Buddhism basics, and why it works

[Sandra M. Lopes]

Hi all,

After reading many of the discussions here (I haven't read all!), I thought that maybe it would be easy, for a newcomer to this subforum, to gather, at a glance, what Buddhism is all about, and this is my attempt to summarise things. It still is a huge text! Bear with me, Buddhism is really a mouthful of things, and it's not easy to summarize *everything* (later in the text, you'll see a summary in just four lines, but it takes a lot of time to explain what those four lines mean!).

First of all, a very important warning: Please take into account that I'm not a qualified teacher, and I have little practice and even less realization. What I've learned and hope to be able to reproduce here, as best as I can, is thanks to my own teachers, most of them having over 30 years of daily Buddhist practice, and, as such, have a high level of realisation which allow them to explain things quite well even to silly people like me. Some of what they told me managed to stick in my mind, in spite of my constant distractions and lazyness, so I guess my teachers are really, really good at what they do!

I'm also using some unconventional language sometimes. This is something I learned from transliterated Tibetan words describing Buddhist concepts — some of the transliterations are funny (Tibetans do have a sense of humour!) but they often make more sense than the equivalent, high-brow translations in Western languages like English. There is a good reason to use precise scientific and philosophical terms, of course, because there might be less ambiguity that way — as long as you know what the meaning actually is. If not, then it's highly likely you'll misunderstand the meaning. I'll provide a few examples below

Last but not least, there are lots of schools of Buddhism, and each presents a different view and different methods to accomplish that view. There is no contradiction here: human beings are all different, and, as such, there are different ways which are more suitable for some people than the others. The Buddha himself is usually credited to have developed 84,000 different methods! Later, others who followed those methods accomplished the same kind of realisation that Siddhartha Gautama had, and, since they had different students, they added even more methods. It is pertinent to ask how we can know which methods are "Buddhism" and which are not, so I'll start with that!

So obviously I'm not familiar with all schools and all methods, but just with a small amount of techniques that are commonly taught in my own school. Naturally, I tend to be slightly biased towards the methods I'm familiar with, and I will emphasize them more, but please understand that different schools will place a slightly different focus on other aspects. Again, there is no contradiction here; these are just different approaches, which work better for different people, and all are equally valid. If you happen to disagree with me, remember, there are lots of good teachers from other schools which might make more sense to you. Don't judge the whole of Buddhism by the words of a single person, who is not even a good practitioner, much less a teacher!

I will also include below some sections for you to be able to evaluate who is a good teacher, and to distinguish Buddhism from other approaches, so that you can have a "roadmap" or "guide" if you decide, after reading this, to learn Buddhism from a qualified teacher and put it into practice.

What is Buddhism?

Ironically, there is no such thing as "Buddhism". In Western thought, an -ism is usually a philosophy, an ideology, a religion named after its founder. We'd be inclined to think, "Buddhism is the philosophy/religion/methods invented by the Buddha", but Siddhartha Gautama would have been shocked to find out that future generations had named a religion after him!

Historically, the first reasonably complete translations of Buddhist teachings in the West were compiled by the Theosophists, a religious/philosophy group which acquired some fame in Europe and the US in the late 19th century, and who somehow wished to integrate all religions and philosophies into a single system. Unfortunately for us, inhabitants of the 21st century, the Theosophists were strongly influenced by Christian thought and theology, so they translated a lot of things borrowing words and expressions from Christianity, thus often failing to grasp the meaning (a similarity can be seen in China, where translators used expressions from Taoism, and for many decades, scholars were baffled about certain texts which sounded like Taoist teachings but actually were Buddhist ones). Even though we have far better translations these days, a lot of terminology was still kept from the early work of the Theosophists (who are still around, btw), and we're thus encumbered with some horrible translations thanks to them....

They also coined "Buddhism" as "the religion of the Buddha". Now, in the East, there is no "Buddhism"; usually, the teachings of the Buddha are simple referred as (yes, you got it!) "the teachings of the Buddha" (Buddhadharma in Sanskrit). There are no "Buddhists" either, which would mean "followers of Siddhartha Gautama" — that would also make no sense to Siddhartha, he wasn't looking for "followers"! Instead, in the East, they're just called "practitioners" (meaning: they put the teachings into practice) or eventually some word meaning "inner person", meaning, someone who is willing to look at their own minds and observe it.

The difference is important, because "Buddhism" is neither a religion, nor a philosophy, nor a science — but borrows elements from each. The external rituals might look "religious", but they are merely memory aids to make practitioners remember, at all times, what they're supposed t be practicing and what their ultimate goal is. This is not different from rituals we have at home, like putting the car keys on top of the table so that we remember where we left them. Ok, so nobody has invented a religion around the way we place keys on top of tables (not yet at least!), so we would reasonably say that rituals have some value, but they're not what matters. An accomplished practitioner with excellent memory might not need any rituals at all.

A large part of the Buddhist teachings is about reasoning and logic. So it would seem it's a philosophy, because it establishes things like ontologies and ethics. However, the purpose of Buddhism is not to turn people into intellectuals endlessly discussing the meaning of words! Philosophy aids the intellect to establish some confidence in the teachings, so that we feel compelled to put them into practice and reap the rewards. "Blind faith" has no purpose in Buddhism; everything is to be questioned (oh yes!) — as soon as you do something because you "believe" you'll get some benefit from it, you've dropped out of Buddhism (and won't get any benefits whatsoever — harsh, but true: "faith" does not "save" anything in Buddhism). Buddhism is about having an open mind to learn about new ways of looking at things, then question them to see if they make sense. To do so requires a formal system — that's why there is logic in Buddhism! — and that's why ancient teachers have recorded philosophical themes and topics, and even famous debates with other philosophies, to explain better what is so unique about Buddhism.

Buddhism is also not exactly a science, although some like to describe it as "a science of the mind". There are some reasons for that: what the historical Buddha accomplished cannot be described, but a method to accomplish the same goal is possible to be taught. This method is reproducible (it means that anyone following the method will reach the result) and invariant (the method will work, no matter who is using it, where they are located, and at which time they live). While the accomplishment of a realised practitioner is not "measurable", its effects are. This, roughly speaking, is pretty much what (Western) science proposes as a method for acquisition of knowledge and mirrors the scientific method used by some sciences like psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and so forth. However, the purpose of Buddhism is not to scientifically establish a method that works and promote it as the ultimate goal; the method only looks quite similar to what scientists do because, well, perhaps it's the best way to accumulate knowledge and make predictions

So, if Buddhism doesn't really exist as a word, and it's not a religion, nor a philosophy, nor a science, what is it then? I would probably say it's a roadmap to change one's mind to be able to successfully deal with all adversities in life (and yes, I mean all) and give us freedom of will, beyond all compulsions. And, once you've travelled a bit along the way, you will also be able to teach others to do precisely the same.

Who was the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama?

There are lots of biographies of Siddhartha Gautama, but I'll only address the most important aspect: he was a normal human being, just like any of us. He wasn't "specially blessed", or a "god", or had some superpowers, or was in touch with "powerful beings who helped him". The only not-so-ordinary thing about him is that he was a prince and led his life in his youth in the middle of luxury and debauchery — not much unlike a rich grad student would do nowadays So, no, he wasn't "holy", or a Puritan (he had a wife and a harem!) or anything of the sort.

However, he had a characteristic that perhaps many of us lack: persistence. He didn't gave up until he found out a method to stop all suffering, which he saw to be the biggest problem that every sentient being has to face on a daily basis. So if you wish to attribute something "special" to Siddhartha Gautama, then it would have to be this persistence — because he thought that the suffering of everybody in the world was unbearable for him, he didn't give up until he found a method that worked to relieve everybody from their suffering. Most of us are too lazy to be that persistent in our own practice, and that's why we haven't figured out the trick yet! But, fortunately for us, the method is reproducible by anyone, and, as such, hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people have accomplished exactly what Siddhartha Gautama accomplished, because they were as persistent as he was.

