To be Buddhist is to follow the path laid out by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), emphasizing the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to achieve enlightenment (awakening) and liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth (samsara). Key practices include meditation, cultivating compassion, and living ethically according to precepts like refraining from harming, stealing, and lying.
Core Teachings
The Four Noble Truths:
Dukkha (suffering): Life involves suffering, unease, and dissatisfaction.
The Origin of Suffering: Suffering arises from craving, attachment, and desire.
The Cessation of Suffering: It is possible to end suffering.
The Path to End Suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path provides the way to end suffering.
The Noble Eightfold Path: This is the "Middle Way" that leads to awakening and includes right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
Karma and Rebirth: Buddhists believe in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth called samsara, which is influenced by one's past actions (karma). The ultimate goal is to break free from this cycle.
Key Practices and Beliefs
Meditation: A core practice to develop wisdom, clarity, and insight into the nature of reality.
Ethical Conduct: Adhering to guidelines such as refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and intoxicants.
Compassion: Cultivating goodwill and friendship towards all living beings.
Enlightenment (Nirvana): The ultimate goal is to reach a state of profound wisdom, peace, and liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth.
What Being a Buddhist Means
Being a Buddhist is not just about intellectual understanding or ritual but about experiential practice and self-discovery. It involves incorporating the Buddha's teachings into daily life to cultivate inner peace, compassion, and wisdom.
So what do these guys do here..
Dukkha (suffering): Life involves suffering, unease, and dissatisfaction.
The Origin of Suffering: Suffering arises from craving, attachment, and desire.
The Cessation of Suffering: It is possible to end suffering.
The Path to End Suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path provides the way to end suffering.
Where's this suffering comes from.. like.. wtf with these guys, eh? Like why do they need this buddha guy? So what do they do about homeless people.. they go.. oh you can just come live at my place. Meanwhile they're like meth fentanyl zombies standing there hunched down in the street. lol. Or you give them 20 bucks and it's gone in 2 hours and they're hungry in a few hours later. Those are not solutions.
Within buddhist tradition there is the saying, "If you see the buddha on the road, kill him."
The meaning is that the buddha is NOT a man but an understanding. Only literalists believe in buddha as person, and to do so is to misrepresent and will accomplish nothing.
Another story has a monk and a priest sharing a cabin in the woods in the winter and freezing. To survive, the priest takes a statue of the buddha and throws it into the fireplace, making a fire. The ignorant monk yells, 'You can't do that!' in protest. When the fire is done, the priest takes a poker and stirs the ashes, causing the monk to ask, "Why are you doing that?" The priest replies, to find the ashes of the buddha." That was meant as a lesson to the monk about the difference between literalist thinking and the use of symbols vs understanding the reality.
Exoteric vs esoteric understanding. What is the difference? It's lost on the literalist.
You don't get to misrepresent something you misunderstand and then critique it from that misrepresentation. The same is true with gnostic vs orthodox christianity. One is a lesser literalistic perversion of the deepest tenets.
Now do Zen.
Can't wait to see the sophomoric slant given to that with half understanding.