Buddhism is a path of practice and spiritual development leading to Insight into the true nature of life. Buddhist practices such as meditation are means of changing oneself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom. The experience developed within the Buddhist tradition over thousands of years has created an incomparable resource for all those who wish to follow a path - a path which ultimately culminates in Enlightenment or Buddhahood.
Because Buddhism does not include the idea of worshipping a creator god, some people do not see it as a religion in the normal, Western sense. The basic tenets of Buddhist teaching are straightforward and practical: nothing is fixed or permanent; actions have consequences; change is possible. Thus Buddhism addresses itself to all people irrespective of race, nationality, or gender. It teaches practical methods (such as meditation) which enable people to realise and utilise its teachings in order to transform their experience, to be fully responsible for their lives and to develop the qualities of Wisdom and Compassion.
There are around 350 million Buddhists and a growing number of them are Westerners. They follow many different forms of Buddhism, but all traditions are characterised by non-violence, lack of dogma, tolerance of differences, and, usually, by the practice of meditation.
You can find answers to some common questions about being a Buddhist on the Clear Vison website
Buddhism started with the Buddha. The word 'Buddha' is a title, which means 'one who is awake' - in the sense of having 'woken up to reality'. The Buddha was born as Siddhartha Gautama in Nepal around 2,500 years ago. He did not claim to be a god or a prophet. He was a human being who became Enlightened, understanding life in the deepest way possible.
Siddhartha was born into the royal family of a small kingdom on the Indian-Nepalese border. According to the traditional story he had a privileged upbringing, but was jolted out of his sheltered life on realising that life includes the harsh facts of old age, sickness, and death.
This prompted him to puzzle over the meaning of life. Eventually he felt impelled to leave his palace and follow the traditional Indian path of the wandering holy man, a seeker after Truth. He became very adept at meditation under various teachers, and then took up ascetic practices. This was based on the belief that one could free the spirit by denying the flesh. He practised austerities so determinedly that he almost starved to death.
But he still hadn't solved the mystery of life and death. True understanding seemed as far away as ever.
So he abandoned this way and looked into his own heart and mind; he decided to trust his intuition and learn from direct experience. He sat down beneath a pipal tree and vowed to stay there until he'd gained Enlightenment. After 40 days, on the full moon in May, Siddhartha finally attained ultimate Freedom.
Buddhists believe he reached a state of being that goes beyond anything else in the world. If normal experience is based on conditions - upbringing, psychology, opinions, perceptions - Enlightenment is Unconditioned. A Buddha is free from greed, hatred and ignorance, and characterised by wisdom, compassion and freedom. Enlightenment brings insight into the deepest workings of life, and therefore into the cause of human suffering - the problem that had initially set him on his spiritual quest.
During the remaining 45 years of his life, the Buddha travelled through much of northern India, spreading his understanding. His teaching is known in the East as the Buddha-dharma or 'teaching of the Enlightened One'. He reached people from all walks of life and many of his disciples gained Enlightenment. They, in turn, taught others and in this way an unbroken chain of teaching has continued, right down to the present day.
The Buddha was not a god and he made no claim to divinity. He was a human being who, through tremendous effort of heart and mind, transformed all limitations. He affirmed the potential of every being to reach Buddhahood. Buddhists see him as an ideal human being, and a guide who can lead us all towards Enlightenment.
Soon after his Enlightenment the Buddha had a vision in which he saw the human race as a bed of lotus flowers. Some of the lotuses were still enmired in the mud, others were just emerging from it, and others again were on the point of blooming. In other words, all people had the ability to unfold their potential and some needed just a little help to do so. So the Buddha decided to teach, and all of the teachings of Buddhism may be seen as attempts to fulfil this vision - to help people grow towards Enlightenment.
Buddhism sees life as a process of constant change, and its practices aim to take advantage of this fact. It means that one can change for the better. The decisive factor in changing oneself is the mind, and Buddhism has developed many methods for working on the mind. Most importantly, Buddhists practise meditation, which is a way of developing more positive states of mind that are characterised by calm, concentration, awareness, and emotions such as friendliness. Using the awareness developed in meditation it is possible to have a fuller understanding of oneself, other people, and of life itself. Buddhists do not seek to 'evangelise' or coerce other people to adopt their religion, but they do seek to make its teachings available to whoever is interested, and people are free to take as much or as little as they feel ready for.