What is a Buddha?

Essentially, the word means "awakened", in the sense that one very simple way of describing the universe around us is that it behaves just like a dream, and what Siddhartha did was to "wake up" and look at the dream as it really is, not as we think it is. This is often misinterpreted as "the universe is a dream" or "the universe is an illusion", which is actually Hinduism, not Buddhism! "Like a dream" means that it shares some characteristics of a dream, but not that it actually, literally, is a dream. There is a huge difference!

Put into other words, a person that is called a Buddha is someone who sees things as they are, and not as they perceive them to be. The easiest way to understand this is to do a simple experiment: watch a magician  on stage performing one of his tricks. A child in the audience will not know it's a trick, and so they perceive the illusion as if it's real, and believe that magic exists. An adult might know that magicians do tricks, but not understand how they're done; they're still pleasantly astonished with the illusion, but they know that it cannot be anything but a trick, because they know that magic doesn't exist and that magicians just use tricks to achieve the illusion. They can be fooled in thinking that the illusion is very convincing, but they cannot be fooled to believe that magic exists. The magician, however, knows exactly how the trick is done, and he's not fooled at all; he knows magic doesn't exist, and he just performs a sequence of steps to create that illusion. It doesn't "astonish" him like it does astonish his audience because he knows very well what he's doing and how the trick works.

We are all like the children in the example: we look at the world around us, and think it's real, that it exists by itself, and it's hard to convince ourselves otherwise. Buddhas are like the magician in the example: they can see things exactly as they are and cannot be fooled by appearances. A practitioner is like the adult in the example: while they still are fascinated by the illusion, they already know it is an illusion (maybe because they have had a glimpse of how things actually are, and not as they appear to us to be); however, unlike fully awakened Buddhas, they don't perceive reality directly all the time.

If this seems that Buddhas somehow acquire supranatural powers... then I failed to explain things properly. In the example, adults and magicians know that magic doesn't exist; it's just a trick. The magician, having learned how to do those tricks, doesn't acquire supranatural powers! They are just, well, very good at doing tricks, and, as such, they might impress the poor children, who look at what magicians do and imagine they've got supranatural powers. But they don't! The same applies to Buddhas: they might look to us as if they can "work magic", but, in fact, all they have done is to perfect the "trick" of observing reality as it is, and that is, for them, as "natural" as breathing.

Magicians can teach children how to perform tricks, and, when they learn that, they might be excited because they figured out how to work illusions! But, in fact, all that the child learned was how to do the sequence of tricks that looks like an illusion. If a child continues to learn more and more tricks, then he might become a stage magician as well. That's what Buddhas do: they teach tricks to children (us!), tell us how to get better at them, and, in turn, we might become Buddhas as well.

One thing I dislike in this example is the use of the words "trick", "illusion", and "magic", because in the first case ("trick") it seems that we're somehow cheating others, and the two other words have strong connections to supranatural powers. It's nothing like that. Unfortunately, all examples using words will ultimately fail, and there is always the risk of misinterpretation, but I've stuck to the example because it's a classic one!

Why do Buddhists meditate?

Meditation. Another tricky word. Again, it's also a terrible translation made by the Theosophists. In the West, meditation might mean one of two things: deeply think about something, over and over again ("I'll meditate on the problem until I find a solution!") or the reverse: "thinking about nothing", "emptying the mind from thoughts" — this comes mostly from popular depictions of meditation in movies and TV series, and borrows the meaning from some Hinduist schools.

Let's be clear from the start: our brain is a thinking machine; that's what it does. There is nothing more natural than having thoughts. So it's actually stupid to try to "stop thinking" — it won't work, unless, of course, you get hit on the head and fall unconscious Also, if you're looking for a simple way to stop thinking, you just need to drink a few beers, it's easier than spending years in "meditation". The reverse is also true: methods like "positive thinking", where we try desperately to replace our depressive thoughts by artificially creating new, so-called "positive" thoughts, will just get us more anxious and stressed ("oh no! I forgot to think positively!") — and anxiety leads to suffering, which is exactly what Siddhartha Gautama was trying to avoid!

Instead, we can borrow the Tibetan word for meditation, which is "gom", and just means "getting familiar with". And what do we get familiar with? Our own mind. And we start by getting familiar with our own thoughts, feelings, emotions, compulsions, obsessions, and so forth — by observing them, but not rejecting them nor encouraging them. That's what Buddhists do when they meditate: they're just paying attention to what goes on in their minds!

What's meditation good for?

A good question! My teachers have always told me that, in Buddhism, you shouldn't do anything unless you understand what it's good for. Just doing things without a clue leads nowhere.

To get an idea of what meditation is good for, let me try to give an example, which I'm sure anybody has experienced before. Suppose you're in a happy relation with your S.O., and, one day, they annoy you. You get furious and tell them something nasty, which makes you both angry. At that moment, the anger is so great that you feel compelled to react — you have no choice, the emotion is overwhelming. But, later on, perhaps after a few hours, days (or sometimes years!), you replay that scene in your mind, and think, with regret: "How could I have been so stupid? There was really no reason to be so angry and answer in such a nasty way!"

So, once we are "far away" from the problem, somehow detached and not involved with it, we can look at our own errors and recognise how stupid they were. So we know it's possible! The problem is: when the emotions like anger rise, they're impossible to control; we are held captive by our feelings, and even justify them saying, "it's only reasonable that I reacted that way, it's my nature, I cannot control myself when I'm angry".

What Buddhist meditation does is to reduce the time between the rise of the emotion and its automatic, compelling behaviour, and the moment when we realise how stupid that automatic behaviour is. Instead of waiting hours, days or years, we reduce that to a single instant. That's right: the idea is to catch the very moment the emotion rises, and, before our automatic behaviour kicks in, we are free to decide, with our own free will, if we act in a conditioned way, or if we prefer to act differently.

Notice that this doesn't mean "suppressing" the emotion (as some Hinduist schools propose). We still feel the full force of the emotion just as before; in fact, since we're paying close attention to the very moment it rises, we might even feel it stronger than before! The difference is that we stop acting in a conditioned way; we regain our free will to act reasonably, in spite of feeling a powerful emotion which usually conditions us. This is the result of what meditation does.

Impossible? Well, let me confess a tiny little thing: when I started meditating, I didn't "believe" it was possible at all, I thought that there was some kind of trick involved, like having a calm mind that somehow never had strong emotions (again, more Hinduism...). Now imagine my shock when, one day, I was arguing with my S.O. about something stupid, and I suddenly got very, very angry at her, like I usually do when she annoys me utterly. As the saying goes, I "saw red" — heart beating, warmth spreading all over my body, frowning deeply, and I opened my mouth to yell at her and say something nasty, sarcastic and hurting but... I stopped.

I was experiencing the full force of my anger, but, instead of automatically yelling at my S.O., I suddenly noticed I had the option to yell or not to yell. I think I even opened my mouth... and closed it while I became a bit confused about that. Where was that automatic reaction that I expected to happen naturally?

I remained silent for a second or two. My S.O., who was also quite furious at me at that time, noticing I didn't reply, even insisted angrily: "Are you going to reply to that or not?!" But I didn't. I didn't know what to say. I remained silent, and then the anger flushed away on its own. I suppose my face registered the change, since my S.O. relaxed and calmed a bit, and asked me if I was ok!

We both stopped being angry, and admitted to each other that it was stupid to continue the discussion, and so all was well.

