What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula: A Guide

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 10 November 2026

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What the Buddha Taught is Walpola Rahula’s short introduction to the Buddha’s teaching, first published in 1959 by Gordon Fraser of London and Bedford, with a foreword by the French scholar Paul Demiéville. A Sri Lankan Theravāda monk and scholar, Rahula works from the Pāli texts through the attitude of free inquiry, the Four Noble Truths, the teaching of not-self and meditation. It is still in print, and Tricycle’s 1993 beginners’ reading list called it a classic textbook for dharma and academic teachers alike.

This page covers the book itself. For the teachings in their own right, start with our core teachings hub; for where it sits among other first books, see the best Buddhist books.

Who was Walpola Rahula?

Walpola Rahula was born on 9 May 1907 in the village of Walpola, in the Galle district of southern Sri Lanka, and was ordained at about thirteen. A biographical sketch by Udaya Mallawarachchi, published in The Island in 1998, describes a traditional monastic training in Sinhala, Pāli, Sanskrit, Buddhism and Buddhist history, followed in 1936 by entry to Ceylon University College, then affiliated to the University of London — the first Buddhist monk, the sketch says, to study there. He took a London honours degree in 1941, did postgraduate research at the University of Calcutta, and in 1950 received a PhD from the University of Ceylon for a thesis on the history of Buddhism in the island. His History of Buddhism in Ceylon: The Anurādhapura Period followed in 1956 (M. D. Gunasena, Colombo).

He taught at Vidyalankara Pirivena, one of the island’s leading monastic colleges, and in 1946 published Bhiksuvage Urumaya, a Sinhala book arguing that monks should work for the good of the many; it appeared in English as The Heritage of the Bhikkhu (Grove Press, 1974).

In 1950 a French government fellowship, granted at the initiative of Paul Demiéville of the Collège de France, took him to the Sorbonne to research Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially the works of Asaṅga, whose Mahāyāna Abhidharma compendium, the Abhidharmasamuccaya, he translated into French (Le Compendium de la Super-Doctrine, École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1971). The Walpola Rahula Institute, which he founded in Kotte, says it was in Paris that he wrote What the Buddha Taught.

Northwestern University then invited him to a new chair, as its first Bishop Brashares Professor of History and Literature of Religions — in 1964, according to Mallawarachchi’s sketch; the Institute’s page gives 1965. The sketch calls him the first bhikkhu to hold a professorial chair in the Western world. He was Vice-Chancellor of Vidyodaya University (now the University of Sri Jayewardenepura) from 1966 to 1969, and Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya until his death. He died in Colombo on 18 September 1997.

What the Buddha Taught: a chapter-by-chapter summary

The book has eight chapters, then a section of Pāli texts in the author’s own translation. The chapter titles below follow the contents pages that Google Books shows for the Grove and Oneworld editions and the excerpt Grove publishes from Chapter I.

Chapter I: The Buddhist Attitude of Mind

The book opens with its most famous claim: that among the founders of religions the Buddha “was the only teacher who did not claim to be other than a human being, pure and simple.” The rest of the chapter, which Grove’s page for the book carries as its excerpt, builds a case for self-reliance and free inquiry. Rahula quotes the line we discuss at You are your own protector (Dhammapada 160) and the verse that the Tathāgatas only teach the way (Dhammapada 276), and cites the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta for the Buddha’s statement that nothing was hidden in the “closed-fist of the teacher”.

At its centre is the Kālāma Sutta. Rahula’s own rendering has the Buddha tell the Kālāmas of Kesaputta, “do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay” — Bhikkhu Sujato’s CC0 translation renders the same sentence “don’t go by oral transmission, don’t go by lineage” and so on, and spells the town Kesamutta. Rahula adds that a disciple should examine even the Buddha himself, the subject of the Vīmaṁsaka Sutta (MN 47), in which an inquiring mendicant “should scrutinize the Realized One”. Doubt, he argues, is one of the five hindrances, to be cleared by seeing, not a sin. The chapter then turns to tolerance — the householder Upāli (MN 56) and an edict of Asoka — asks whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy and says the label does not matter, and tells of the Buddha’s night in a potter’s shed with Pukkusāti, a young monk who had gone forth in the Buddha’s name but did not recognise him (MN 140): what mattered was the truth he heard, not who spoke it.

The last part of the chapter argues that the weight falls on seeing, not on faith — saddhā, Rahula says, is confidence born of conviction — and closes with two famous similes: the raft, a teaching meant for crossing over and not for carrying, and the man wounded by a poisoned arrow, the Buddha’s answer to Māluṅkyaputta’s ten metaphysical questions. It ends on what the Buddha said he had explained: dukkha, its arising, its cessation and the way to its cessation.

