshall wrote:

Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenæ, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilisation. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.

Around 1,000 sites have since been reported, including five major urban centres (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and three more). The territory, which straddled the modern India-Pakistan border, stretched some 900 miles along the banks of the Indus and its tributaries, covering an area larger than that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), or Harappan Civilization, as it came to be called, also had extensive terrestrial and maritime trade connections with, among others, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula.

An advanced early civilization

Indus Valley Civilization, major sites

Early centers were populated from Neolithic settlements such as Mehrgahr in Balochistan. Like the valley of the Nile and the basin of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus Valley is a semi-arid floodplain with fertile, irrigated land that did not need much clearing. The advent of settled agriculture in such a place led to a food surplus that supported population growth and urban development.

At their height, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro may each have had 30,000 to 60,000 inhabitants. Although these cities are some 400 miles apart, their construction is remarkably uniform and stable, changing little over the course of a thousand years. The IVC peaked from around 2700 BCE to 1700 BCE and represents the flowering of the Indian Bronze Age.

For context: in Egypt, the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Djoser in the Saqqara necropolis, dates from c. 2650 BCE; in Europe, the first Cretan palaces, at Knossos, Mallia, and Phaestos, date from a little after c. 2000 BCE.

Rather than growing organically, Harappan settlements were laid on a similar grid pattern, with large communal buildings and the world’s earliest sanitation system—a degree of urban planning not to be seen again in the subcontinent until the 18th century, when Sawai Raja Jai Singh laid out plans for the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. Brick houses, some multi-storey, opened only to inner courtyards and smaller lanes. Each house had access to covered drains along the main roads, suggesting a fairly egalitarian society. The Harappans also had granaries, dockyards, reservoirs, irrigation canals, and public baths.

With a few things missing

The Dancing Girl, Mohenjo-daro, c. 2000 BCE.

But what is more interesting is what they did not have.

First, they did not have palaces or monuments to monarchs. Indeed, this is one reason we know relatively little about the IVC: unlike in Egypt, there are no rich burials like Tutankhamun. The other reason is that the Indus script, like Minoan Linear A, remains undeciphered. After the demise of the IVC, writing would not reappear on the Indian subcontinent for another thousand years.

The Harappans did have citadels but no standing army. The primary purpose of the citadels was to divert or withstand flood waters. Although the standardization of bricks, road widths, and weights and measures over such an extensive area speaks of a strong central government and efficient bureaucracy, the lack of a monarch and standing army argues against the idea of a conquering empire.

Finally, they did not have temples, and so, it is inferred, no organized religion.

Could this utopia have been the first secular, egalitarian state or confederation?

Perhaps the most iconic Harappan artifact is a four-inch bronze statuette, Dancing Girl, depicting a confident teenager caught in a moment with her right hand on her hip and her left hand on the knee. With her chin raised and wearing nothing but bangles and a necklace, she looks much more like a Henri Matisse than anything prehistoric—if only better.

Neel Burton is author of Indian Mythology and Philosophy.​

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The Uncanny Parallels Between Plato and the Upanishads

Le Char d'Apollon, by Odilon Redon
Know the Self as the rider in the chariot, the body as the chariot itself; know the intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. —Katha Upanishad

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels. And I have been asking myself: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar (Sanskrit being closely related to Greek)? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?

The possibility of contact cannot be dismissed. By Plato’s lifetime, the Persian Empire had brought the Greeks and Indians within the same vast political and commercial sphere. Ideas, like goods and people, could travel great distances. But possibility is not proof, and there is no evidence that Plato himself encountered the Upanishads.

Introduction to the Upanishads

‘Upanishad’ means something like ‘hidden connections’, ‘secret teaching’, or ‘esoteric doctrine’, literally, ‘a sitting at (the feet of the teacher)’. Although part of the Vedas, the Upanishads tend to take a dim, if diplomatic, view of what went before. ‘Of what use,’ asks the Svetashvatara Upanishad, ‘is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?’ By a strict definition, there are around 108 Upanishads, but the first dozen are the most important.

Like the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of these mukhya (major) Upanishads are in prose, others are in verse.

Although it is the philosophy and poetry that are retained, the content of the Upanishads is very diverse. The Upanishads fit into the Vedic tradition, and, like older layers of the Vedas, may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. At their best and most original, they take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.

For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad (which is the oldest Upanishad, dating from around or before the sixth century BCE), the sage Yajnavalya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalya with ‘namaste’. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru (teacher) of Yajnavalya—engages in debate with his son, Svetaketu.

Yajnavalya, Uddalaka, and Svetaketu are among the first philosophers in recorded history.

Brahman and Atman

This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to reach ‘at the truth behind the truth’ (satyasya satyam).

The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman.

The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha).

These ideas are neatly encapsulated in this passage from the Mundaka Upanishad:

As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace and their name and form disappear, even so the wise become free from name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness. In truth who knows God becomes God.

Parallels With Parmenides and Greek Philosophy

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of the pre-Socratic Parmenides (d. c. 400 BCE), who, in his poem, On Nature, contrasted the way of truth to the way of opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’.

These verses from the Katha Upanishad could credibly have been penned by Parmenides:

Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but one. Who sees variety and not unity wanders on from death to death.

To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his student and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments, including the famous Achilles and the Tortoise, designed to undermine ordinary assumptions about motion, space, time, and plurality.

Just as Plato (d. 348 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the Forms.

Already, Greek and Indian thought appear to be circling around the same fundamental problem: are the change and multiplicity presented to our senses real, or are they merely manifestations of something single, eternal, and unchanging?

Parallels With Plato

Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. The philosopher, says Socrates, who is soon to drink of the hemlock, aims at truth, but his body is constantly deceiving and distracting him:

The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with needs, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense…

Absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate the soul from the body. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death and can be said to be almost dead.

This idea of the soul being waylaid by the body is also found in the Maitri Upanishad, which was written at around the same time as the Phaedo:

The human soul rules the body; but the immortal spiritual soul is pure like a drop of water on a lotus leaf. The soul is under the power of the three constituents and conditions of nature and thus it falls into confusion. Because of this confusion the soul cannot become conscious of the God who dwells within and whose power gives us power to work.

In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates, having established its immortality, compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. Whereas the chariot of a god has two tame horses, that of a mortal has one tame horse and one unruly one, which is the cause of much hardship for the charioteer.

This passage from the Katha Upanishad appears almost to be elucidating Plato’s chariot allegory:

Know the Atman as the Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins. The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense. He who has not right understanding, and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.

The two allegories are not identical. Plato divides the soul between charioteer and horses, whereas the Katha splits differently. Yet both arrive at the same extraordinary image: human life as an exercise in charioteering, in which the mind must somehow govern forces that threaten to derail us.

The Form of the Good

For more than two millennia, Western philosophers have been poring over Plato’s elusive Form of the Good. Plato himself devised three interconnected allegories (the sun, line, and cave) merely to point at it. But I can tell you what it is in just one word: Brahman.

Both Brahman and the Form of the Good point beyond the changing world of appearances towards an ultimate principle upon which truth and reality depend. Just as Brahman stands behind the multiplicity of the world as its ultimate ground, so the Form of the Good stands beyond the other Forms as the source of their intelligibility.

Plato even has a theory of reincarnation, leading us to suppose that he must, in a previous life, have been a Brahmin.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Indian Mythology and Philosophy and The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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