Preface: This article was completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

As noted earlier, Rome’s “Regal Period”¹ is traditionally placed from 753 BCE to 509 BCE, and in the same era China was in the late Spring and Autumn period², Japan at this point was still in the early phase of the Kofun period³, while India was undergoing a transitional phase after the Second Urbanization⁴. In fact, there is no single standardized name for this Indian period in historical usage; depending on the angle, it can plausibly be labeled the Late Vedic Period⁵, the Mahājanapada period⁶, or the Axial Age⁷.

The Late Vedic Period⁵, roughly spanning 800–500 BCE, is a label grounded in religious and intellectual history. In the Vedic world, sacrifice (yajña)⁸ sat at the center of everyday life and political order. Lineages, chiefs, or kingship sustained the relationship of exchange between humans and gods by keeping the sacred fire burning⁹ and offering clarified butter, grain, and livestock. Around sacrifice developed a highly ritualized discipline of language. The most important “technology” of the Vedic age was not writing, but exact memorization and recitation¹⁰. Hymns had to be chanted according to fixed pitch, rhythm, and pauses; even a single misaligned syllable could be seen as undermining the efficacy of the rite.

In social life, the most stable habit was to organize one’s life course by status rather than by personal choice. The structure later systematized as “caste”¹¹ already had an early form in the Vedic period. Priests were responsible for ritual and knowledge, warriors for warfare and protection, and commoners for production and support. What one ought to do was not a matter of moral preference; it was treated as part of cosmic order. Simply fulfilling one’s duty was regarded as legitimate conduct.

Paired with this was an intensely strong family and patriarchal structure. Marriage, inheritance, and ritual eligibility were all organized around male lineage. In the Vedic world, the family was not a private unit but a religio-legal subject. Whether a family “existed” did not depend on people living together, but on whether someone could continuously and legitimately perform sacrifice. Ritual eligibility was tightly bound to the male line of succession. Only males born through the patriline were taken to be capable of kindling the household fire, reciting the hymns, and mediating between ancestors, gods, and the living. Women were not entirely excluded from ritual, but they appeared consistently in an “auxiliary” capacity—as wives, mothers, helpers—rather than as independent ritual agents.

Within this structure, marriage was first of all not an emotional union, but a rewiring of bloodline and sacrificial rights. When a woman married, she effectively “transferred out” of her father’s patriline and entered her husband’s family system. Her religious identity, social position, and ritual role changed accordingly. Children she bore were not recognized as lawful heirs of her natal family; rather, her reproductive capacity served to extend her husband’s bloodline, ancestors, and sacrificial continuity. Institutionally, marriage functioned as a total status migration. This arrangement was not maintained only by “custom,” but continuously reinforced by normative texts. Later written legal-ethical works such as the Manusmṛti (Laws of Manu)¹³ systematized and intensified this logic: women were placed under the guardianship¹⁴ of father, husband, and son across the life course; they were said to require protection rather than autonomy. This “protection” was not gentle—it amounted to a legally sanctioned non-independence.

Chronologically, the crystallization of the Manusmṛti¹³ is usually placed roughly between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE, clearly later than the Late Vedic and the Buddha-era I discussed earlier. It divides the world into stable ranks and roles, and specifies duties, rights, and boundaries for each role. The human being is not treated as a free agent but as a functional position. “Who someone is” precedes “what they want to do.” This is why the Manusmṛti is so insistent on bloodline, birth, gender, and ritual eligibility—variables that are hardest to change.

On family and patriarchy, the Manusmṛti elevates practices that had existed more diffusely within ritual tradition into explicit rules. Women are prescribed lifelong male guardianship: as children under the father, after marriage under the husband, and after widowhood under the son. This is not merely disparagement but a structural assumption: women are treated as beings that must be “embedded” within patrilineal continuity, rather than as independent religious and legal subjects. Their social value is primarily realized through bearing legitimate male heirs. In the text, inheritance is tightly bound to sacrificial rights. Property is not private wealth but the material base for fulfilling religious obligations. Whoever inherits land, livestock, and implements inherits the ability to continue ancestral offerings and maintain the family’s place within cosmic order. Hence patrilineal inheritance is established as the norm, while other forms are framed as exceptions or risks. The underlying logic is not simply “preferring males,” but a fear of rupture.

