Buddhism 101

I've been trying to think of things that aren't directly related to religion that we can talk about, and I thought Buddhism might be a good start, as it's not a religion or faith, but a way of living and understanding reality and our personal existence. We don't worship Buddha (though some S. Asian traditions do), but venerate him for his teachings. I'm not saying it's the best philosophy in the world, we each have our own 'best', I offer the below just for the sake of interest:

Not many people are aware of the fact that Buddhism comprises of different levels of knowledge. Each is called 'expedient means', teachings that will help a particular kind of student at a certain level of understanding. Think of these levels as being a small part of the larger picture - none is individually wrong, but the first few levels are incomplete, or intermediary explanations. When looking at Buddhist thought people tend to fix on entry level Mahayana, which is a little like Buddhism 101, an overview of basic concepts of morality. Move beyond this into higher forms such as Mahamudra or Dzogchen, and few would recognise it as being the Buddhism they know. In the same way that we have, say, Newtonian Physics and Quantum Physics, neither is the complete picture, but a part of the whole.

One of the main things that people misunderstand is the idea of Karma. Karma emerged from Hindu thought, and didn't originally mean that if you do bad things you incur bad things in return, but that if you do bad things then you'll become bad. It morphed as an idea through the various cultures who reinterpreted the idea in light of their own local religions, and now it's become a supposed staple of Buddhist thought. However, the idea of Karma is again just an intermediate understanding, and something that students are taught to let go of as they rise through the teachings. It is expedient means, and just an easy way of explaining certain principles to students of lower acumen - not wrong, but ultimately, not right either.

This is an excellent explanation of our lack of fixed thinking at higher levels.

...Yes, there are certainly ideas and concepts taught in Buddhism. But they are not "fixed" doctrines to be attached or carried around by us. They are cures for sickness, They are something like "Drano" that is used for eliminating a clog in a pipe. When water regains its smooth and natural flow, "Drano" is no longer necessary. Buddhist ideas and concepts are antidotes against the poison of human attachment. Since we are attached to various objects, Buddhist teachers challenge us with ideas such as "impermanence" and "emptiness" and destroy our attachment...."

The necessity to avoid dogma and fixed ideas isn't one to make us somehow open-minded or better people, but is tied directly with our quest for enlightenment, which can be thought of as a path to personally experiencing the true nature of reality. Thinking that we know reality, having fixed ideas, actually stands in our way of dong this, so throughout the teachings you'll see instructions to let go of attachments to ideas, to avoid 'reification' and 'acceptance or rejection'. With no judgement or analysis of reality, our minds are free to percieve its true nature in an experience of realisation or cosmic consciousness.

The above doesn't mean that Buddhists aren't allowed opinions, or that we should disregard proven truths regarding science or any other kind of intelligent inquiry. But on the whole because a fixed reality of the kind that most people regard as being here neither exists nor does not not exist to us. We aren't concerned with this reality as the be all and end all of existence, but a greater reality that we thinkit may be a part of. In some respects, this greater reality might resemble a god of some kind. But we don't think of it as a being, or anything that can be conceptualised in that way, but it certainly 'has' (and has not) the qualities of being beyond time, ineffeable and beyond restrictions and extremes as god is. We see it as a featureless state of nothing/something, with no divine plan or hand in man's actions, but more along the lines of an inertial frame in quantum mechanics.

In some ways again, Buddhists echo the christian (tao, Hindu, Moslem, etc., etc) idea of One-ness, everything is one thing. As such it's important to understand that when trying to reach enlightenment we aren't hoping to transcend this reality and move somehow into a spiritual plane where we merge with greater reality. We are it already, we have no need to reach what we already are. Practice is learning to understand what we are and amongst other things (this is rather a simplification) just resting in knowledge of our true condition. When we do that, we may again have experiences of enlightenment.

The above is very brief and those Buddhists here will cringe at some of the generalisations I've made to keep this short. Obviously there's much more to Buddhism than the above, so if anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer them here or by PM.

Just a thought too, why don't we have a sticky for each of our beliefs here, an overview that other members can refer to? Individual branches of Christianity say, Judaism, Islam, etc and their key beliefs? It would certainly help clear up some misconceptions.