Chapters II to V: the Four Noble Truths

Chapters II to V take one noble truth each. The contents pages head them Dukkha, Samudaya: The Arising of Dukkha, Nirodha: The Cessation of Dukkha (with a section headed What is Nirvana?) and Magga: The Path.

Rahula’s own one-line gloss of each truth comes from his 1981 restatement of a formula he had presented to the World Buddhist Sangha Council in 1967. Dukkha is the fact that our existence is “in predicament”: impermanent, imperfect, unsatisfactory, full of conflict. Its arising is our egoistic selfishness, “based on the false idea of self” (compare our page on craving). Its cessation, the subject of the chapter on nirvana, is the possibility of freedom from that predicament by uprooting the selfishness entirely, and the way there is the Middle Path, which is eightfold.

Rahula’s account of the Noble Eightfold Path, which Tricycle publishes under his name, groups the eight factors under the three trainings of ethical conduct (sīla), mental discipline (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā), to be developed together as far as each person can, not one after another. Compassion and wisdom must grow together: develop only the heart, he warns, and “one may become a good-hearted fool”.

Chapter VI: Anattā

The sixth chapter, headed Anatta, deals with not-self. Tricycle praised the way Rahula puts the doctrine of no-soul into contemporary language. His 1981 formula states the position in one line: all things, conditioned and unconditioned alike, are without self (anatta) — the unconditioned included. Readers coming from Mahāyāna should set this chapter beside our pages on buddha-nature and emptiness.

Chapter VII: Bhāvanā (meditation)

The meditation chapter is short: pages 67 to 75 of the 1974 Grove edition. Tricycle printed a passage of the book on mindfulness of breathing in 1995, with Grove’s permission. In it Rahula presents mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati) as the one “meditation” for which, he notes, the sutta prescribes a definite posture — sitting cross-legged, body erect — and gives plain instructions: breathe without strain, watch the breath, and practise twice a day, morning and evening, for five or ten minutes at a time. Its purpose, he says, is concentration, which leads to the meditative absorptions (dhyāna) and which any deep understanding, including the realisation of nirvana, requires. It is a real starting instruction, but not a course: for more, see Buddhist meditation and meditation posture.

Chapter VIII: What the Buddha Taught and the World Today

The last chapter carries the teaching into lay and social life. Among the book’s subjects, Bareau’s review lists the relation between Buddhist morality and lay society, and Tricycle’s list mentions Buddhist attitudes toward responsibility, attachment, nonviolence and social justice.

The selected texts

From the second edition on, the book closes with Rahula’s translations: in the 1974 Grove edition they run from page 91 to page 138, almost a third of the book. The contents pages Google Books shows include the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Parable of the Piece of Cloth (Vatthūpama Sutta), the Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta) and the Last Words of the Buddha from the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, and Grove’s description adds a selection from the Dhammapada.

When was What the Buddha Taught published?

The first edition appeared in 1959 from the Gordon Fraser Gallery of London and Bedford: xvi + 103 pages. Grove Press published it in New York in 1962, at the same 103 pages, as Evergreen original E-330. The library records then show the change that matters to a buyer. In 1967 Gordon Fraser issued a “2nd and enlarged” edition of xvi + 151 pages and 16 plates, with “a collection of illustrative texts translated from the original Pali”; Grove’s revised edition of 1974 has the same 151 pages and the same collection of texts. The records suggest a simple rule for the English book: printings from 1967 on carry the anthology, the 103-page printings of 1959 and 1962 do not.

The French version, L’enseignement du Bouddha d’après les textes les plus anciens, came from Éditions du Seuil in Paris in 1961; Bareau’s review identifies it as the French version of the 1959 book. Its title adds étude suivie d’un choix de textes — a study followed by a selection of texts — six years before the enlarged English edition. The Walpola Rahula Institute lists translations into German, Spanish, Sinhala, Siamese (Thai), Chinese and Burmese as well.

Which edition to buy, and where to find it

Grove Press keeps it in print in the United States as a 192-page paperback (ISBN 978-0-8021-3031-0). Open Library and Google Books give that same ISBN to Grove’s 1974 second, enlarged edition; Open Library also dates a printing under it, subtitled Revised and Expanded Edition with Texts from Suttas and Dhammapada, to 11 January 1994 — a later printing, not the date the texts were added. Oneworld’s editions date from 1997 (168 pages) and 2014 (172 pages; Google Books lists it for sale as an ebook), and there is a Grove Atlantic ebook (ISBN 978-0-8021-9810-5). Grove’s own page carries the text of Chapter I free to read, and public and university libraries are the other legitimate route. For the book itself, this guide links only to publishers’ and libraries’ records, not to the free copies that circulate online.

