Buddhist Approach to Communication: An Overview

Buddhist Approach to Communication: An Overview

Anthony Le Duc

2023

1. Introduction

Buddhism represents one of the few ancient religious traditions that has an undisputed historical founder and much of its teaching is attributed to a man named Siddhartha Gautama who lived and taught about 500 years before the birth of Christ in what is now modern-day Nepal and India. Even though there is a gap of approximately a century and a half between when the Buddha spoke and when his words were recorded in writing, what has been passed down through the generations is an enormous corpus of written records that represents forty-five years of teaching and preaching – fifteen times the length of Jesus’ public ministry on earth. Despite questions concerning accuracy that would naturally arise as a result of such a significant hiatus, we can assume that due to the strength of the oral tradition of the ancient time and people’s incredible memory that many of the Buddha’s teachings were faithfully passed down from one generation to the next. Moreover, because the Buddha taught for so many decades, his close disciples who followed him year after year would have had the opportunity to listen to his teachings repeated countless times in various circumstances, thus reinforcing their memory and understanding of these teachings.

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