Why do Different Traditions Have Different Teachings?
It can be confusing when we are told that the Buddha taught this and didn’t teach that, or that one tradition is correct while others are mistaken.
Often this confusion comes from competition between traditions, each claiming the most legitimate connection to the Buddha.
If all Buddhist traditions trace themselves back to the Buddha—and they do—then the next claim is usually that one tradition has preserved his teachings exactly as they were. But the traditions differ. Recollections differ in accordance with each tradition’s needs rather than fidelity to what he actually said.
One Family, Shared Names, Different Understandings
Just as in all families, the children are different, even twins can be different. Not all Theravadins are the same and not all Mahayana traditions are the same. There are 4 or 5 different Tibetan schools who say they are the same but have different understandings of what something or other actually means.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is simply how living traditions work. As a Tibetan saying puts it: if it weren’t for disagreements, there would be no scholars in the monasteries.
There is no cause for alarm. Some styles of practice will suit your temperament and interests better than others, and that is not a failure—it is how practice works. Searching endlessly for the “perfect fit” risks being another form of delay.
The fundamentals are shared. The details reveal themselves through practice, experience, and conditions. Rather than waiting for certainty, it is better to begin.
Across Buddhist traditions—regardless of later doctrinal or institutional differences—there is a stable core of teachings that function as shared commitments rather than school-specific theories. They are:
1. The problem: dukkha
Life as ordinarily lived is marked by unsatisfactoriness, instability, and vulnerability. This is not pessimism but it is the diagnosis of the life we experience.
2. Causal explanation
Suffering arises due to causes and conditions, most centrally craving, clinging, and ignorance. Nothing occurs without causes and conditions.
3. Cessation is possible
Everything is impermanent. Because suffering is conditioned, it can cease. Liberation is not something added to the world, it is the ending of clinging itself.
4. The path is practical and transformative
Liberation is achieved through a path of cultivation involving:
ethical restraint,
mental training,
and wisdom or clear seeing.
(However phrased, these three functions are universal.)
5. Impermanence (anicca)
All conditioned phenomena are unstable and unreliable. This is not merely temporal change but the absence of anything that can be held as fixed.
6. Non-self (anattā)
No phenomenon—physical or mental—can be identified as an independent, enduring self. This is a methodological insight aimed at ending appropriation, not a metaphysical claim about what “exists”.
7. Conditionality / dependent arising
Phenomena arise and cease in dependence upon conditions. Nothing stands alone or possesses self-grounding existence.
8. Anti-reification orientation
Concepts, identities, and even doctrines are tools, not realities to be clung to. Reifying them, just like we consider the self as existing on its own—not depending on anything— is itself a source of suffering.
9. Liberation through insight, not belief
Freedom comes from seeing processes as processes, not from adopting correct views as dogma.
10. Compassion as a functional outcome
As clinging to ourselves weakens, concern for others naturally increases. Compassion is not imposed; it follows on from the insight that we depend on others.
Different traditions elaborate, theorise, or ritualise these points in divergent ways—but they do not meaningfully reject them without ceasing to be recognisably Buddhist.