Quick Answer
The short book that universities and meditation centres have handed to beginners for sixty years, and still the clearest account in English of what the earliest Buddhist texts actually say. A Sri Lankan monk with a Sorbonne training lays out the four truths, the doctrine of no-self and the practice of mindfulness in a hundred and fifty pages, quoting the Buddha at every step. It is Theravada presented as Buddhism, and it is confident about Buddhism as rational and empirical in a way that belongs to 1959. Neither fact stops it being the right first book.
Key Takeaways
- The four truths, one per chapter, from the Pali sources, with the texts attached.
- No-self is the centre, and Rahula will not soften it.
- Free inquiry, no blind faith: the first chapter's claim and the book's most quoted.
- Theravada as Buddhism, without much saying so.
- Read it before the Mahayana, so you know what the later schools were arguing with.
16 min read
What This Book Is
What the Buddha Taught was published by Gordon Fraser in 1959, revised and expanded in 1967 with additional texts, and reissued by Grove Press in America and Oneworld in Britain. It has never been out of print.
It has eight chapters. The first sets out the attitude of mind the Buddha asked for. The next four treat the four noble truths, one each. The sixth treats the doctrine of anatta, no-self. The seventh treats meditation. The eighth applies the teaching to the life of a layperson in the modern world. A second part gives a selection of texts from the Pali canon in Rahula's translation, and a short glossary and bibliography close the book.
The whole is around a hundred and fifty pages of exposition and fifty of texts. It was written, the preface says, for the educated and intelligent general reader who wants to know what the Buddha taught, and that is exactly the reader it has served.
What it assumes. Rahula draws on the Pali canon, the scriptures of the Theravada tradition, and treats them as the earliest and most reliable record of the Buddha's teaching. He acknowledges the Mahayana in a few sentences and does not draw on its texts. A reader should know that the book is the Theravada account presented as the Buddha's own, and that the Mahayana schools would tell parts of the story differently.
Who Walpola Rahula Was
Rahula was born in 1907 in a village in southern Ceylon, ordained as a novice at thirteen, and educated in the monastic colleges before taking a degree and then a doctorate at the University of Ceylon, the first monk to do so. His thesis became History of Buddhism in Ceylon, still a standard work.
In 1950 he went to Paris to work with the Belgian Buddhologist Paul Demiéville at the Sorbonne, and it was there that he wrote this book, in French first and then in English, with a foreword by Demiéville. He later taught at Northwestern University in Chicago, the first Buddhist monk to hold a chair in a Western university, and served as vice-chancellor of a university in Sri Lanka.
He was also a public figure at home, a nationalist, and the author of a book arguing that monks had a duty to engage in politics. He died in 1997. The two sides of the man, the serene expositor and the political monk, are discussed below.
The Buddhist Attitude of Mind
The first chapter, and the one that made the book's reputation.
Rahula opens with the claim that Buddhism, alone among the world's religions, asks for no faith in the sense of belief without evidence. He quotes the Kalama Sutta, in which the Buddha tells a group of villagers not to accept anything on the authority of scripture, tradition, teachers or reasoning alone, but to test it in their own experience and keep what leads to welfare. He quotes the parable of the raft, in which the teaching is a raft to cross a river and not a burden to carry afterward. He quotes the Buddha's refusal to answer speculative questions, and the parable of the man shot with an arrow who refuses treatment until he knows who shot it.
The chapter presents Buddhism as tolerant, empirical, undogmatic and free of blind belief, and it has been quoted in a thousand introductions since. It is also the chapter where the book's period shows most, and the section on the modernist frame below returns to it.
The First Truth: Dukkha
The second chapter, and the one that corrects the most common misreading.
Dukkha is usually translated suffering, and Rahula spends the chapter showing why that is inadequate. The word covers ordinary pain, the suffering of change, in which pleasant things end, and the suffering inherent in conditioned existence as such, in which nothing that arises is stable. He insists that the first truth is not pessimism: the Buddha also taught the reality of happiness, and the point is a diagnosis rather than a mood.
The chapter introduces the five aggregates as the analysis of what a being is, and prepares the ground for the doctrine of no-self, since the third kind of dukkha is the instability of anything one might take to be oneself.
The Second Truth: Arising
The origin of dukkha, treated with care.
