Suffering comes from craving and from clinging to a fixed self that isn't there; a disciplined path of ethics, meditation, and insight can loosen that clinging and end the suffering. Scoped here to shared early doctrine — the schools diverge widely, and those splits are flagged.
Where it stands on the axes
- The nature of realitycontested
- Takes no fixed position. The Buddha set aside metaphysical speculation (the 'unanswered questions'); later schools range from analytic realism (Abhidharma) to emptiness (Madhyamaka) to mind-only idealism (Yogācāra).
- How we knowcontested
- Intuition-led. Liberating knowledge is direct meditative insight (prajñā) beyond discursive reason — paired with a strong 'test it for yourself' empiricism (Kālāma Sutta).
- What makes an action rightcontested
- Virtue-based. The Eightfold Path cultivates character and states of mind (compassion, non-harming); karma also gives it a strongly consequential logic.
- Where meaning comes fromcontested
- Discovered. The Four Noble Truths present the way things are (dukkha and the path out) as something awakened to, not invented — though some read the Dharma as received tradition.
- What people are like underneath
- Malleable. 'Non-self' (anattā): there is no fixed essence, and the mind is radically trainable — which is what makes liberation possible.
- Free willcontested
- Compatibilist. Dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda) conditions everything, yet volition (cetanā) is efficacious — often read as a 'middle way' between hard determinism and libertarian free will.
- The individual and the groupcontested
- Takes no fixed position. The monastic community (Sangha) is central, yet liberation is each person's own path; the tradition doesn't reduce to individualism or communitarianism.
- How power should be arrangedcontested
- Egalitarian. The Buddha rejected caste-based spiritual rank ('not by birth is one a brahmin') — though monastic life kept its own seniority and operated within hierarchical societies.
- How change should happen
- Takes no fixed position. The transformation sought is inward; classical Buddhism offers a path for the person, not a programme for social institutions.
Marked readings are ones serious scholars dispute; the note says how. Traditions are living arguments, not fixed doctrines.
A challenge to it
The critic of non-self: If there is no persisting self, what carries karma across a life (or lives), and who is liberated? Personal responsibility and rebirth both seem to need the continuous self the doctrine denies.
Inner Axis never pins a school on you. A reading describes where your answers resemble a tradition and where they part from it — a family resemblance, not a label you carry.