The Four Aryan (or Noble) Truths are perhaps the most basic formulation of the Buddha's teaching. They are expressed as follows:
Another formulation of the path is the Threefold Way of ethics, meditation, and wisdom. This is a progressive path, as ethics and a clear conscience provides an indispensable basis for meditation, and meditation is the ground on which wisdom can develop.
To live is to act, and our actions can have either harmful or beneficial consequences for ourselves and others. Buddhist ethics is concerned with the principles and practices that help one to act in ways that help rather than harm.
The core ethical code is known as the five precepts. These are not rules or commandments, but 'principles of training', which are undertaken freely and put into practice with intelligence and sensitivity. The Buddhist tradition acknowledges that life is complex and throws up many difficulties, and it does not suggest that there is a single course of action that will be right in all circumstances. Indeed, rather than speaking of actions being right or wrong, Buddhism speaks of the being skilful (kusala) or unskilful (akusala).The Five Precepts are as follows:
Abstaining from drink and drugs that cloud the mind. The positive counterpart of this precept is mindfulness, or awareness. Mindfulness is a fundamental quality to be developed the Buddha's path, and experience shows that taking intoxicating drink or drugs tends to run directly counter to this.
Many Buddhists around the world recite the five precepts every day, and try to put them into practice in their lives.
Meditation is the second stage of the threefold way.
There are many things in life that are beyond our control. However, it is possible to take responsibility for and to change one's state of mind. According to Buddhism this is the most important thing we can do, and Buddhism teaches that it is the only real antidote to the anxiety, hatred, discontentedness, sleepiness, and confusion that beset the human condition.
Meditation is a means of transforming the mind. Buddhist meditation practices are techniques that encourage and develop concentration, clarity, and emotional positivity. By engaging with a particular meditation practice one learns the patterns and habits of the mind, and the practice offers a means to cultivate new, more positive ways of being. With discipline and patience these calm and focused states of mind can deepen into profoundly tranquil and energized states of mind. Such experiences can have a transformative effect and can lead to a new understanding of life.
Over the millennia countless meditation practices have been developed in the Buddhist tradition. All of them may be described as 'mind-trainings', but they take many different approaches. The foundation of all of them, however, is the cultivation of a calm and positive state of mind.
The aim of all Buddhist practices, including meditation, is prajna, or wisdom. The Buddha taught that the fundamental cause of human difficulties is our existential ignorance - our failure to understand the true nature of reality and wisdom is the opposite of this.
To start with, we simply need to hear the teachings that indicate the Buddhist vision of life. Then we need to reflect on them and make sense of them in relation to our own experience. But prajna proper means developing our own direct understanding of the truth. It is not enough to know the Buddha's philosophy, or even to have a good understanding of it. The ultimate aim is to realize the truth for oneself and to be transformed by that realization.
The Buddha taught that life - everything we experience - has three characteristics. He called these the three marks of conditioned existence. Firstly he said that all life is dukkha, or unsatisfactory. He also said that it is impermanent. Everything in the universe, including ourselves and the thoughts that make up our minds, is in a constant process of change. And yet we act as if the world around us is predictable and stable, and we live our lives as if death were not a certainty. Buddhists reflect on the fact of impermanence, and try to live with this understanding. Thirdly, wherever we may look in life for something something solid and unchanging, we only find flux. So he said that all existence is anatta or insubstantial. There is no fixed, abiding essence to things, and no eternal soul within human beings.
A person who is wise in the Buddhist sense will naturally see life in terms of these qualities or marks, and prajna means setting aside the pleasing illusions that we adopt to make life comfortable, and to live more and more on the basis of these truths. A full comprehension that nothing lasts, or has anyfixed substance, has an utterly transformative effect. This also means that everything in life is interconnected: no individual is entirely separate from other individuals, and humanity is not separate from the world it inhabits. From this naturally arises compassion, or universal loving-kindness, which is the counterpart of wisdom.
The ideals at the heart of Buddhism are collectively known as the Three Jewels, or the Three Treasures. These are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It is by making these the central principles of one's life that one becomes a Buddhist.
The Buddha refers both to the historical Buddha and to the ideal of Buddhahood which is open to all.
The Dharma primarily means the teachings of the Buddha, or the truth he understood. Dharma has many meanings but most importantly it means the unmediated Truth (as experienced by the Enlightened mind) and Buddhist Teachings, the Truth as mediated by language and concepts. In the second sense Dharma is the teaching that was born when the Buddha first put his realisation into words and communicated it to others at Sarnath in Northern India. The occasion is traditionally referred to as `the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma' and the eight-spoked Dharma wheel is a common emblem of Buddhism.