So, what had happened? Buddhist meditation is about awareness, mindfulness, attention. By constantly training these techniques over and over again, one becomes familiar with them. It's like learning to drive a car: you remember how stressful it was on the first days with the instructor? So much to remember, so many new things to do! One's arms might hurt from spending an hour glued to the driving wheel. And over and over again we might think, "I can't do this, it's too hard, I'm not talented enough to drive a car" and so forth. But because we trained it over and over again, even after getting the driving license, after a while one starts to be able to chat with the other people in the car, listen to the radio, and still be able to pay attention to everything, and do things "automatically" because we have learned to do so. The same applies to pretty much everything in our lives that we have learned: we don't remember any more how hard it was for us to learn to write, to take a shower, even to go to the toilet or to walk! But, in fact, we don't need to be "talented" or "special" to learn any of those things — we just need to persistently do them over and over again, until we learn it, and then we can do it naturally. Any of us can walk and talk at the same time — but how long did it take to learn to put a foot in front of the other and remain erect?

The same happens with meditation. By learning to observe one's own thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, and everything else that happens in our mind, we become familiar with the way our mind works, and then being able to react in a conditioned way or a reasonable, useful way becomes easy over time. In fact, there is no way you cannot learn that: if you do your practice correctly, you have no choice but to become acquainted with the workings of your own mind, and situations like the one I described will become "normal". And with more training, of course, you'll reach a point where you can do that 24h a day (yes, during sleep as well). It might sound impossible, but remember, Olympic marathon runners had to learn how to walk just as anyone else — they just continued their training further and further. It's hard? Yes, for sure! But definitely not impossible! To reach the state where I can catch myself feeling angry and being able to react in an unconditioned way, but fully aware of what I'm feeling and what I'm supposed to do, just took a few years of meditation — far less time than learning how to spell properly!

Of course, anger is one powerful emotion, which is the easiest to detect. Things like pride or jealousy and envy are much harder to catch. Not to mention what Buddhism calls "erroneous views" — for example, the fixed idea we have that everything around us is solid (when quantum mechanisms knows very well that this "solidity" is just apparent; atoms are made essentially out of vacuum and nothing else, except perhaps a loose electron or two, which cannot even be established exactly where it is — remember Heisenberg? — and that is enough to create an electromagnetic field which somehow makes atoms keep their position. That's "solidity" for you. But we all think otherwise!). Of course those things are much harder to realise, specially being aware of them every single moment. But that just means more training!

[Sandra M. Lopes]

Why should people meditate, then?

You might read this and think, "well, ok, I understand that Buddhism is not trying to suppress emotions and thoughts, just getting rid of conditioned responses to those emotions and thoughts, but I actually like those automatic responses — yelling at someone or kicking them hard when I'm furious relieves my stress due to anger! Why should I change the way I am?"

This is a good question, and one that has multiple answers. First, you should understand that there is not "one" Buddhism with "one" method, and different schools will provide different answers (and debate them endlessly!).

There are perhaps three major groupings of all schools, and the most easily accessible school is known as the Foundational Vehicle (or Hinayana, which actually means "small vehicle"). "Vehicle" here is just a metaphor: you're travelling along a path which leads you to realisation, and you use a "vehicle" to do your travel. Different paths lead to different places, so it's logical that we might need different vehicles, depending on what "place" we wish to go. The Foundational Vehicle focuses on yourself only, and proposes a way for you to stop acting in a conditioned way, but have the freedom instead to act sensibly and reasonably. While doing so, you get less depressed and frustrated, and deal with everything that happens to you in a sensible way; that way, even others get a benefit when dealing with you, because you won't be pestering them so much!

In my own example above, what happened? Firstly, I didn't yell at my S.O. and thus avoided regretting it later. That was my own benefit for not reacting in a conditioned way. But I also benefitted my S.O.: seeing that I remained silent and didn't bark at her, she also calmed down, and we stopped arguing. So we both benefitted that way. This is the reason why New Age groups somehow see a Buddhist monk and think that they have strange mystical powers to calm everybody down and make everybody feel good around themselves... like the Dalai Lama, which will make everybody smile just by looking at them! Magic? No. It's just that a highly accomplished practitioner will never willingly do anything to make other people angry, frustrated, envious, and so forth, and by doing so, everybody around them will be a little more calmer, a little more happy, even if it's only for a while. Not because they have "mystic powers", but just because they have trained their minds not to act in a rash way to hurt others, but constantly refrain from harming others. And they do that all the time. This is noticeable! That's why we usually feel good around those kind of people.

But there is also a bit more to that. When I'm angry and become aggressive towards others, it's true that there can be some "stress relief" — feeling a bit happier because I've hurt someone else. However, this sense of happiness will quickly fade. In fact, in the middle of an ugly discussion, I might be "happy" for a split second for having said something that made the other person quiver with rage, being unable to reply.... until they find something even nastier to say about me, and all my "happiness" fades away instantly and I'm angry and furious as before. Worse, I might become even more angry, because now there is even more reason to be furious — the original reason (whatever it was) and additional anger for having "lost" that moment of temporary happiness which resulted from "scoring". So I need to be even more nasty, to regain that moment, and you can see how this can easily escalate out of proportion — to the point of breaking relationships. That's conditioned behaviour.

So, among the many trainings Buddhists do, one is to observe how these "moments of happiness" are always very temporary and fade away on their own. Sure, sometimes they can last for long: if I win the lottery, I might be able to spend a lot of money buying cool things, and, while the money lasts (and the things don't break apart!), I might be happy for a long, long while. But at some point, the money will not last any longer — or the revenue service might tax me heavily — or the lottery guys figure out that they gave the money to the wrong person — or, well, you die, and there is no more enjoyment to be had! The same happens to everything: circumstances change, and, when they do, our momentary happiness will also change. Just think about how many relationships you have gone through: with each single one of them, you started believing that "love is eternal" and that you would now have ever-lasting happiness! But very soon you will realise that the other person is changing (and so are you; but that's harder to see and accept!), and, when that happens, "it's not the same person" you have been in love with, and you break the relationship, because that person is unable to give you more "happiness" as before and dared to change and become a different person!

Accepting that things change on their own is part of what Buddhists call "impermanence". Scientists will call that "entropy": as time passes, everything fades, and the process cannot be reversed. So it's not as if your beloved companion changes "on purpose" just to spite you; no, we are constantly changing, and that means that, no matter what we do, we cannot "get hold" of a "permanent happiness" — circumstances will change, and, as such, things will change as well, and so will our happiness. Fortunately, this is also true for the reverse: there is no "permanent unhappiness" either! Even someone who is physically hurting from an injury will not hurt all the time; during sleep, for example, they will not feel the pain; and eventually one will heal, and the pain will go away.

One might argue that, if we just have the "luck" (or the skill) to hit on the right circumstances, we might be able to "turn the tide" and hit "permanent happiness". So we spend all our lives trying to do exactly that, and, in fact, we're educated to think like that — you have to go through college, get a well-paid job, marry the right person, have kids, buy a house and three SUVs, fill your home with gadgets, and so forth. All these are attempts to "create permanent happiness". However, like entropy in the universe always grows, and perpetuum mobile devices are impossible because of it (even though every year insane inventors try to file a patent for that!), you also cannot create "permanent happiness" (but, thankfully, you cannot create "permanent unhappiness" either). This should be obvious, from an intellectual point of view — we all learn about entropy at school! — but, however, we act precisely as if things are permanent, and become incredibly surprised when we find out they're not!