The Manusmṛti does not pretend that society is equal. On the contrary, it openly acknowledges and reinforces inequality, describing rank differences as part of cosmic order. Different strata have different obligations, taboos, and penalty standards; the same act can be treated entirely differently depending on status. There is no modern principle of “equality before the law,” only “each in their proper place.” Precisely because of this stark normativity, the Manusmṛti carries a double significance in intellectual history. On one hand, it is the clearest written articulation of patriarchal, hierarchical, and ritual-centered order; on the other hand, it also indicates that this order was no longer self-evident reality. Only when society begins to drift from such rules do people need to write them so explicitly and so forcefully. It is also at this point that the Late Vedic structure comes under major pressure. Urbanization, monetization, and mobility across families meant that more and more people could not, or would not, be locked into the patrilineal–sacrificial chain¹². The rise of śramaṇas, renunciants, and itinerant thinkers was not primarily a direct assault on “male authority” as such, but an exit from an order centered on bloodline and family.

Over time, circumstances changed. As the Ganges plain was systematically opened up, settled agriculture replaced pastoral mobility, population density rose, and villages and cities emerged. Society no longer ran on migration and immediate raiding, but on land, taxation, and long-term governance. The Vedic sacrificial system was too heavy, too expensive, and too slow to match this tempo. With multiple states coexisting and warfare becoming routine, rulers needed stable fiscal capacity and standing forces. Priestly legitimation still mattered, but it was no longer sufficient on its own to sustain state operation. Kingship thus began to detach from purely ritual authorization and reorient toward administrative, military, and taxation capacity.

Urbanization and a money economy made it possible to survive outside one’s birth family. Once individuals could move between city-states, hire out labor, and form associations, the patriline–sacrifice–family chain began to loosen. The Vedic order presupposed that “you stay where you were born for your entire life,” but reality no longer fit that premise. A religion that had emphasized external operations began to turn inward. In other words, religious practice shifted from external acts—ritual performance and “each in their place”—toward introspection and internal discipline. This is where the Upaniṣads¹⁵ appear. Yet the Upaniṣadic path to knowledge and liberation still presupposed elite learning and long-term cultivation, and did not suit the highly differentiated, competitive world of cities. As a result, more people chose to leave the system rather than keep repairing it. The śramaṇa tradition¹⁶, institutional renunciants¹⁷, and later new religious paths represented by Gautama Buddha¹⁸ all belong to this hinge moment.

“Śramaṇa” was not the name of a single sect but a choice of life-form. The term refers to those who voluntarily gave up family status, property, sacrificial obligations, and social roles. They were no longer sons, husbands, or heirs within a patrilineal household; they severed genealogical continuity and became individuals who wandered between polities, begged for food, and practiced discipline. This was radically disruptive, because in the Vedic world to step outside the family was to relinquish religious legitimacy and social protection. The very emergence of śramaṇas signals that the older system could no longer provide an acceptable life-path for everyone. (I even find myself thinking of today’s homeless people; it’s hard not to notice that capitalism is not a viable life-path for everyone either—leaving the faith, too. “Lay down the butcher’s knife, and you become a Buddha on the spot….”)

Renunciants are one institutionalized form within the śramaṇa milieu. Through shaving the head, wearing simple clothing, keeping precepts, and living by alms, they publicly declared that they would no longer participate in production, inheritance, or sacrifice. Their time was no longer segmented by farming cycles, marriage, or ancestral rites; it was reorganized around practice. The key shift is that meaning moved from family continuity to personal liberation. For the first time, a life could be oriented not toward “continuing others,” but toward “ending one’s own suffering.” That is deeply striking—though it also sounds genuinely appealing.

