Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhist philosophy is the ancient Indian philosophical system that developed within the religio-philosophical tradition of Buddhism. It comprises the philosophical investigations and systems of rational inquiry that arose among the various schools of Buddhism in ancient India after the parinirvana of Gautama Buddha, around the fifth century BCE, together with the later developments that followed the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia. Buddhism combines philosophical reasoning with the practice of meditation, and Buddhist thinkers have written on cosmology, ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of time and soteriology in analyzing the paths to liberation. This entry is the philosophical tradition, distinct from Buddhism as a religion, which has its own entity in the Divinity Atlas.