Just take a look at your own reaction when your newly bought car, computer or iPhone breaks down for the first time! You feel what you think to be "justified anger", because something so new shouldn't break down! What that means is that you believe that all these things you buy or get — like relationships! — are supposed to be permanent, at least for a long while, and become terribly frustrated when they're not. We all react that way, so we think we're justified in thinking that we were "unlucky" when something broke down, or, worse, we feel "cheated" because we expected something to last longer than it did. Because we attach permanence to things that are, by their own nature, impermanent, we suffer a strong disappointment.

Worse than that, we usually don't even see how one thing leads to another. We feel justified to yell at our S.O. because we expect that the anger of our words will stifle them down, giving us a permanent sensation of happiness — happiness because of our "power" or "ability" to keep them "in submission" somehow, for a long time. In fact, we expect that "long time" to be very long indeed. But what we're doing when constantly angering our S.O. is to create the causes for them to sever the relationship much earlier — which will bring us frustration (and perhaps even more anger!). What is happening here? We're blind to the real causes for the relationship to fall apart, which is our constant yelling at our partners; instead, we think that we can make a relationship "more permanent" if we yell at our partner to "keep them in check". When the relationship breaks apart, we put all the blame on our S.O. — they "changed", they were unreasonable, they required constant yelling just to keep appearances, they were not acting their expected role in the relationship, or, well, we can simply say we were "unlucky" and "those things happen" and are "beyond our control". What that means is that we invent all kinds of justifications for a relationship to terminate, except looking at the real causes: it was our constant yelling all the time. This, unfortunately, we fail to see.

All these things are part of the Buddhist training. It's not only paying attention to one's mind and what happens "inside" it, it's also realising how everything is constantly changing all the time, and nothing lasts "forever" — and that believing otherwise is just fooling ourselves. And it's also looking for the true causes for things to happen, instead of inventing "wrong" causes which simply are just that — inventions, justifications. Figuring out how everything is constantly changing, but that they change because of appropriate causes, is "looking at things as they really are" instead of as they appear to our senses. Some teachings call this "Right View"; others might say "Clear View" or "viewing the true nature of things". Again, it's nothing mystical or magic, not something that requires "special powers", and is actually quite easy to see and understand. The difficult part is to be aware of all this at every moment and not expect things suddenly to become "permanent" or to appear "randomly, without causes" because that's what we are conditioned to expect to happen.

When we see things the right way, we are not disappointed that things break apart or obstacles appear because that's the way things happen. When our car breaks down, we don't start kicking it, or blaming the salesperson, or yell with everybody ("It's your fault, my car worked perfectly yesterday, you must have done something to it!"), throw a tantrum, or just weep uncontrollably in sorrow. We just accept that cars will never last forever. That doesn't mean we'll be careless with the car! In fact, exactly because we know they will not last long, we will even take more care about them, so as to enjoy the car as much as possible — which will enhance our happiness while using the car, but also stop feeling regrets, sorrow, and frustration when finally the car breaks down. The same applies to relationships: instead of fearing all the time that the other person will change, and that means our happiness with them will disappear, if we understand that both partners are changing all the time, and constantly creating causes and conditions for arguments to arise about pretty much everything — then we can accept and adapt, avoid arguments, learn to accept that change and even derive pleasure from it, and, by doing so, enjoying the relationship much more. Ironically, it's exactly when we fully accept that a relationship will not last forever that we will be able to maintain it for much longer — because we will be so used to constant changes that they will not affect us! Very short relationships come from a strong expectation that the "ideal partner" will remain "ideal" forever. Long relationships know that there is no such thing as "an ideal partner", and that the "ideal partner" of yesterday might very well be the nightmare tomorrow; but, as in my own example, once we learn how to deal with the "nightmare" (nightmares will also fade away!), and get rid of the expectations that all has to be rosy and cheeky, then we will actually enjoy relationships for much longer.

Just to be thorough, the above is a very brief description of what the Foundational Vehicle offers as a vision. There are two other vehicles: the next one (actually, all were revealed by the Buddha, so talking of "first" and "next" is a bit silly, but that's ok) goes one step further.

It's called "Great Vehicle" (Mahayana) but the name might mislead us to believe it's "greater" and "better" than the Foundational Vehicle — but that's completely wrong, both vehicles are "equal" in the sense that they lead to results when applied properly; it's just the vision/view that is different. The Mahayana has the view that, once we understand how people are frustrated and depressed because they lack the understanding of how to live their lives, we feel an unbearable compassion towards all beings and want to teach them how to get rid of their own suffering. And by "all beings" I really mean all — not just your friends and family, but everybody, even the terrorists in Syria are suffering because they don't understand how their actions are hurting themselves (and others). This is tough! How are you able to do that for everyone?

Well, Mahayana practitioners, once they reflect upon this apparently impossible task, will come to the conclusion that the only kind of person able to help everybody to get rid of their frustrations is a fully realised Buddha. So their practice is not only to be able to deal with one's own emotions, feelings, ideas, etc. but they have to go much further than that: they wish to become Buddhas, just as Siddhartha Gautama did. Since Siddhartha was certainly able to become a Buddha, we know it's possible, and Mahayana Buddhists will follow exactly the same steps. So, in Mahayana, you're not concerned about merely yourself; your concern is  mostly about every sentient being, and the strong desire that all of them become Buddhas and get rid of their frustrations, but, to do that, you have to become a Buddha yourself. These two aspects are called bodhicitta (which is usually mistranslated as "compassion" — all Buddhists are compassive, not only Mahayana Buddhists! — so I won't use that translation): the strong wish to become Buddhas and place every sentient being on the path of becoming Buddhas as well. So now you understand the word "Great Vehicle": unlike the Foundational Vehicle, which fundamentally helps one single person (yourself), even though that path will also benefit others indirectly (because you won't be pestering them so much), a practitioner of the Great Vehicle wants everybody to reach Buddhahood and works to achieve that for everybody.

We know it's not impossible because Siddhartha managed to do so, but it certainly will take a lot of time and might be too slow! (Mahayana teachings might say that it takes "several eons", an eon being roughly defined as the time that a universe will last — from the Big Bang until there is no energy left in the universe, as an astrophysician would say) So, there is a further vehicle, which is essentially also Mahayana, but where practitioners understand that because people are suffering now, we need to become Buddhas quicker — preferably in a single lifetime. This is the essence of the Diamond Vehicle (Vajrayana in Sanskrit), and the word "diamond" is not really meant as something very valuable (although those teachings certainly are valuable!), but merely that it is Indestructible: the point being that once you become a Buddha, you can't "turn back" to having a confused mind

One way my main teacher explains the difference between the vehicles is by using the following example. The Foundational Vehicle is like a small car: you drive in it along your path and eventually reach the destination on your own. The small car is easy to drive, but it's not very fast; but it's also safe to drive, and you only need to worry about your way and everything will be fine.

The Great Vehicle is like a bus. It might also not be very fast, but it brings a lot of people to the same destination (including you, the driver). However, a bus is much harder to drive than a car, and it takes special training. And, of course, you're now responsible for all your passengers as well, so you have to drive safely not only for yourself, but also for the comfort of your passengers. In fact, being a good bus driver is not only about yourself, but mostly about bringing all your passengers to the final destination (but, of course, you will also go to that same destination), and bring them safely there.

The Diamond Vehicle is like a Jumbo Jet. It's incredibly fast to reach the destination and it also brings a lot of people there (because it is essentially Mahayana as well). However, learning how to pilot a Jumbo Jet is not for the faint of heart; it's incredibly hard to learn how to pilot an airplane, you have to precisely follow a very rigid set of rules, and the slightest mistake becomes a catastrophe. A pilot must pay close attention to a lot of tiny details, all the time, or the plane will crash; and learning how to fly is much harder and takes much longer than learning how to drive a car or a bus. But the benefits reach further and, of course, you get results much sooner!