Scholars usually place the Buddha’s timeline in the 5th century BCE, almost exactly contemporary with Confucius. He was likely born around the mid-5th century BCE in the Śākya region¹⁹ on the northern edge of the middle Ganges, in the area around today’s southern Nepal and the northern Indian border. This was not an imperial core, nor a region saturated with priestly culture, but a small peripheral polity. His background was not lowly, yet he was not a central figure of a major ruling elite either; this “peripheral aristocratic” position is crucial: he was familiar with kingship and family structure, but not deeply bound to a large sacrificial establishment.

In youth, he followed what society expected of a male aristocrat: marriage, household, worldly life. But around the age of thirty, faced with the unavoidable facts of aging, illness, and death (people in antiquity really did die young… thirty already meant “aging, sickness, and death”), he made a decision that was extremely abnormal within the Vedic system: he left home and became a śramaṇa. Over the following years he wandered across the Ganges region, studying under several famous teachers, learning austere practices and meditative techniques. At roughly thirty-five, he is said to have completed awakening under the Bodhi tree.

To understand awakening in more detail, I consulted three classical collections that describe it: the Majjhima Nikāya, Saṃyutta Nikāya, and Dīgha Nikāya²⁰—their names simply reflect the length/organization of the books, yet they form part of the earliest and closest-to-the-Buddha core textual corpus in the Pāli Canon²¹. “Pāli Canon” literally means the earliest systematic Buddhist scriptures preserved in Pāli; in scholarship it is more commonly referred to as the Pāli Tipiṭaka²². Since I do not know Pāli, I could only consult translations.

I specifically pulled the “Greater Discourse to Saccaka” (Mahāsaccaka Sutta) from the Majjhima Nikāya²³, where the Buddha explains his early experiences and the process of awakening. This passage is essentially a “debate with gunpowder in the air,” starring the Buddha and a notorious argumentative debater from outside the Buddhist fold—Saccaka²⁴ (Saccaka). “Debaters of other paths” here refers to people from other traditions who liked to challenge, dispute, and win prestige through argument. The opening sets the scene at the Great Wood and the Gabled Hall in Vesālī²⁵, and Vesālī was a major city in the middle–lower Ganges region, roughly in today’s northern Bihar. In the Buddha’s time, it was not an ordinary town but a frontline zone of political, intellectual, and religious competition. Buddhists, Jains, various ascetic groups, and metaphysical schools were all active there. That morning, in a lecture hall in the city, as the Buddha was preparing to go on alms-round²⁶ (in Buddhist practice: a system in which monastics carry an alms bowl into a town or village and accept that day’s food by going from household to household—i.e., soliciting offerings), Saccaka came to “crash the venue.”

In the course of their debate, the Buddha says that when he was young he renounced the household life against his parents’ wishes and first studied under Āḷāra Kālāma²⁷—one of his earliest and most important teachers, and a representative of the highest levels of meditative attainment then circulating in the Ganges world. He was not a Buddhist figure, but a śramaṇa teacher from before and alongside the Buddha. Āḷāra Kālāma taught a meditative attainment regarded as extremely lofty at the time, with the highest target being the “Sphere of Nothingness”—a state of consciousness so subtle and empty that, in the religious marketplace of the time, it was close to an “ultimate answer,” conferring enormous prestige and followers.

The “Sphere of Nothingness” belongs to formless meditative absorption²⁹—levels of concentration that have fully left behind bodily senses, images, and spatial form. The typical progression is: from meditations that still have form and felt qualities, one advances step by step to the “Sphere of Infinite Space,” then the “Sphere of Infinite Consciousness,” then the “Sphere of Nothingness,” and finally the “Sphere of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception”³⁰. In plain terms, early concentration still has an object: you still know the body is there, you still have breath, joy, and a focus point—only everything has been highly simplified and stabilized. This is what it means to be in a stage “with form and felt experience.”

As concentration deepens, the meditator deliberately lets go of all concrete forms; even bodily sensation is no longer taken as the object. What the mind “holds” is only space itself—experienced as boundless—thus entering the Sphere of Infinite Space. The point is not that space is “big,” but that the mind is no longer stuck to any particular thing; it clings only to the abstract feature of “limitless extension.”