MelT

 

I'll keep my responses as brief as possible, but if you think they're inadequate I'm happy to expand on them. In Buddhism we have Vajrayana, which is a variety of tantra that this site talks about. I'm not in favour of what much of the site says to be honest, as it misrepresents a lot of tantric ideas and in places, QM too. The main problem though is that it takes the intermediate teaching of 'mind' as though it were ultimate, setting out to prove something that we don't actually believe. However, I do believe that there are a number of very interesting correlations between buddhism and some areas of physics. I'll dig out a few things and post them here.

MelT

 

Good questions. Buddhism isn't a religion, so it doesn't concern us if there's a god or not. We're more interested in trying to find ways to get over personal conditioning that makes us materialistic, or depressed, or angry, etc. The reason that Buddhism was incorporated into so many other cultures is because, to some extent at least, you can hold onto some ideas from theism and still be a Buddhist. Think of it in some ways as a set of moral precepts (disregarding the realisation aspect for now) and tools for self-help that can be bolted on to your current beliefs. There is a limit though, because as we don't talk about the soul or god, our core ideas won't mesh well with some aspects of christianity, simply because the sooul and god aren't what we're about.

Some branches of Buddhism do see themselves as religion-like because of the way that it grew in certain countries, but Buddha took pains throughout his life to point out that he was an ordinary man and that it would be wrong to worship him. For it truly to be practiced as a religion, there would have to be some kind of deification of him, or some direct connection with spirituality. Buddhism doesn't think of itself as spiritual, or dealing with another 'godly' reality, but more about discovering extensions of this reality that we're normally unaware of.

MelT

 

If you don't mind I'm going to jump around from subject to subject within Buddhism rather than feed you things that you could find on any site concerning it.

We could in some respects split Buddhism into that which is practiced for self-betterment and that practiced with the aim of reaching enlightenment. Not everyone within Buddhism tries to gain realisation though, and whether anyone goes down either route is entirely up to them.

I want to stress the fact that meditation as many think of it is an entry stage practice to prepare the mind for other sorts of work, the main one of which is understanding reality, a key method of gaining enlightenment. When you do know aspects of reality in the right way, it can lead to shifts in consciousness into various states just by thinking about reality correctly, without meditating at all. This is how some people have become enlightened by understanding a particular phrase or concept. Anyone here may read the following and experience a shift,large or small, and I'd suggest that if you are going to read it, do it when you're high, as that'll help a lot.

I'd like to explain a key principle now that those who are interested in realisation would learn as a key facet, that of Emptiness. It's very straightforward and simple (even obvious) logic that anyone can understand, but grasping it leads on to other, deeper forms of practice. Sorry, it's quite long, so I've put it here in the smallest possible font so that those interested can cut and paste it into a reader.

EMPTINESS/SUNYATA
Take a coin from your pocket, hold it in your hand, and you'll probably believe that you're grasping a fixed, solid object - but the action of light and oxygen, and the sweat on your hand, is causing the coin to continually lose atoms from its surface and to decay and change. The coin is also interacting outwardly too, affecting things in its vicinity, as the atoms and photons it projects into the atmosphere alter other objects they come in contact with in similar ways. Everything around us is equally unstable – and equally connected to and integral with the world around itself. Nothing crystalises into being one unchanging thing or stops interacting with its environment, but is instead either increasing, decaying or transforming, without ever having its own real, independent nature.

In Buddhist terms, emptiness is the absence of 'inherent self-identity' in objects and reality, and again it shows that every action and object is always linked in some way or another to the actions and objects around it. Think of self-identity as being a definable thing that makes a cup a cup or a tree a tree which, if it were removed, would stop these things from being themselves. No matter what you look at you'll find that nothing has self-identity, and therefore nothing can be thought of as a stand-alone object in its own right. Everything exists in reliance on a chain of co-dependent events that it can never be separated from. Our reality and what's in it is in a continual state of change. Let's use emptiness as a starting point in our deconstruction of reality:

Imagine a table. Say you were to take a few inches off each of the legs, would the table still be there?