Different parts of the world, because they have different kinds of people, may have a vehicle more widespread than others. India, where Buddhism started, actually has few Buddhists — they were all wiped out during the Islam invasions in the 12th century, which destroyed all Buddhist universities, most of the temples, and killed almost all monks who didn't manage to escape. In Thailand, the predominant vehicle is the Foundational Vehicle (although up in the mountains of Thailand you occasionally still find some Vajrayana practitioners), which is usually the image most people have in mind of Buddhism. China, before the Cultural Revolution, was mostly Mahayana — China is credited with the development of the Ch'an school, which was later brought to Korea (another Mahayana country) and finally introduced in Japan, where it was renamed "Zen" (a transliteration in Japanese of what "Ch'an" sounds to a Japanese); although Japan still has two relatively large Vajrayana schools in existence for several centuries, most Buddhists in Japan will be part of one of the Zen schools (also note that most of what passes for "Zen Buddhism" in the West is just a watered-down version of the original Zen schools, changed to better suit the tastes of commercial spirituality in the West). Vajrayana is widespread in the Himalaya region, covering a vast territory from Nepal and Butan, North India, Tibet, until Mongolia and Russia; however, the number of practitioners is small (Tibet has just 6 million inhabitants, and Buddhism has been forbidden for many decades there); India was almost exclusively Vajrayana at the time of the Islam invasion, so most teachers who managed to escape went up the mountains and taught their methods to the barbarians living there An interesting feature of Tibetan Buddhism, as opposed to other schools, is that its practice incorporates all three schools and practices them simultaneously without contradiction; that's why Tibetan Buddhists are almost obsessive in preserving every teaching they can, no matter what school it originally belonged to; according to their vision, anything that is Buddhism and leads to realisation cannot be "wrong", no matter what school it belongs to, and so, they have successfully preserved a lot of completely different teachings. Even today, some Tibetan Buddhism teachers might prefer to teach according to the Hinayana or Mahayana vehicles, depending on their audience, and will not "mix up" their vision with the Vajrayana vision.

So many different schools! How do I know which ones are "for real"?

This is actually one of the first questions I was taught to ask! Every time you meet another person (and this is specifically true if you meet a teacher!) claiming to be a Buddhist, the first thing you should ask is what their lineage is.

Lineage is a measure of credibility: it means that every Buddhist practitioner should be able to know where they got the teachings from, and where their teachers got them, all the way down in time until Siddhartha Gautama himself. Yep, that's right: a valid lineage is one that has a long succession of teachers and disciples starting with the Buddha and is supposedly unbroken. No other lineage is valid in Buddhism, and all valid schools today, with qualified teachers, will be able to tell exactly where they got their teachings from.

This might surprise us Westerners, because we're not able to trace our own teachings so accurately (I mean, who taught your first class teacher how to read? And who taught that teacher in turn? We simply don't know). However, in Buddhism, it's crucial that people know exactly what they are doing, because a wrongly-applied mind training will bring no results whatsoever, and, in some cases, it might even be hurtful. A typical example: imagine you pick up a book on meditation and, because of bad translations, you think that somehow you need to meditate "emptying your mind", and you understand (wrongly) that somehow you have to stop thoughts from appearing. Now you teach that to someone else, and tell them "this is Buddhism!".

Two things happen: first, this person won't have any results whatsoever, so you're spoiling their chance of attaining realisation. But, even worse, that person will tell others, "Buddhism is a scam, nothing works as announced!" and that means that more people will turn away from the Buddhadharma.

To avoid that to happen, students don't "apply" to become teachers. It's not like going to college to become a doctor, and when you get a degree, you can open your practice and start doing surgery, because you have a college degree. In Buddhism, even if you go through a 12-year course in advanced Buddhist studies (and that means studying at least 330 days a year, 16 hours per day), and finish with a 3-year retreat, you don't start to teach immediately. No, what truly matters is the level of realisation you have, and the motivation for teaching others, and this is the job of your own teacher: once he or she notices that your motivation is correct (working towards the benefit of others, not for your own personal glory, fame, or wealth) and your realisation is good (you can actually practice according to the teachings you've studied, and have achieved the expected realisation due to that practice), then you might be asked to teach others. A good telling sign that a student might be ready is when his or her teacher asks them to start teaching but they refuse because they feel they don't know enough and have no realisation whatsoever! By contrast, someone who is very eager to teach others has probably the wrong motivation to do so, and a good teacher will refrain them from teaching anything and just require them to practice more, until they develop a better motivation.

So now you know. If you go to a Buddhist teaching, the first thing you should ask afterwards is what that teacher's lineage is, and who asked the teacher to teach. This is not offensive; you can ask that of the Dalai Lama, and I'm sure that even His Holiness will provide you with an answer (and, in fact, he might secretly be very happy to see someone that respects the lineage and wishes to know more). In fact, the correct attitude towards the Dalai Lama is not to respect him because, well, he is the Dalai Lama after all, or because he is fun and entertaining, or has a lot of knowledge, or is very charismatic. No, a Buddhist student will respect the Dalai Lama because he had excellent teachers, who in turn had excellent teachers and so forth, and because one can see in the Dalai Lama that he has put those teachings in practice and achieved realisation.

A good rule of thumb for figuring out who is a good Mahayana teacher (and that applies to Vajrayana as well, because it's just a "faster" Mahayana) is to see how much that teacher is worried about their own personal interests — even if those interests are building temples, monasteries, publishing books, etc. A good Mahayana teacher will only care about the ability to benefit others through explaining them the Buddhadharma; all else is secondary. This should be rare (after all, who doesn't have any personal interests whatsoever?), but fortunately, there are dozens of thousands of good teachers everywhere, even in the West.

Remember, in Buddhism, teachers are supposed not only to have high realisation of what they teach, but also be able to explain it in a way that others understand; they should never be worried about questions, even embarrassing ones (embarrassment is just the ego being hurt!), and should answer them truthfully and honestly to the best of their abilities. Debate and discussion is part of the process, so the old adage, "the only stupid question is the one that is never asked" is quite true for Buddhism. You should never, never, just do something because you "believe" it will work, or because the teacher is so charismatic that he or she "persuades" you to do so. Instead, you should keep an open mind, but be prepared to question everything that is said to you; a teacher who is unwilling to be questioned is not a Buddhist teacher at all. But they should also be able to answer your question!

And because it's good form to tell you my own lineage, I should tell you that I'm a Vajrayana practitioner of the Tibetan Nyingma School, but my own tradition is non-sectarian (which in Tibetan is known as the Rimay Movement), a movement which started some 150 years ago and produced great teachers who viewed all Buddhist teachings from different schools as equally valid. That doesn't mean that my own tradition mixes everything up: no, we stick to the teachings according to our particular lineage, and that's our main practice, but also study and train according to other traditions (in my case, mostly from some schools of the Kagyü tradition). Two of my teachers have been disciples of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who was credited to be the highest accomplished Dzogchen master of the 20th century. If nothing of the above makes sense to you, don't worry! It's only important because, as said, any serious practitioner should be able to present you with their own lineage and not be "afraid" or "ashamed" of telling you with whom they learned and trained. And you might have noticed that I haven't listed all the teachers until the historical Buddha. I'm using a shortcut: anyone in the Tibetan tradition will know the whole lineage of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and trace it down for you, if you're interested All I can say is that I'm "one teacher away" from this master (if there is anything I regret, is that I haven't started y own practice until well after Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche left his world; however, much of the way he taught is very clearly noticeable in the way his direct disciples teach, so nothing is really lost).

Do I need a teacher to become a Buddhist practitioner?

To put it bluntly: yes. There is no other way. Sorry!