Going further, even “space” is seen as too coarse an object. Attention shifts from space to the knowing of space—the awareness itself—thus entering the Sphere of Infinite Consciousness. The center of experience is no longer an external or internal object, but the state of “knowing” itself. You could say: content disappears, leaving only “there is knowing.”

Next, the meditator sees that even the sense “there is a knowing” is itself something that can be grasped. So that too is released, and the mind stabilizes in a state where there is “nothing to grasp”—this is the Sphere of Nothingness. Note: this is not dullness or blackout; it is a very lucid recognition that “there is nothing here.” Awareness remains, but it no longer points to any object.

Above that, the Sphere of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception is so subtle that even “I am clearly knowing there is nothing” becomes extremely blurred. One cannot say there is clear cognition, yet one cannot say there is no cognition at all. It is an almost indescribably fine state—the upper limit of what that era’s meditative system treated as reachable.

Gautama learned extremely quickly under Āḷāra Kālāma and attained the “Sphere of Nothingness.” Āḷāra Kālāma was willing to share leadership of his community with him, treating him as an equal teacher. But the Buddha judged that this was only a high level of meditative absorption and could not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, right awakening, or nibbāna³¹, and so he left.

Disenchantment is not an emotional world-weariness, nor a hatred of life. It is a cognitive shift: you no longer regard the field of experience as something “worth grasping.” Pleasure is no longer automatically classed as “a good thing,” and pain is no longer treated as an “exceptional accident.” Only when one truly sees that “all conditioned experience is unstable, cannot be secured, and cannot be possessed as mine” does the mind lose interest in objects of clinging.

Next comes dispassion. “Craving” is not a moral flaw, but a mechanism of adhesion. Disenchantment is “seeing it isn’t worth it”; dispassion is “actually letting go.” At this stage, the mind no longer automatically reaches for desire, achievement, meditative attainments, or even the identity “I am a practitioner.” The key is that craving is not forcibly pressed down; it fades naturally because cause and effect have been seen clearly. If it is only suppressed, that is concentration power, not dispassion.

Then comes cessation. Cessation does not mean “everything disappears,” but refers to something very specific: the stopping of suffering. When the fuel of craving is cut off, suffering no longer has the conditions to keep arising. Here “cessation” is a result, not a technique. And precisely because it is the ending of conditions rather than a fabricated state, it is not temporary. What can cease is only what has already been seen through and released.

Peace is not merely a quiet mood, and not simply the comfort of meditation. It is a system-level absence of disturbance. When craving ends and suffering ceases, the mind is no longer pulled around; the entire structure of experience no longer needs to react, repair itself, or explain itself. It is a stability that requires no further operation, not a balance held in place by effort. This step distinguishes: are you merely resting, or is there no longer a need to fight?

Next is right awakening. The emphasis is not on “awakening” but on “right.” It is not a matter of learning a secret; it is seeing how reality functions with complete correctness. Causality, impermanence, non-self, and suffering are no longer concepts but facts that can no longer be misconstrued. “Right” means this understanding cannot be overturned by fluctuations of experience. Feelings still occur, but they are no longer misread as “I” or “mine.”

Only then comes nibbāna. Nibbāna is not an experiential state, nor a place one “goes.” It is the extinguishing of the entire clinging–reaction–rebirth system. The word’s root sense is “blowing out a flame.” What flame? The ongoing burning of greed, hatred, and delusion. The definition is deliberately cool: it is not entering a special realm, but no longer needing any realm. For that reason, it cannot be “maintained” as an attainment; it can only be confirmed.

After leaving Āḷāra Kālāma, Gautama went to study under Uddaka Rāmaputta²⁸ and attained the “Sphere of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception.” Again he was elevated to a very high status, yet he still judged it not the endpoint and left once more. Afterwards he stayed near Uruvelā, found the environment suitable for strenuous practice, and pushed himself to extremes—forcing the mind with “teeth pressed to teeth, tongue pressed to the palate,” practicing breath suppression that brought severe headaches, stomach pains, and feverish heat, and nearly starving himself into extreme emaciation, to the point that observers even differed in how they described his skin tone.