“Of course it would.”

Say you then actually removed one of the legs, would the table still be there then?

“Absolutely.”

But say I now take away three of the legs completely?

“That’s a bit harder to define, but yes, the table is still there.”

...And now I remove some of the planks that form the table top as well?

“With only one leg and not much top left it’s not a pretty sight, but yes, the table is uhhh....”

Now I take off the final leg. Where is the table now?

“Well, it’s still there - and it isn’t. There’s part of a table top, but...”

Okay, let me take away a couple more of those planks you have there from the table top, and maybe that bit of beading from around the edge of it too. Is there a table there now?

“No, not really, I have what was a table...”

So, you’re saying that the essence of the table has gone?

“Kind of. You took away most of what made it a table. Like the legs for instance-“

Was the table ‘in’ the legs we took off?

“No, legs are legs...”

So the table was in the parts of the table top we removed? Those planks of wood contained the essence of the table?

“No. The table hasn’t gone anywhere I don’t think - but what’s left isn’t actually it...but neither is it in what you’ve just taken away.”

Where has the thing that makes us call it a table, gone? We might decide then that the table’s table-ness (its inherent ‘self-identity’) is in a number of elements (called 'aggregates' in Buddhism) put together in a particular way to make something we call a table. But the parts themselves - the legs and the top - also lack self-identity and are also aggregates; the table is 'empty'. Being empty means that a table neither exists nor does not exist in the strictest sense, it’s just a name that you give to something that has a certain shape and function, what it is at a particular point in time. There isn’t one part of the table by itself that you can say is ‘table-ness’, as in reality, what is there is just a group of aggregates, causes and conditions. In a way, the table is defined simply by its name, shape and use, rather than its existence. Instead of us stating that, ”There’s a heap of things in a particular shape over there...”, we use general definitions, like the word 'table, to talk about groupings of things to make life easier to describe.

Emptiness also shows, just as with the coin example above, that everything shares an unavoidable co-dependence. Think of it like the fall of dominoes in one of those record-breaking displays, where some dominoes will pass on their energy to the next domino in the chain and create visible patterns, whereas others will fall and go no further. Emptiness isn't the movement of the dominoes or the shapes they create, but an overall sense that objects – and even the present and future - can not be separated from the history of causes and conditions that led to their existence.
So, according to both science and esoteric thought, you could imagine that reality is like a sea with a current of water flowing within it that creates eddies and whorls of movement. If we look closely at the movement we might think that we see shapes and faces, but all that's really there is just the sea alone. Our use of language and ideas has made us describe the current and what it creates as being a separate entity from the water around it - we're giving name to something that's never been anything other than the sea it manifests within. Of course, when we call waves on the sea 'waves' and not 'sea' we know what we're doing, as we already know that the waves are just an 'expression' of the sea. But it's harder to appreciate that we're also doing the same thing with our perceptions of reality, especially since much of its movement happens at an atomic level. When we call tables tables and trees trees, we're just talking about one thing, a flow of reality, seeming to be many things.

It can be hard to understand all of this at first, as the word ‘emptiness’ tends to imply a lack of something. But emptiness doesn’t have to be expressed as a negative - we can also say that it's a positive too, that emptiness is the basis of what we regard as this reality and the reason for its relative existence. In fact emptiness is a commonality in all things, a point where we really are all one. With nothing to denote what we might call ‘other’ - separate people, animals and objects to ourselves - there's only a Oneness, or more accurately a 'Not-Two-ness' here.

Emptiness and the Self
The deepest changes that understanding emptiness can bring about is when you realise that we aren’t only talking about external objects as being empty. Just as importantly, our own bodies and minds are all empty, relative, and not much more than the words that describe them. Whereas most people can quickly understand that the physical side of themselves is not the place where ‘they’ are, they can't let go of the idea that their ‘self’ is something that exists somewhere in their minds. But your mind, your character and thoughts, your memories, the personal things that you think of as you, are also empty. They’re all part of a flow that changes from day to day, from minute to minute - there is no permanent, definable you. Your thoughts are a chain of events, each reliant on the last, vanishing the moment they appear.
As for your physical presence, the carbon in your body was created in our Sun as a part of a process that began over 15 billion years ago when the universe was formed. You are in a constant state of change and decay, and upon your death the elements that you're created from will return to the earth, where some cataclysm will one day hurl them out into space where they become a constituent of another star, and the cycle will begin again.