The cause is thirst, tanha, craving: for sense pleasure, for existence and becoming, for non-existence. Rahula is careful to say that this is not the first cause, since Buddhism has no first cause, but the most immediately identifiable link in a chain of conditions. He introduces conditioned genesis, the twelve-link chain from ignorance to ageing and death, as the full account, and explains karma and rebirth within it.
The section on rebirth is where a modern reader may resist most, and Rahula presents it as the teaching, without apology and without much argument, as a monk of his tradition would. He is clear that there is no soul that transmigrates, and that what continues is a process, which follows from the no-self chapter and does not remove the difficulty.
The Third Truth: Cessation
Nirvana, and the chapter Rahula found hardest to write.
He begins by saying that nirvana cannot be defined in positive terms and that every attempt to do so falsifies it. He then gives the negative descriptions the canon offers, the extinction of thirst, the unconditioned, the cessation of the aggregates, and the few positive ones, the highest happiness, the deathless, and warns against reading either as annihilation or as eternal existence. Nirvana is the end of the illusion of self, and the question of what happens to the self afterward is a question about something that never existed.
The chapter is short and honest about its limits, and it is where the book's refusal to speculate is most valuable.
The Fourth Truth: The Path
The eightfold path, arranged as the tradition arranges it.
Rahula groups the eight factors under the three trainings: ethical conduct, comprising right speech, right action and right livelihood; mental discipline, comprising right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration; and wisdom, comprising right thought and right understanding. He treats each briefly and insists that they are practised together rather than in sequence, and that the path is a way of life rather than a doctrine.
The chapter is compact and practical and makes clear that the teaching is something done. It is also where the book's treatment of ethics is concentrated, and it is plain and undramatic in a way later Western presentations often are not.
The Doctrine of No-Self
The sixth chapter, and the heart of the book.
Rahula holds that anatta, the denial of any permanent self, soul or ego, is the teaching that distinguishes Buddhism from every other religion and philosophy, and that it is the natural consequence of the analysis of the aggregates and of conditioned genesis. What we call a self is a process of changing physical and mental events with no owner. The belief in an owner is the deepest form of ignorance and the root of craving, since a self must be protected and satisfied.
He deals directly with the attempts, ancient and modern, to find a hidden self in the Buddha's teaching, in the concept of the unconditioned, in the famous injunction to be a lamp unto oneself, in the silence before the wanderer Vacchagotta, and rejects them all. The Buddha, he argues, was silent before Vacchagotta because the questioner was not ready for the answer, and the silence hides no self that he declined to name.
The chapter is where Rahula is most a monk and least a diplomat. He could have softened the doctrine for a Western readership raised on souls and selves, and many later writers have. He does not. He states that there is no self, that this is what the Buddha taught, that the teaching is difficult precisely because it is true, and that a reader who finds it frightening has understood it. The refusal to comfort is the book's integrity, and it is why practitioners still recommend it over gentler introductions.
The Five Aggregates
The analysis that runs under the whole book, given in the first-truth chapter and used throughout.
A being is five aggregates: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Each arises and passes; none is a self; together they give the illusion of one. Rahula explains each with the canonical definitions, and pays particular attention to consciousness, which Western readers tend to take for the self, and which the Buddha explicitly denied is anything more than a conditioned event arising with its object.
The section is technical and clear, and it is the equipment a reader needs for the no-self chapter. Readers of the later Abhidharma, or of the Mahayana analysis of mind, will find here the foundation those systems built on.
Meditation and Mental Culture
The seventh chapter, and the one that shaped Western mindfulness.
Rahula begins by attacking the idea that meditation is an escape from life, a withdrawal into trance, or a technique for peace of mind. He distinguishes the development of concentration, which the Buddha found among his teachers and judged insufficient, from the development of insight, which is his own contribution. He then explains mindfulness of breathing and the four foundations of mindfulness from the Satipatthana Sutta: body, feelings, mind and mental objects, attended to as they are, in every activity.
The chapter's insistence that mindfulness is to be practised in daily life, at work and in conversation and not only on a cushion, was among the sources of the mindfulness movement that followed decades later, and the sutta itself is included in the texts section. It is an explanation and not a course; readers wanting instruction should go to Gunaratana or Nyanaponika.
The Teaching and the World Today
The eighth chapter, on lay life.