In the West, we have this strange idea that everything can be learned from books, and we're educated to believe that to be the case. However, we actually know it's not true. For example, we cannot learn how to drive with a book — we need an instructor to show how it works. A driver's manual might be useful, once we learn how to drive, to refresh our memory, and remember how things are called, and so forth. We also cannot learn how to dance from a book, but, if we learned to dance with a teacher, the book might be useful to make us remember the dance steps and their order and so forth. Imagine what it would be to learn swimming without a teacher — you'd drown first, before you could consult the book to see what you should do! So, in practice, our schools and universities and gyms all have teachers, even though, of course, we also have books to help us to study and remember the things we've learned.

Humans also learn by imitation, and having a teacher means you have a role model to aspire to — we might wish to become as good drivers as our driving instructor, for instance. So teachers also inspire us to learn.

In Buddhism, however, there is a further reason for having a teacher. The books (and there are gazillions) are useful if you know what they mean. But you need a teacher to explain the meaning to you. Since we're all different, and each of us has our own ideas about what things mean, when we pick a book about Buddhism, we might (erroneously) think: "Ah! This is easy! It's all about love and compassion, so it's like Christianity, the difference is that instead of God, Buddhists venerate the Buddha!" This means that our own education, our society, our own thoughts, all will distort the meaning of the Buddhadharma, if we do it on our own, and this leads to the unfortunate examples of meeting someone telling us: "Buddhist meditation? It's all crap. I bought all the books from all great masters, tried everything for a decade, and didn't achieve anything but spending money — nothing works". The problem with that person is that they were unwilling to have the real meaning be explained to them, and so, they just read the books and mixed everything up with their own ideas of what they think that "meditation" should be. No wonder it doesn't work!

By contrast, a good teacher might point out a book to you, according to your level of understanding, explain the techniques and methods, show them how to do, and answer all your questions, by carefully pointing out what you're misunderstanding due to your own ideas. Then, after you practice according to the teacher's explanations, the book will make sense to you: you won't misinterpret it again, and you'll be able to use it as it is intended — as a memory refresher.

And, as said, you're not benefiting merely from this particular teacher, but from all the accumulated knowledge of all the teachers since the Buddha gave his first teaching.

Because the West has incorporated in "spiritualism" so many different roots, and mixed them all together, it's often hard to understand how Buddhism gives such an importance to the precise transmission of knowledge and instructions from teacher to student. By contrast, here in the West, anyone can start reading the Bible, claim to have found a "revelation", and start preaching in a new Christian Church. But that is also the kind of thing that commonly happens in Hinduism: it's not widely known in the West, but most Hinduist schools (and there are thousands and thousands) usually have no long lineages: although the Vedas are the most ancient sacred texts known, there is no continuity of a single school that lasted all those millenia. Rather, just like Christians, anyone is able to read the Vedas, adhere to an interpretation, and proclaim themselves a "Hinduist teacher". There are, indeed, some Hinduist schools which are quite old — interestingly enough, the more sophisticated of them (like the non-dual schools), have been strongly "contaminated" by Buddhist thought, as the Hinduist debaters had to discuss their views with Buddhist teachers, and, when they lost the argument, they were forced to adopt their views (a tradition that existed before the Islamic invasion).

But unlike Hinduism or Christianism, nobody can start to read the teachings of the Buddha and self-proclaim themselves a "Buddhist teacher". This is not how it works. And to be sure that it's not what happened, have no fear about asking that teacher what their lineage is — a genuine teacher will always be able to answer at least that question!

Some schools put even more emphasis on the teacher-student relationship. For instance, in my own school, it is said that our present teacher is even more kind to us than the Buddha himself. Why? Because we were not present when the Buddha taught, and, as such, we're still not realised beings. By contrast, our own teacher is here and now, and teaching exactly the same way the Buddha taught, so this time we can learn and accomplish realisation! This is one another reason why teachers are seen as so important — because we don't have the historical Buddha around to teach us. But we still have his teachings, and today there still are accomplished masters with the same realisation as the historical Buddha who teach!

[Sandra M. Lopes]

Ok, this is all very nice and interesting, but how should I meditate then?

There have been already a few primers on meditation in this forum, so I will just explain the rough divisions that exist in Buddhist techniques, which have been expounded by the Buddha himself.

Briefly, there are two main groups of meditation techniques, and all Buddhist schools have them (yes, all; sometimes the advertising for some groups tend to focus on one or the other type, but all schools have both). The first type is known as "shamatha" and its purpose is to tranquilise the mind. Why? Because to be able to observe one's thoughts, feelings, emotions, and all those things happening in our minds, we need a technique to be able to be both calm and very lucid to be able to do that. Note that "calm" doesn't mean "apathetic" — self-inducing apathy is, once again, not part of Buddhism but found on some Hinduist schools (Hinduism has explored a vast array of different techniques! Buddhism only preserved the techniques that actually led to the desired results, namely, a way to deal with depression, anxiety, anger, and an overall relief from mental anguish and suffering). In fact, "calm" meditation in Buddhism will lead to a state where the mind is highly active and its attention and cognitive abilities are at its peak (this has been measured with EEG, MRI, and similar medical instruments) — like, say, getting a kick from a cup of strong coffee but without the adverse effects of the adrenaline rush (which might also make you jittery and sometimes lose your focus).

So if you're looking into a way to meditate to just become sleepy and apathetic as a form of escapism (i.e. as opposed to sleeping in front of a TV), then Buddhist meditation is not for you. Rather, the attention-inducing calmness will make you more functional, diminish distractions, allow you to focus on things with pin-point accuracy, and be able to observe your own mind, moment by moment, with extreme clarity and lucidity. If you don't get those results after practicing shamatha meditation, you're doing something wrong!

In order to achieve that effect, the Buddha explained several techniques. Roughly they can be subdivided into two main groups: meditation without support (or object) and meditation with support (or object). Meditation without support means just resting in the natural state of the mind, doing nothing, just observing. But this might be not understood by beginners — it's actually harder to do than to explain! — and, as such, beginners usually start with some object to support their meditation. Again, we have two groups here: meditation using external objects (a stone, a vase, a flower, a small statue of the Buddha) and internal objects. Among the last ones, the simplest is to use breathing as a meditation support. Why? Well, we breathe all the time; that means that we can meditate anywhere, we just need to sit down and observe our breathing. There is no need to carry a handful of objects with us! Also, our feelings towards breathing are neutral: we do not "like" breathing (it's just that we need to breathe to keep us alive), but we also do not "dislike" it. If we use an external object like, say, a small painting or statue, we might get attached to it ("oh, how lovely it looks, how nicely has it been painted/carved") which gets distracting. Breathing, at least, has no such problems. Finally, among the internal objects, there are also so-called "neutral" objects (like breathing) and "virtuous" objects (the ones that will leave a positive imprint in your mind). Some schools, specially in the Mahayana, like to meditate on (internally visualised) images of the Buddha because that will leave an imprint on one's mind. For now, I won't go deeply into that, because each school has slightly different methods — the importance here is to understand that this division dates back to Siddhartha Gautama, and different schools have put their focus more on one type than the other, but none of these methods contradict each other: they're just more appropriate to some people than others, and even if you prefer one method, you might also know a few more, because, depending on the mood or location, some methods may be easier to apply than others.

The other large group is known as "vipassana" and its aim is to get "clear vision" (or some equivalent translation). Roughly speaking, by using vipassana, the practitioner looks at things as they are and not as they appear to be, and that is its goal: penetrating through appearances and see how things truly are. In the Hinayana schools, vipassana is mostly used to look at one's own mind, one's own thoughts, and recognise their lack of solidity, and thus refuse to take them so seriously. Mahayana schools additionally also look at phenomena and external appearances to understand that they are as little "solid" (as we saw above) as our own thoughts and feelings and emotions.