At last he reached a decisive conclusion: asceticism had been taken to its limit, yet it still could not bring ultimate awakening. He then recalled a childhood memory of naturally entering the first jhāna under the shade of a tree, and recognized that the “meditative joy born of seclusion from sensuality and unwholesome states”³² was not something to fear. Only then did he turn to the Middle Way³³, resume eating, and re-enter the four jhānas³⁴.

“Seclusion from sensuality” does not mean killing desire by force, nor hating the world; it means that in this moment the mind is no longer chasing sensory stimulation. Forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches may still appear, but they are no longer treated as “what I need” or “what I must seize.” “Seclusion from unwholesome states” means the mind has stepped out of the patterns that automatically generate turmoil—greed, aversion, restlessness, dullness, agitation, self-reproach, and runaway fantasy. They are not driven out by moral condemnation, but rendered temporarily inoperative through concentration and clear awareness. The mind becomes unified, usable, and not self-draining.

The Middle Way in Buddhism is not a vague compromise, nor a lifestyle tip of “don’t be too extreme,” but a precisely defined principle of practice: neither the path of sensual indulgence nor the path of self-torment; the aim is not comfort or pain, but to end the mechanism that produces suffering. The four jhānas are Buddhism’s division of four stages by which the mind becomes progressively stable, purified, and simplified in meditative absorption.

The first jhāna³⁵ is the first stage in which the mind truly stabilizes. One has already stepped away from sensory chasing and obvious mental noise; attention can remain on its object, but there is still a faint sense of “effort.” The mind lightly brings attention back, hence “applied and sustained attention” (vitakka/vicāra); and clear, positive joy and ease arise, hence “rapture and pleasure” (pīti/sukha). This pleasure is not stimulation; it is the natural feedback that appears when mental clutter withdraws. The Buddha explicitly affirms this level of pleasure: it does not come from sensuality and does not feed craving in return.

The second jhāna is an inner unification that arises with mastery. The mind no longer needs repeated “bringing back”; applied and sustained attention subside, and concentration becomes spontaneous and firm. Joy and pleasure remain, but are more focused and quieter; the subjective sense “I am trying to meditate” fades. Its core feature is one-pointedness: the mind is not scattered, not effortful, yet highly stable.

The third jhāna is the key turn from excitement to calm. Even the uplift of “joy” is seen as too coarse and naturally falls away, leaving steady, lucid, non-excited pleasure alongside continuous mindfulness. The texts describe this as “equanimous, mindful, dwelling in ease.” Here pleasure is more like stable contentment than emotional elevation.

The fourth jhāna completes the letting-go of affective polarity. Neither pain nor pleasure functions as the mind’s coordinate; one enters a state of “neither painful nor pleasant,” with extreme balance and fully purified mindfulness. There is no emotional swing, no dependence on comfort—only a highly lucid, completely stable mind that is not moved by any feeling. This stability is not produced by suppression, but because there is nothing left that requires reaction.

Thus, under the Bodhi tree, Gautama awakened. The process unfolds through the three watches of the night: in the first watch he gained knowledge of past lives, in the middle watch the divine eye (seeing beings wandering according to karma), and in the last watch knowledge of the destruction of the taints³⁶. He directly knew the Four Noble Truths³⁷ and the ending of the taints, and finally declared: “Birth is ended, the holy life has been established, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being”⁴⁰.

“First watch: knowledge of past lives; middle watch: the divine eye; last watch: destruction of the taints” describes three successive cognitive breakthroughs after his mind had fully stabilized in the fourth jhāna on the night of awakening. In the first watch, knowledge of past lives means he saw countless cycles of birth and death. Life keeps occurring, yet there is no permanent, unchanging “self” traveling through it. What he saw was repeated birth, death, and identity-change—not a fixed subject swapping bodies. Names, clans, lifespans, pleasure and pain all changed, but no substantial basis could be found for the assumption “this is the same I.” The “self” is not an immutable entity crossing time, but a stream of processes arising and ceasing with conditions. Names change, identities change, situations change, yet the pattern of ongoing formation and ongoing collapse keeps occurring.