Rahula argues against the idea that Buddhism is for monks only, quotes the Buddha's teachings to householders, and draws on the Sigalovada Sutta, the discourse on the duties of family and social life, to show that the tradition has an ethic for the world. He discusses wealth, work, politics, war and the Buddhist ideal of a ruler, and closes with the claim that a society ordered on the teaching would be free of the sufferings that ideology and greed produce.
The chapter reflects Rahula's own engagement with Sri Lankan public life and is the place where the book's social optimism, characteristic of its moment, is most visible.
The Selected Texts
The second part, and a reason to own the book even after the exposition has been absorbed.
Rahula gives, in his own translations from the Pali, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Buddha's first sermon setting in motion the wheel of the teaching; the Fire Sermon; the Metta Sutta on loving-kindness; the Mangala Sutta on blessings; the Satipatthana Sutta on mindfulness; the Sigalovada Sutta on lay conduct; the Buddha's last words; and selected verses from the Dhammapada. The translations are plain and reliable, and they let the reader check the exposition against the sources.
The pairing of explanation with text is the book's method and its lasting value: a reader finishes it having read the Buddha and not only read about him.
The Modernist Frame
The period the book belongs to, and what has changed since.
What the Buddha Taught is a document of what scholars now call Buddhist modernism: the presentation of Buddhism, from the late nineteenth century onward, as rational, empirical, scientific, tolerant, free of ritual and superstition, and closer to philosophy or psychology than to religion. The first chapter is a classic statement of that position, and it was shaped by a century of Sri Lankan Buddhists answering Christian missionaries and Western scholars on their own terms.
The position is not false. The Kalama Sutta and the raft parable are in the canon and mean what Rahula says. But the canon also contains devotion, cosmology, miracles, merit-making and a monastic culture of ritual, and the book passes over all of it. Later scholarship, and later Western practitioners who went to Asia and found a religion rather than a philosophy, have recovered what the modernist frame left out. A reader should take Rahula's first chapter as one true account of the teaching and not as the whole of the tradition.
Theravada as Buddhism
The other frame, which the book barely names.
Rahula writes from the Pali canon and the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka, and he presents what he finds there as the Buddha's teaching without qualification. The Mahayana, the tradition of Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, receives a few sentences of acknowledgement and no texts. The Lotus Sutra, Nagarjuna, Zen and Pure Land do not appear.
Within the Theravada, this book is orthodox and reliable. As an account of Buddhism as a whole, it is one tradition's view. Readers who go on to the Mahayana will find that the doctrines Rahula presents as settled, particularly on the nature of the Buddha and the scope of the path, were exactly what the later schools reopened. That is a reason to read him first, since one cannot follow the argument without knowing what it began from.
The Monk in Politics
A matter readers of this serene book are often surprised by.
In 1946 Rahula published The Heritage of the Bhikkhu, arguing that Sri Lankan monks had always been engaged in the life of the nation and should be again, and he became a prominent voice in the Buddhist nationalist movement that shaped the island's politics for decades, with consequences for its Tamil minority that remain painful. He was, at the same time, the author of the book reviewed here.
The two are not contradictory in his own understanding, since the eighth chapter argues for a Buddhist social order. Readers who find the combination troubling are not wrong to. It is a reminder that the serenity of the exposition is not a guarantee about the expositor, and that the tradition's teaching on no-self has coexisted with strong attachments to nation and community in the very people who taught it.
Beside the Dhammapada
The natural pairing.
The Dhammapada is the canon's collection of verses, memorable and unexplained. Rahula's book is the explanation, drawing on the same canon and quoting the verses in support. A reader who takes both has the teaching in its two classical forms, aphorism and exposition, and each makes the other clearer.
Read Rahula first if you want to know what the verses assume; read the Dhammapada first if you want to feel the teaching before analysing it. Either order works and the two books have shared a shelf for sixty years.
The Objections
Three, and they are the standard ones.
Modernism. The book presents a rational, undogmatic Buddhism that is one reading of the sources and leaves out what did not fit the reading.
Theravada as the whole. Half the Buddhist world is treated in a paragraph.
The author. The political monk and the serene expositor are the same man, and the book does not help a reader hold both.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know what the earliest Buddhist texts say, from someone who read them in Pali and practised what they teach.