Why it became the standard introduction

Its publisher says it remains popular in colleges, universities and theological schools, and quotes the Journal of the Buddhist Society: the newcomer had long “lacked a simple and reliable introduction”. Library Journal, as quoted on the ebook edition, called it “the standard”. Oneworld’s 2014 edition carries the verdict of R. F. Gombrich, credited there as Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford: “By far the best introduction to Buddhism available.”

Scholarly approval came early. André Bareau, one of the French scholars Rahula had worked with in Paris, reviewed the French version in the Revue de l’histoire des religions in 1963 and called it “une excellente introduction au Bouddhisme” — clear, precise and based on the canonical Pāli texts — adding that orientalists would find useful clarifications on some of the most important and most controversial problems in Buddhist studies. The Walpola Rahula Institute goes further, calling it the most widely read book on Buddhism in the Western world; that is its claim, and we have no sales figures to test it.

Its perspective and limits: how the traditions differ

What the Buddha Taught is one tradition’s reading, and Rahula did not hide it. In a 1981 paper for the World Buddhist Sangha Council he described Theravāda as “considered to be the original teaching of the Buddha” and called the terms Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna “later inventions by Mahayanists”, a point he said scholars universally accepted. His account there of where the name Theravāda comes from rests on the Sri Lankan chronicles and Buddhaghosa’s Vinaya commentary — the Theravāda’s own record. That is a Theravāda telling of how the schools divided, and every text in the book’s anthology comes from the Pāli. For the other side, read Theravāda vs Mahāyāna and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

He was not sectarian about it. The same paper restates the formula he presented at the Council’s 1967 congress in Colombo, which he says was unanimously accepted: it names three ways to awakening and accepts following the career of a bodhisattva as the “highest, noblest and most heroic” way, citing the Mahāyāna Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra for the view that all three are one path. Differences of monastic life, rites and customs between countries are, in that formula, external forms not to be confused with the essential teaching. The same paper adds that for “less instructed and less advanced people” such observances are part of their religion and “should be appreciated sympathetically according to their relative value”, while attachment to rites and rituals is a fetter to be outgrown — and his eightfold-path account says the path “has nothing to do with belief, prayer, worship, or ceremony”. Readers who practise in Pure Land, Tibetan or Zen communities will want to weigh those lines against their own tradition’s account of practice.

Scholars have named the book’s modern cast from the start. Demiéville’s own foreword calls it “an exposition of Buddhism conceived in a resolutely modern spirit”; Bareau, approvingly, counted Rahula among those who seek to adapt the Buddha’s teaching to modern life without betraying it, presenting it as a rational doctrine with an essentially practical aim. Patrick Grant (2004), following Gombrich, describes a division in Sri Lankan Buddhism between “modernists” and “traditionalists”, and takes Rahula’s Heritage of the Bhikkhu and Gamini Salgado’s The True Paradise as representing the two. And Colin Edwards, in “Rahula and the Liberal Buddha” (Buddhist Studies Review, 2008), suggests that the opening pages of What the Buddha Taught influenced the popular Western image of a Buddha who respected other religions and encouraged freedom of thought. He finds Rahula’s evidence “faulty at every turn” and gives examples of the Buddha’s and the suttas’ disrespectful attitude to other faiths, suggesting that in its “exclusivism” the Buddhism of the Pāli suttas is no different from other religions.

Readers can test the argument on the Upāli story, Chapter I’s first example of the Buddha’s tolerance. The sutta does have the Buddha ask the new convert to keep supporting his old teachers:

The same discourse, a few lines later, has Upāli go home and give his gatekeeper this order:

Later still Upāli tells his former teacher that “the doctrine of the foolish Jains” cannot endure being scrutinised. Both strands are in the text; Chapter I reports the Buddha’s request. Its English is also of its time: “Man is his own master,” the opening chapter says, using “man” for everyone.

What to read next

Read the book with a sutta anthology beside it, so you can check its quotations against the Pāli canon itself; our best Buddhist books list names the anthologies and the books from other traditions. For the teachings themselves, go to the Four Noble Truths, not-self and the core teachings hub, and if this is your first step, our beginner’s guide.