To be able to practice vipassana correctly, one should have mastered shamatha first. So, one starts by doing some mental exercises to calm the mind and enhance its lucidity; and when tranquil and lucid, it's now time to look at things as they are. An unruly mind, always looking for distractions, will be unable to focus on mental objects in order to ascertain their nature. So, usually, you start doing shamatha until you master it, and then move on to vipassana, but that doesn't mean that vipassana is "better" or "more advanced" — it just has a different goal, and you cannot do vipassana without a tranquil mind anyway.

Tibetan Buddhist schools usually train both methods simultaneously (remember, they want to reach results fast) but I won't go into details here; I'm just mentioning this because it's really important to understand that all Buddhist schools have the two divisions in shamatha/vipassana, even if, from an outsider's perspective, it might not be easy to figure out which is which!

So, to recap: using a shamatha technique you will be able to calm your mind and train yourself to recognise things like emotions, and be able to escape some conditioning due to them — as in my own example of being angry with my S.O.! By using vipassana, one can see how emotions and feelings come and go, they never stay for long around, it's hard to see where they come from, much less where they go when they fade, and that gives us an idea that they are not so real and not so solid as we think. When applied to our own mind, this is the experience of "no-self" that so many people like to repeat. Basically, it means experiencing the way our self emerges from all these thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions, emotions, and so forth, that are bundled together in our mind, but which, by itself, has no intrinsic existence. It's the sum of the parts that we label "self". But once we start examining each of these parts, one by one, we see that they are also made of other parts, and so forth, until we find that there is nothing "solid" there.

A good analogy is thinking about a "forest". We can look out of a window and say, "there is a forest, I know it exists!". But if we start looking closer, what we are actually seeing is a group of trees. It's just our mind that labels "forest = group of trees", but there are not really "forests", it's just a conventional word to mean "group of trees" (because it's easier to use in everyday conversation). But zooming in, we will see that a tree is made of parts, too: the bark, the leaves, the roots, the leaves, the fruits, and so forth. So what we call a "tree" is an assembly of things, because it's way easier to say "tree" than describing each of the part. Zoom in into a leaf, and what do you see? It has a delicate internal structure; and we can zoom in and see individual cells. Again, it's much easier to say "leaf" than list every cell inside it! Zoom in further and further, and cells disappear, giving place to molecules, and then atoms, and then neutrons, protons and electrons, and then quarks, and that's as far as modern science can go. So, at the atomic level, where is the leaf? Where is the tree? Where is the forest?

If we're honest, we will say: well, I know that there really aren't leaves, trees or forests, there are just assemblies of atoms into molecules and so forth. However, for the purpose of everyday discussion, it's much more convenient to talk about leaves, trees and forests. So long as I understand that there are no intrinsically existing forests or trees or leaves, I'm fine, and can still appreciate the beauty of them, and have meaningful conversations with other beings able to appreciate things as they appear to us. It's only when I start to believe that things exist intrinsically that I run into problems!

The same happens with our mind and what we call "the self". To explain further, Buddhism is not a method to "erase the self" — something which you will read in Christian anti-Buddhist propaganda, for instance. There is no self to erase: the self is just like the forest, a convention to describe an assembly of thoughts, ideas, emotions and so forth, which, in turn, can be dissected just as we did with forest, trees, leaves, cells, molecules and so on. But by doing that "zooming in" we didn't "destroy" the forest: it's still there, we can still appreciate its beauty, we can still talk about it and enjoy it, we can still behave towards forests as we used to before we looked deeply into its structure. The same happens with the "self": we will appreciate much further the incredible complexity of thoughts, ideas, emotions and so forth that constitutes what we call "the self", but, by doing so, we understand that the self is nothing more (and nothing else) than this assembly of parts, each of which is in constant change. We are not "destroying" anything, just looking at things as they are.

Why is this "good"? Well, consider my own example of being angry with my S.O. (by now, you might imagine I'm always angry with her, since I always bring up the same example!!). I could justify my yelling at her by saying, "being angry is part of my self, I cannot change the way I am, it's my nature, I'm not to be blamed (but pitied)" and so forth. But when I start examining this "self", I don't "see" any bits that are permanently angry — it's an emotion that comes and goes, like a breeze. When it is active, I behave in a certain way; when not, I behave differently; so how can such an inconstant, impermanent emotion be "part" of my self? Clearly, the "self" cannot be "anger" but must be someplace else. Meditation is a way to recognise this and explore further and further, to try to figure out where this "self" is. Of course we know the (intellectual) answer: the more we search, the less we will find it. But it's not enough to read that in a book: we have to experience it, and that means meditating until that experience is realised.

What does realisation mean? Well, let's take the old example of learning how to drive. When you start driving, everything seems strange, unnatural, hard to do, and often even illogical (specially if you don't use automatic gears — why have I to step upon a pedal before shifting a gear, and so forth). So, while you're doing these things mechanically and giving a lot of thought about what you do, you're still at a stage of learning. But at some time, all that training becomes natural to you, and then you can really enjoy driving, when you have mastered the technique. "Mastering" something, in the sense that it becomes natural, is a bit what "realisation" means. It is not being intellectually proficient in memorising the instructions and being able to tell what the books say — one thing that is quite hard to understand in the West, where our own educational system reinforces the idea that once we have memorised some facts from a book, we are experts in the area. Realisation is effortlessly experiencing something that has been trained over and over again until it becomes natural.

Often it's hard to see (externally) if someone has realisation or merely a highly advanced intellectual knowledge of the methods and techniques, but no experience from practice. There are a few tell-tale signs, however: the sign of having studied the teachings of the Buddha (intellectually) is a gentle conduct (which, in itself, is already great). But the sign of having meditated and brought those teachings to the daily experience is to be little affected by negative emotions.

This reminds me of a story from last year. An English lady was visiting my country and saw one announcement for one of our teachers. She asked us if he was a Westerner or an Easterner. Then she explained: in her experience, Western Buddhist teachers are usually stern-looking, serious, speak in a monochordic voice, and somehow take themselves too seriously. While most Eastern Buddhist teachers are easy-going, funny, little worried about how they look or how they present themselves in public, have few cares, and generally radiate happiness towards everybody around them (just take the Dalai Lama as an example!). And, I reflected, she is right — this was not merely a "discrimination" between East and West, as is so usual. This woman correctly pointed out that if you claim to be a Buddhist teacher but take yourself too seriously and distance yourself from your crowd by looking stern and without a sense of humour, then something is wrong with your practice: Buddhism is a way of happiness, of easy-going-ness, of taking few things very seriously, of having few worries, and that should be reflected in our body language and speech. Beware of teachers that take themselves too seriously!

So I think I found a good teacher, but, as a beginner, how do I know if he or she is actually teaching Buddhism?

Let's imagine that you have found out someone who looks, behaves, and speaks like a Buddhist teacher, and you have analysed him or her in the way explained earlier. Now you're ready to learn, but... how do you know that this teacher is actually teaching Buddhism and not something completely different? Remember what I said before about being very hard to distinguish some advanced teachings of the Buddha from the highly sophisticated non-dual schools of Hinduism. How can a complete beginner, clueless about everything, know the difference?

Fortunately for us, the Buddha was clever enough to have taught us a relatively simple way to ascertain that something is "Buddhism" or not. You can think it as "the acid test of Buddhism" — if it passes the test, it is Buddhism; if not, it isn't. It's known as the Four Seals of Dharma and the link shows a very good explanation from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, who is known for being quite direct and to the point, even if his words are not always "nice" (in the New Age sense of the word "nice"...).

The Four Seals are like hypothesis in a mathematical demonstration. Something that claims to be Buddhism has to validate that hypothesis; or, by contrast, if it fails to demonstrate one of the seals, then it cannot be Buddhism.