Read it before the Mahayana, Zen and Tibetan books, so that the later traditions arrive as developments of something rather than as the thing itself.
Read it if you practise vipassana or mindfulness and want the doctrine your practice comes from.
Read the texts in the second part even if you skip the exposition. They are the Buddha, and they are short.
The book's most demanding claim is the one it will not soften: that there is no one home. The aggregates arise and pass, the process continues, and the sense of an owner watching it is the illusion that everything else rests on. Rahula presents this as the Buddha's central discovery and refuses to make it comfortable. What he offers instead is the observation that the doctrine, frightening as it sounds, is the end of the one fear that all the others depend on. If there is no self to protect, the protecting can stop. That is the book's whole promise, and it took a monk who would not compromise to state it plainly.
The four truths, no-self and the Buddha's own words, in the introduction that has served for sixty years.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the book's modernist frame and on the author's politics are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is What the Buddha Taught about?
The core teaching of the Buddha as preserved in the Pali canon: the four noble truths, the doctrine of no-self, meditation, and the application of the teaching to ordinary life, presented in eight chapters with a selection of translated texts.
Who was Walpola Rahula?
A Sri Lankan Theravada monk, 1907 to 1997, who took a doctorate at the University of Ceylon, studied at the Sorbonne, became the first monk to hold a professorship in the West at Northwestern University, and was a public figure in Sri Lankan politics and religion.
Why is it so widely used?
It is short, clear, written by a scholar who was also a monk, quotes the Buddha's own words throughout, and takes no sectarian position beyond a Theravada frame. Universities and Buddhist centres have assigned it since 1959.
What does it say about no-self?
That the Buddha denied any permanent self or soul, that the five aggregates are all there is, and that the belief in a self is the root of suffering. Rahula treats this as the teaching's most important and most distinctive doctrine.
Is it Theravada or general?
Theravada in its sources and its assumptions, presented as the Buddha's teaching as such. Mahayana readers will find their tradition acknowledged briefly and treated as a later development.
Does it teach meditation?
One chapter, on mental culture, explains mindfulness of breathing and the four foundations of mindfulness from the Satipatthana Sutta, and warns against treating meditation as escape. It is an explanation rather than a course.
What texts does it include?
The Buddha's first sermon, the fire sermon, the Metta Sutta, the Satipatthana Sutta, the Sigalovada Sutta on lay ethics, and several others, in Rahula's own translations from the Pali.
What is the Buddhist attitude of mind?
The title of the first chapter, in which Rahula argues that Buddhism asks for no blind faith, that the Buddha told his followers to test his teaching, and that tolerance and free inquiry are its foundation. It is the book's most quoted section.
Is it still current?
As an exposition of the Pali teaching, yes. Its confident modernist framing of Buddhism as rational and scientific reflects its period, and scholars now treat that framing as one interpretation among several.
How does it compare to the Dhammapada?
The Dhammapada is a collection of verses from the canon with no explanation. Rahula explains the doctrine the verses assume, and quotes the canon in support. Reading them together is the natural pairing.
What did Rahula do outside this book?
He wrote a history of Buddhism in Ceylon, a controversial book arguing that monks should engage in politics, and taught in Paris and Chicago. He was a leading figure in Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism, which some readers find hard to square with this book's serenity.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants to know what the earliest Buddhist sources say, in a clear and short form, before reading the later traditions; students assigned it; and practitioners who want the doctrine behind their meditation.
Test it as instructed
The first chapter says the Buddha asked no one to believe him and told his hearers to test the teaching against experience. Take him at his word with the one doctrine that matters most. Sit for ten minutes and look for the self: not the thoughts, the sensations, the perceptions, the intentions or the awareness of them, but the one who owns them. Rahula's claim is that you will find the five and never the sixth, and that the looking, done honestly, is the beginning of the path. The test costs nothing and the book gives you the method.
Sources & References
- Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught, revised and expanded edition, Grove Press / Oneworld.
- Rahula, Walpola. History of Buddhism in Ceylon and The Heritage of the Bhikkhu.
- Bodhi, Bhikkhu, ed. In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, for a fuller selection of texts.
- McMahan, David. The Making of Buddhist Modernism, on the frame the book belongs to.
- Gombrich, Richard. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo.
- Seneviratne, H.L. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka, on Rahula's political role.