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The 3 Buckets of Buddhism
Memorize the Buddhist path a lot easier with this condensed version
What Is Buddhism?
Roughly 500 years before Christ, in ancient India, there was a man named Siddhartha Gautama, who gave up his princely life in his father’s palace to become a “forest dweller” and study spirituality.
After spending years exploring the existing traditions and only finding disappointment, Siddhartha sat himself under a tree to meditate, with the intention of not getting up until he found a way to transcend suffering.
Days later, he arose from his meditation as a fully enlightened Buddha, or “awakened one,” and proceeded to a nearby town to deliver his first sermon: that suffering is caused by craving, and craving can be eliminated by following the Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path represents the entire Buddhist practice, everything one must do to train the mind and become enlightened themselves.
It can be hard to memorize and apply it all at once, so the Buddhists of old created a simplified version organizing the eight rungs of the path into three categories, or buckets: wisdom, ethics, and meditation.