The Bare Essentials of Buddhism
A Rudimentary Guide for Westerners
By Justin Hartfield

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." - Buddha

There is much confusion in the Western world over the basic tenants of Buddhism. Many Westerners believe that Buddhism is -- a) a religion circulating around the worship of a portly Asian sage (often gilded or bronzed and meditating near the door of your favorite Chinese restaurant holding the mints and toothpicks), b) involving a lot of sitting in uncomfortable positions, and c) coldly atheistic or fancifully pantheistic (depending on which section of Wikipedia you consult)

Of course, when inspected closer, these stereotypes and inadequate attempts of pigeonholing a religion that has neither formal creed nor “divine” teachings is absolutely useless.

At least in the Judeo-Christian sense, Buddhism is not a religion. Instead, Buddhism is more like a collection of insightful observations centered on a single principle- the study of what is. A Buddhist isn't interested in what might or what should be- he is simply interested in analyzing reality as it is, without undue romanticism or abstraction.

Now this sounds simple, but it’s actually quite hard to discern what is and what is a mere fabrication.

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." - Buddha

This is because, according to Buddhists, our thoughts are very good at distracting ourselves from reality. Instead of experiencing things as they are, many experience life in terms of ideas (and subsequently in language and words) and are thus unable to ever experience true reality. It’s as if we were eating the menus instead of entrées.

So a good Buddhist becomes like a baby again, forgetting every preconceived notion and experiencing reality without bias or unnecessary agitation. The influential German psychoanalyst Carl Jung put this in his own way, when he said a completely emotionally stable individual has the ability to "see through the game."

It is said that in this state of 'unknowing' certain symbols begin to melt away (e.g. good and evil, right and wrong, black and white). Even the very concept of the self, the I or ego, disappears. Interestingly, experiments have shown that babies believe every external event or object is inseparable from themselves and that all happenings are caused by their own doing, which is essentially the principle underlying every Eastern religion, including Buddhism.

So what does exist to the Buddhist?

The tides of the ocean, the seasons of weather, the birds singing, the river babbling, the sun shining, and the ever changing on and off patterns of nature.

The Zen proverb says:

Sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself

"I'm so enlightened I'm like glow-in-the-dark" - Jay-Z

The first Buddhist was of course, the Buddha, although this isn’t a proper name. It is simply a term for anyone who isn’t under the dreamy spell of thought-born concepts, or literally translated “the Awakened One”.

The real name of the founder of Buddhism was Siddhartha Gautama, a north Indian prince who began teaching around 500 BC. He called his lectures the 'middle way' because it was grounded in the practical, every day reality (in stark contrast to the excessively spiritual Hindus of the era) yet more disciplined and esoteric than the other prevailing ideology of the time, hedonism.

In the Buddhist conception of the world, all thoughts are symbols and all symbols must have an aspect of both yin and yang, because humans can only identify ideas if they have a logically opposite reference point.

If one is constantly seeking pleasure they will surely find it; they will also (and necessarily) find suffering, however, since pleasure can only be felt in comparison to its yin counterpart, suffering. To the Buddhist, pleasure and pain aren't two separate entities but one, acting like a wave that has both crests and troughs, or a coin that has both heads and a tails.

An end to desire

A Buddhist story goes like this: A group of disciples came to the Buddha and asked him to teach them how to eliminate their suffering. The Buddha tells them that their suffering stems from their desires and that their desires were always being disappointed when they failed to fulfill them or when they were fulfilled at an unsatisfactory level. So the Buddha tells the group to eliminate suffering, they must first eliminate desire.

So the disciples went off into the forest where they burned desire, stomped on desire, strangled desire and did everything they could to try to diffuse their own desires.

But alas, they were still unhappy. So they returned to the Buddha to ask why his medicine didn't take, and the Buddha responded, "Ah, but you are still desiring not to desire!"

The point of Buddhism is not to eliminate all feelings, thoughts or desires – it's plainly obvious that doing so is an exercise in futility. Even Buddhist meditation is just a way to prove to yourself that, regardless of how hard one tries, you cannot control your own mind because your mind is another conception, which simply has no grounding in actual reality.

The crux of Buddhism is that the only thing which really exists is this present moment. Society has come up with many fancy ideas, yogas and other fun concoctions to escape the fact that there is nothing other than the present moment. There is no other teaching to learn once one’s being is firmly entrenched in this state.

Like Jesus, the Buddha never wrote down his own doctrine. Rather his teachings were all gathered by disciples from numerous lectures and fused together to form a canon called the Tripitaka. According to these texts, the Buddha taught that if one were to recognize all of the thought symbols of the world and vanquish them, they would enter in a state of permanent satori or enlightenment and be forever free from doubt or worry. He prescribed a (simple in theory but impossible in practice) method to attain this state via what he called the Noble Eightfold Path.

Much like contemporary Christianity is associated with the worship of Jesus, modern Buddhism is now more associated with prayers and offerings to Gautama himself than the ideas which he espoused, despite his specific instructions to hold no ideals or Gods. This is unfortunate since there is much wisdom in Gautama's teachings. In fact, the Buddha would have never been a Buddhist himself, because his own teaching requires that in order to attain enlightenment one must be clear of all notions of man, including philosophies or ideals.

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written by Andy Johnson, March 26, 2008

Good, accurate article. A similar concept which helps Westerners to understand some of these ideas was taught by Descartes; he noted that we, as humans, tend to formulate ideas of real things. Because of this, it becomes difficult for us to experience any external object; we can only experience our ideas of that object. We see a table, but what we experience is a wooden thing, tan in color, that makes a sound when you knock on it. These are all only characteristics, though, it takes a lot of effort in undoing what we've taught ourselves about 'reality' to be able to truly experience the table in its raw form.

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