As well as this Dharma, refers to the entire corpus of scriptures which are regarded as constituting the Buddhist canon. These include records of the Buddha's life (known as the Pali Canon), scriptures from a later date, and the written teachings of those people who have attained Enlightenment over the centuries. The whole canon is many hundred times as long as the Bible and it represents a literature of unparalleled riches. It includes works such as The Dhammapada, The Diamond Sutra, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Another meaning of Dharma is the practices which are outlined within the scriptures. Despite the wealth of its literature the essence of Buddhism is very simple: it is finding ways to transform oneself. It could be summed up as 'learning to do good; ceasing to do evil; purifying the heart' (as the Dhammapada says).
The third of the `Three Jewels' is the Sangha or the spiritual community. Buddhism is not an abstract philosophy or creed; it is a way of approaching life and therefore it only has any meaning when it is embodied in people. So Buddhists place great value on the fellowship of others who are treading the same path, and those who embody its goal. In the broadest sense the Sangha means all of the Buddhists in the world and all those of the past and of the future. In practice it particularly refers to other Buddhists with whom one is in effective contact.
Buddhism being a path, some people are further advanced along it than others, and particular respect is paid to the lineage of great teachers down the millennia. Beyond this, the ideals of Buddhism find their embodiment in archetypal figures known as Bodhisattvas. For example, Avalokitesvara is the embodiment of Compassion, and he is depicted with four, eight, or a thousand arms with which he seeks to help sentient beings; Manjusri is the embodiment of Wisdom and he is depicted carrying a sword with which he cuts through ignorance. Together the Bodhisattvas and the other Enlightened teachers are known as the Arya Sangha or community of the Noble Ones.
As a Buddhist living in the Western society and in the era of globalization, I have often thought of the significance of the five sila or precepts in Buddha's Teachings that lay Buddhists traditionally are given to uphold. The more I have thought about it, the more reassured I am of their powerful meaning in today's world. Here is a modern adaptation in English of the five sila, along with my comments, to illustrate their timeless relevance.
I endeavour to refrain myself from harming any sentient being (We must all wake up to the serious depletion that we, of the human species, have inflicted upon the resources of Mother Earth and embrace strategies for sustainable development. This means saveguarding the endangered species in the animal world as well as the fast disappearing marshes, savannas, marine flora and rain forests. Some scientists have argued that plants are also sentient beings. Our ancestors had learned to live in harmony with Nature, seeing to it that resources were being preserved for the livelihood and enjoyment of generations to come. Sure enough, many had to kill with their own hands as a matter of course in order to feed themselves. But their slaughters would have amounted to a mere fraction on the scale of operations in today's fully-automated slaughterhouses. Sure enough, there had always been wars among rival tribal clans, but there were none of these senseless and amorally murderous destructions of both lives and environment on the scale of today's fields of landmines, chemical warfares or blanket-bombing.)
I endeavour to refrain myself from taking that which is not given (This covers not only the black-and-white acts of stealing, but also, for example, the murky instances where one uses one's position of power to take possession of something that otherwise would not have been given out of free will.)
endeavour to refrain myself from having unlawful sexual relations (This goes beyond adultery to include other licentious excesses the like of incest, sexual abuse, sex with a minor, and so on.)
I endeavour to refrain myself from speaking that which is untrue (This relates to those occasions when what came out of one's mouth may not be an outright lie but certainly was not the truth either. Sometimes, saying something which is untrue may be done in the spirit of protecting another person's feelings as in "I love your gift!". But who is lying to whom when you promptly recycle the gift you so "love" to another person? Think about what an accumulation of these little untruths does to your own self-esteem, not to mention the erroneous understanding that people will ultimately have of you. And then there are those utterings that are made purposely to hurt and belittle another person, such as racial slurs, name-calling and all the social prejudices that people repeat around and around.)
I endeavour to refrain myself from dulling my mind (These days there are so many ways one can dull one's mind, besides alcohol and drugs. Just look at the ever-expanding selection of self-help books on addictions and addictive behaviours. There are now work-addicts, TV-addicts, sex-addicts... and internet-addicts! On this note, I better sign-off the e-mail circuit and the Net so that I can endeavour to resharpen my mind with some insight meditation.)