Try applying the idea of emptiness to yourself, trying to find the real essence of what makes ‘you’. Point now to where ‘you’ are, the thing that if someone took it away, would make you no longer exist. You might be pointing at your chest or head, but neither of those things is your self-identity, they’re just parts of a thing you call you. When trying to identify ‘self’, all you can ever do is point to things that are aggregates that again have no self-identity.

Your urge may be to see the idea of emptiness as just some kind of mental game that has nothing at all to do with the ‘real’ world, that all we’re doing is playing with words. I thought just that too when I first heard about emptiness. I learned it, found it quite intriguing, but then I let it stay inside myself as just something I knew and understood. But it’s no good learning anything about the universe if you don’t then let what you know be a real part of the universe you perceive. The power of emptiness to change you and your perceptions lies in applying it to your reality, not leaving it as something you simply know. Unless you put a lot of time into looking at things and understanding that they are empty, your reality will still be defined subconsciously by you in just the way it was before you understood emptiness as a concept.

Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamaka school of Indian Mahayana, showed that the idea of emptiness was essential to our understanding of reality, and wrote a vast amount about it. In these verses he indicates that although we have to talk about objects in a conventional sense as things with their own nature, in the truest sense they have no essence of their own and are mainly words that don’t describe what anything really is. Anyone who grasps this fact and applies it correctly becomes freed from a wrong view of reality and takes a major step towards realisation.

“Though the Buddhas have spoken of duration, origination, destruction, being, non-being, low, moderate, and excellent by force of worldly convention, [they] have not done [so] in an absolute sense”

MelT

 

Somebody asked by PM about the Buddhim, and whether it promoted the idea of not having emotional ties to 'worldly objects' and whether or not it means not taking any chances. It's such a good question I'll answer it here.

Again, think of Buddhism as in two parts, one part is methods of self-help, the other to aid realisation. In terms of self-help, Buddhism recognises that a lot of our problems and worries are caused by the need for material things, or the fear of losing them. If we learn to let go of attachment to, and need for, posessions then we go a long way in cutting back our problems. It doesn't mean that we don't buy things, or try to live in poverty, but if we learn to see objects as transient pleasures that really don't have much bearing on whether we're happy or not, then having or not having 'things' is no longer an issue.

You can still be an ambitious Buddhist and amass a fortune and have a thousand cars, but once you analyse and understand your own needs for these things, the desire for them is reduced dramatically. They become symbols of prosperity rather than things you actually need. And if they are symbols, who are you displaying them for? Why do you need to both be rich and tell other people about it too? What does displaying really give you? Are you hoping to rub other people's noses in their lack of similar wealth? etc., etc. A lot of work in Buddhism is simple self-analysis, and it's suprising how rarely we do analyse our motives for acting and thinking like we do.

I'll be honest, sometimes you can get very vivid insights about yourself coming up from time to time as you begin to analyse and meditate, and it's not always pleasant. Things you realise about yourself will make you shudder and are so humbling that they can't help but change you. But if we don't look we can never change, if we never change then we're stuck forever being who we think we are, always reacting in the same ways, always being saddened/gladdened by the same things, whether that's in our best interests or not.

In the big picture though, enlightenment, the call to avoid worldly attachments is for a different purpose and is more a case of avoiding attaching ourselves to a particular view of reality. We avoid 'reifying objects', thinking of them as beng separate things from the rest of reality, that possess inherent self-essence, as I explain above in Emptiness.

MelT

 

Hi BD, I didn't want to use your name here, just in case you wanted to keep our conversation private. Yes, the above is fine - as you say, not everyone amasses things purely to show off to others. What we say is that no matter what we have it will come and go and it's no good worrying about losing or gaining posessions. Everything is transient, and as long as you aren't deeply attached to the things that you do lose, that makes their loss easier to cope with.