In the second stage, the view expands from oneself to all beings. He saw that beings’ deaths and rebirths are not decided by divine will, nor random accidents, but unfold in accordance with their actions, habits, and tendencies. Actions shape the mind’s direction; the mind’s direction shapes future modes of existence. The world is not managed by a reward-and-punishment judge, yet it is not chaotic; it is causally coherent, without requiring an arbiter.

In the third stage, he directly knew the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of origin, the truth of cessation, and the truth of the path.

The truth of suffering does not mean “life is miserable,” but that all conditioned experience cannot be securely possessed as ultimate ground. Happiness changes, satisfaction fades, identities collapse; even states of neither pain nor pleasure dissolve. Here “suffering” is closer to “uncontrollable, unreliable, and unfit to bear ultimate meaning.” “Origin” means suffering is not accidental; it has a definite generative mechanism. The root is not in the external world but in clinging: adhesion to feelings, identities, and modes of being. Craving is not a moral issue but a reaction pattern—once the mind decides “this is what I need, this is what I cannot lose,” suffering is already on its way.

“Cessation”: if suffering is conditionally produced, then when conditions are removed, suffering ceases. This cessation is not suppression, escape, or numbness, but the natural extinguishing that occurs when fuel is cut off. When clinging no longer starts up, suffering is not “defeated”; it simply loses the possibility of continuing. Finally, “Path”: the stopping of suffering does not occur automatically just because one understands; it requires a trainable, repeatable route. This route was later systematized as the Noble Eightfold Path³⁸, covering cognition, conduct, livelihood, and concentration training. The core of the path is not “becoming a good person,” but gradually removing the operating conditions that feed clinging, so the mind loses its capacity to manufacture suffering.

“Birth is ended; the holy life is established; what had to be done has been done; there is no more becoming.” Here “birth” refers to rebirth in the sense of saṃsāra, not the biological continuation of this life. When clinging and ignorance no longer operate, the conditions for a new “birth” cannot start, hence “ended.” “Holy life” (brahmacariya) is not general moral cultivation, but the complete practice-path established for liberation. The point is: the route has been fully walked; practice is no longer a project in progress but has reached its purpose—not “I practiced well,” but “there is no further need for practice.”

“What had to be done has been done” is the least romantic line: the necessary work is complete, with no remaining task. The “work” here is not worldly achievement, but the ending of the taints and the cessation of the causes of suffering—the only work that truly had to be finished. It rejects the fantasy that “a higher realm remains” or “one last step is missing.” “No more becoming”: “becoming” refers to future modes of existence—another unfolding of life. “No more” is not an act of willful refusal; it means there are no longer conditions that could generate it. It is not “choosing not to come back,” but the mechanism of saṃsāra has failed and can no longer produce a new existence.

After awakening, the Buddha did not immediately head into the crowd. The texts say he remained near the Bodhi tree for several weeks, repeatedly abiding in liberation and examining whether this Dharma was “deep” and “difficult.” After reflection—and after accepting that there are people “with little dust in their eyes” who could understand—he decided to teach. Buddhism does not run on the premise that “truth spreads by itself”; it is a path that must be translated, broken down, and trained. The Buddha’s identity shifted from “one who is freed” to “teacher.”

He went to the Deer Park⁴¹ and found the five ascetics⁴² who had practiced austerities with him and later left. He taught the Four Noble Truths and how to end the system that manufactures suffering. After awakening he still went on alms-rounds, walked, grew tired, fell ill, and in old age entered final nirvāṇa (parinibbāna)⁴³. Sensation remained, but no longer ruled the mind; praise and attack still occurred, but no longer formed identity reactions; the body still aged and died, but it was no longer understood as “I am disappearing.” At this point the Buddha was established, and Buddhism began.

Footnotes:

1. Roman Regal Period（七王时代）: The term used in Roman traditional historiography for the monarchical period, conventionally dated from the city’s foundation (traditionally 753 BCE) to the end of kingship and the establishment of the Republic (traditionally 509 BCE). Modern scholarship often treats the precise chronology and the “sequence of seven kings” as retrospective constructions, but the institutional transition from late monarchy to early republic remains a key node in ancient narratives.

2. Late Spring and Autumn period（春秋晚期）: The later phase of China’s Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn era (roughly mid–late 6th century to 5th century BCE), marked by accelerating interstate annexation and the reconfiguration of ritual-political order, setting the stage for the Warring States landscape.

3. Kofun period, early（古坟时代早段）: A Japanese archaeological periodization (c. 3rd–6th centuries CE). The “early” phase is commonly identified through archaeological signatures such as large keyhole-shaped tumuli and the emergence of political centers.

4. Second Urbanization（第二次城市化）: A scholarly umbrella term for the mid–1st millennium BCE wave of new urban growth, state formation, commercial expansion, and monetization in the Ganges basin.

5. Late Vedic Period（晚期吠陀时期）: Usually c. 800–500 BCE, a period label from religious and intellectual history emphasizing the Vedic tradition’s shift from earlier tribal–ritual structures toward more complex kingship, settled agriculture, and normative textual cultures.

6. Mahājanapada period（十六大国时代）: A period of competing “great realms/states” in North India, often summarized as “sixteen mahājanapadas,” broadly placed around the 6th–4th centuries BCE (lists and boundaries vary across traditions).

7. Axial Age（轴心时代）: A modern intellectual-historical concept describing major religious and philosophical breakthroughs across Eurasia roughly c. 800–200 BCE; used here as a comparative naming lens.

8. yajña（祭祀）: The central Vedic sacrificial-ritual system, typically involving fire offerings and regulated recitation; also a major arena for political legitimacy and social order.

9. sacred/domestic fire（圣火／家火）: The tradition of maintaining a continuing fire associated with fire-offerings and household rites, symbolizing religious–legal continuity of the household or lineage.

10. precise recitation（精准背诵）: The Vedic oral-transmission discipline requiring exact pitch, rhythm, and pauses; textual authority is secured primarily through accurate memorization and teacher–student lineage.

11. varṇa and “caste”（varṇa 与“种姓”）: Early social hierarchy framed via varṇa (fourfold classes). The later, more complex jātī (birth-group) system is related but not identical.

12. patrilineal–ritual chain（父系—祭祀链条）: A shorthand in this essay for the structural logic binding succession, ritual eligibility, and family legitimacy to patrilineal inheritance.

13. Manusmṛti / Laws of Manu（《摩奴法论》）: A Brahmanical normative legal-ethical text discussing class duties, marriage and inheritance, and punishment standards. Its formation is layered and complex; it is often dated broadly to c. 2nd century BCE–2nd century CE.

14. guardianship (father–husband–son)（监护：父—夫—子）: The Manusmṛti’s patrilineal allocation of women’s legal and religious standing, formalizing institutional “non-independence.”

15. Upaniṣads（《奥义书》）: A major group of late-Vedic philosophical texts, shifting emphasis from external ritual to inner knowledge and liberation theory.

16. Śramaṇa tradition（沙门传统）: A broad label for the mid–1st millennium BCE North Indian currents of renunciant wandering, ascetic practice, and meditation, encompassing multiple paths (including Buddhism and Jainism).

17. renunciant / monastic（出家者）: An institutionalized form of leaving household roles, living by precepts and alms, and organizing life around disciplined practice.

18. Gautama Buddha（释迦牟尼）: The Buddhist title for the Buddha. Scholarly dates for his life remain debated within a range; he is commonly placed broadly in the 5th century BCE (or slightly earlier).

19. Śākya（释迦族）: The local political community associated with the Buddha’s origin, located around today’s southern Nepal and the India–Nepal border region.