Yes, enlightenment aside, a set of guidelines to help you better cope with life and others.

MelT

 

Can you say what these contradictions are? I'm not quite sure what you mean?


MelT

 

More on attachment:

If you're attached to objects then you're seeing them as non-empty, conceptualising them as certain things, rather than knowing you don't truly know what they are. It's no good trying to see through the relative illusion we call our universe if we're still seeing things as being fixed.

How can you practice to reach enlightenment and not be attached to it?

Non-attachment is practiced more for worldly reasons of self-help, and as a precursor to the higher non-practice of non-reification (avoiding thinking of things as being fixed in one form), but we can relate it to practice in some ways too:

A very, very important idea for meditators who are on the path to bear in mind. is that we don't strive to reach enlightenment, we practice meditation for the benefits it gives here and now, and if realisation happens within it that's great, but we understand it may not. If we were continually trying to reach something that may never happen then that would be more dissatisfaction and unhappiness in our lives and not less. So we practice, enjoy it, amass a few tools that may/may not make enlightenment more feasible, and leave it at that.

The second we try to reach enlightenment, and have intent to do and act within meditation, then we're no longer meditating in a way that will facilitate it, as our thoughts and striving get in the way of the event happening. It's very hard even for novice buddhists (and you have to bear in mind that only a proportion meditate, it's not a fixed requisite) in the early stages of practice to understand this, and even harder for outsiders. The phrase we use is to meditate 'without hope or fear' - that is, without hope for enlightenment, and without fear of not already having it - but just for the sake of meditating and helping ourselves in the here and now. The latter is the main thing to bear in mind, we aren't trying to go anywhere or reach anything, but hoping to understand and live as what we already are - which may happen with or without meditation and enlightenment.

If we recognise what we are instantly, then there's no need to practice in the traditional sense. People regularly do reach the end before the beginning so to speak, and tens of non-buddhist/non-hindus have realisation experiences without having meditated a day in their lives and without knowing the first thing about it. All meditation does is help things move along and make it more likely. Anyone who strives earnestly to reach what they already are will fail. This is simple excerpt from a famous writer on Dzogchen a few hundred years ago, admonishing people not to strive or go anywhere or do anything but be here, with full understanding. The idea of non-action/non-striving is continually referred to in our texts:

So stay here, you lucky people,
Let go and be happy in the natural state.
Let your complicated life and everyday confusion alone
And out of quietude, doing nothing, watch the nature of mind.
This piece of advice is from the bottom of my heart:
Fully engage in contemplation and understanding is born;
Cherish non-attachment and delusion dissolves;
And forming no agenda at all reality dawns.
Whatever occurs, whatever it may be, that itself is the key,
And without stopping it or nourishing it, in an even flow,
Freely resting, surrendering to ultimate contemplation,
In naked pristine purity we reach consummation.

And from another text, showing that you are already are what some try to become:

Awareness is unstructured, natural radiance, your own mind, so how can you say that you cannot see the Buddha? There is nothing at all to meditate upon in it, so how can you complain that meditation does not arise? It is manifest Awareness, your own mind, so how can you say that you cannot find it? It is a stream of unceasing radiant wakefulness, the face of your mind, so how can you say that you cannot see it? There is not so much as a moment of work to be done to attain it, so how can you say that your effort is unavailing? Centred and dispersed states are two sides of the same coin, so how can you say that your mind is never centred? Intrinsic Awareness is the spontaneously originated three modes of being, which is achieved without striving, so how can you say that your practice fails to accomplish it? It is enough to leave the mind in a state of non-action, so how can you say that you are incapable of attaining it? Your thoughts are released at the moment of their inception, so how can you say that the antidotes were ineffective? It is cognition of the here and now, so how can you say you do not perceive it?

All the early stages of what seems like trying to reach something is actually just building up a set of tools and understandings, some as self-help with nothing to do with enlightenment, some to show, by logic and personal experience, particular things about reality. Yes, there is work to do, but it's all preparatory. Once you have the tools there is no practice, you enter the stage of 'no-meditation', again, without becoming attached to it. And we also have to take great pains to not get attached to non-attachment and no-meditation too!

MelT