20. Dīgha / Majjhima / Saṃyutta Nikāya（《长部》《中部》《相应部》）: Three major Nikāyas (collections) of the Pāli Sutta Piṭaka. Their names reflect editorial organization (length or thematic grouping), not a ranking of value.

21. Pāli Canon（巴利语佛典）: The Theravāda scriptural corpus preserved in Pāli.

22. Tipiṭaka（巴利三藏）: The “three baskets” structure of the Pāli Canon: Vinaya (discipline), Sutta (discourses), and Abhidhamma (systematic doctrine).

23. Mahāsaccaka Sutta（《萨遮迦大经》）: A discourse in the Majjhima Nikāya describing the debate between the Buddha and Saccaka, including key autobiographical material on his early quest and awakening.

24. non-Buddhist debater / challenger（外道辩士）: A Buddhist-context label for disputants from other schools; “outside the way” indicates a different tradition, while “debater” highlights contest-style argument aimed at prestige and victory.

25. Vesālī（毘舍离）: A major city and political center in the Ganges region, frequently appearing in narratives of inter-tradition competition and debate.

26. piṇḍapāta（托钵）: The institutional practice of monastics carrying an alms bowl and receiving food from households; emphasizes dependence on conditions, non-storage, and training.

27. Āḷāra Kālāma（阿罗逻迦罗摩）: One of the Buddha’s early teachers in canonical narrative, associated with high-level meditative attainments.

28. Uddaka Rāmaputta（郁陀迦罗摩子）: Another teacher the Buddha studied with in canonical narrative, associated with even higher meditative attainment.

29. formless attainments（无色界定）: Higher meditative absorptions beyond form and sensory bodily objects, taking increasingly abstract or near-objectless “objects” as the focus.

30. the four formless spheres（四无色处）: Sphere of Infinite Space, Sphere of Infinite Consciousness, Sphere of Nothingness, and Sphere of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception; often treated as extremely high yet not identical with final liberation.

31. disenchantment–dispassion–cessation–peace–right awakening–nibbāna（厌离—离贪—灭—寂静—正觉—涅槃）: A canonical goal-chain marking the trajectory from non-clinging to the cessation of suffering and final awakening; used here as the criterion for why high meditative absorption alone is insufficient.

32. jhānic joy born of seclusion（离欲、离不善法而生的禅乐）: Meditative joy or pleasure conditioned not by sensual desire but by seclusion from sensuality and unwholesome states; affirmed as legitimate “non-sensual pleasure.”

33. Middle Way（中道）: Buddhism’s defining practice orientation rejecting both sensual indulgence and self-mortification, emphasizing a trainable path that ends the causes of suffering.

34. four jhānas（四禅）: The four-stage Buddhist meditative absorption scheme describing progressive unification, purification, and simplification of mind.

35. technical jhāna terms (vitakka, vicāra, pīti, sukha, ekaggatā)（寻、伺、喜、乐、一境性等术语）: Specialist vocabulary for the structure of absorption; translations vary, but referents are broadly consistent.

36. tevijjā (the three knowledges)（三明）: Knowledge of past lives, the divine eye, and the destruction of the taints—used narratively to present the closure of awakening.

37. Four Noble Truths（四圣谛）: Suffering, origin, cessation, and path—the core framework of “problem, cause, ending, and method.”

38. Noble Eightfold Path（八正道）: The canonical formulation of the path: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

39. āsava; destruction of the taints（诸漏／漏尽）: Deep “leak-like” drivenness sustaining rebirth and suffering; destruction indicates complete cessation.

40. liberation declaration（生已尽，梵行已立，所作已办，不受后有）: A standard formula announcing the completion of liberation—rebirth-producing conditions are ended and no future becoming remains.

41. Isipatana / Sarnath（鹿野苑）: The traditional site of the Buddha’s first teaching after awakening.

42. the five ascetics（五比丘）: The five former companions from the Buddha’s austerity period who became the first recipients of his teaching.

43. parinibbāna（入灭）: “Final nibbāna,” referring to the Buddha’s (or an arahant’s) death—the final extinguishing at the end of life.