The first thing is relatively simple to understand: all compounded phenomena are impermanent. Put in other words, anything that is made of assembled parts will break down. There are no exceptions: this also applies to our own thoughts and ideas, and, of course, to our own self (as we saw before, our "self" is also an assembly of thoughts, ideas, sensations, feelings, emotions and so forth). So, if you hear someone saying, "we can create something eternal and unchanging", then that person is not teaching Buddhism. Also see the parallel with modern science: until recently, it was thought that everything in the universe, made of atoms, would be impermanent and subject to entropy, except for atoms, which, as fundamental particles, would be "eternal". Thus the old saying, "in nature, nothing is ever destroyed; things are transformed into other things", alluding to the fact that when one animal or plant dies, it becomes food for other animals or plants. However, as science progressed further, atoms were seen as made of parts, which in turn are made of even smaller parts, and now we know that even non-radioactive atoms will fade and disappear after a long, long time.

So beware of people claiming that they have found "eternal" things, specially if they claim they can "create" eternal things out of other (presumably non-eternal) things. This is why Buddhism does not teach "positive thinking", i.e. the idea that by constantly thinking positive things, you will create happiness. If you "create happiness" that way, then it's something compounded (made of parts; in this case, the positive thoughts), and, as such, it will also fade away sooner or later. It cannot be made "permanent" merely by wishing to do so.

The second seal is harder to explain, and it states that all emotions lead to dissatisfaction (this is just one possible translation). It's easy to understand this to be true for negative emotions, i.e. anger, frustration, depression, etc. But what about love, compassion, altruism, happiness, pleasure? Aren't positive emotions "good" to have and to strive for? What Buddhism teaches is that all these emotions will be impermanent (see seal #1), and, as such, they will fade and go — both the negative ones, but also the positive ones. When that happens, we feel frustrated because our positive experience has gone. This can lead to the craving of the next positive experience, which will also only last for a little while, and so forth.

Consider the alternative. Imagine that we could have a positive experience that did not lead to insatisfaction. For example, one might feel pleasure when eating food, say, an ice cream. So, eating more ice cream should lead to more satisfaction, right? But that's not what happens: at some point, we have eaten so much ice cream that we're full, and we cannot eat more — there is a limit to how much we can eat. That's exactly what the second seal states: at the point we cannot eat more ice cream, we're sorry because we would like to enjoy even more, but we're too full, we cannot do that — and, if we insist, we throw up and feel horrible.

Obviously this is easy to see in extreme examples, but it's way harder to see it on a daily basis. We're educated to "pursue happiness", and that usually means relations, work stability, a home, lots of gadgets, kids, and so forth. So we are led to believe that by having all those things, and the experience of happiness and pleasure from those things, we can live in "perpetual happiness". But soon we find out we were told plain lies: even the best of relationships will have the two partners arguing with each other at some moment. The most stable job might come to an end, even without a financial crisis looming. Homes can become a source of worries — with the neighbours, or simply because some household appliances stopped working, it's raining through the roof, and so forth.

What this second seal does not mean is that we should reject pleasure and happiness just because it won't last long! No, what matters is to reject the expectation that it will last forever. We can (and should!) still enjoy everything, even if we're aware it will soon fade away; in fact, we might even appreciate those moments more because we know they will not last long! The reverse, fortunately, is also true: things won't be bad all the time, and, as mentioned before, even someone in pain will not hurt all the time. Depression is often cured when one realises that the reason for depression will not last forever (even if we think it does). Of course, this is easier said than done!

The third seal states that all phenomena have no intrinsic existence. Unfortunately, in the West, often because of bad translations dated back to the Theosophists, this is often confused with the claim that Buddhists say that "Nothing exists; all is illusion", which is not what it's meant ("all is illusion" is what some Hinduist schools claim, but not Buddhism). Intrinsic existence means just that things don't exist on their own: they exist because they are made of parts; they exist due to causes and conditions that made them appear; and they exist because a mind is observing them.

This statement actually sets Buddhism apart from every other philosophy. Grossly speaking, most philosophies are eternalists ("things exist on their own") or nihilist ("things don't exist; all is illusion"), or sometimes, very rarely, try to combine aspects of both (some things exist on their own, some are illusions). Buddhism is known as the Middle Way because it asserts that reality is neither eternalistic nor nihilistic: so, things do conventionally exist, and that existence is "real" and not an illusion, but things do not exist on their own, i.e. without causes, without parts, and without observers. You can see how this clashes even with modern Western philosophy: science, for instance, likes to state that the universe follows certain rules, like the laws of cause and effect, except where it's convenient not to (which scientists will refer to as "chance", "random events", or "acausal events"). Similarly, it is stated that everything exists on its own, except for some strange effects that cannot be explained that way and are illusions (like virtual particles, which however have measurable properties, even if they do not exist) or emergent properties (things like "mind", "climate", or even "life" are labeled as emergent properties, in the sense that they don't exist on their own, but arise because of certain complex interactions which are, at the moment, not fully understood). This is because modern science is essentially eternalist, but struggles with those few things (which grow in importance over the years!) which cannot be explained easily with an eternalist world-view.

Buddhism is more clear and precise and has no exceptions or difficult-to-explain phenomena. Everything appears due to causes and conditions; everything is made of parts (and thus impermanent — subject to entropy); everything requires a mind to be observed (without a mind to observe it, it cannot exist); nothing can exist "on its own", but only in dependence of other things. This is known as the doctrine of interdependent co-emergence, and is unique to Buddhism.

It is also rather hard to explain, much less to understand, because it runs rather contrary to our experience: in our daily lives, we see things as permanent and believe them to exist on their own. It's just when something happens that shows us the contrary (a car that breaks down, for example) that it causes us frustration and despair — because we are seeing things as they are, and not as how we expected them to be.

This is also a reason why Buddhists refute the existence of a First Cause (a creator god, if you wish). They would immediately ask who or what created that creator god, and the answer is that either it has created itself (which doesn't make any sense) or that it had existed forever. In the latter case, Buddhists would ask how something eternal can change (if it changes, it has a beginning, a middle part, and an end, and it means it cannot be eternal; eternal things cannot change, and cannot effect change). Buddhists offer the alternative explanation that there is no "first cause", everything, without exception, has multiple causes. "First cause" also implies "time" (i.e. first, there was a first cause; then came all the others). But time is also a compounded phenomenon — there is a past, a present and a future. A moment exists and fades away, giving rise to another moment. So, time also exists conventionally, but is subject to the third seal as well. Modern science claims that there is no "time" before the Big Bang; the Big Bang created matter and time at the same moment, so "time" is not different from anything else — it also has a beginning, and will have an end (when the universe ceases to exist). The difference in cosmology is that Buddhists are a bit like superstring theorists: there is not just "one" universe, but an infinite amount of them, which are created and destroyed constantly, but not because "someone" is creating them, but just because they are impermanent by nature (note: superstring theory is one of those ideas that pops up every now and then in science, but is often discarded because, so far, it hasn't produced any measurable predictions).

The last seal of Dharma is more philosophical: it states that only Nirvana is peace, and this requires proper interpretation (which differs slightly from school to school). Roughly speaking, a simple way to look at that statement is that, looking at the other three seals, there is only one way to accomplish a state of permanent happiness — we have to transcend the limitations of our dualistic minds. But as we have seen, we cannot "fabricate" that state: anything fabricated will be impermanent, and that's exactly what we wish to avoid. So how do we solve this paradox?

Buddhist teachings simply say that we cannot achieve something we're not, or, put in other words, there is no way to "create ultimate happiness" if we haven't got it already. Wait, you'll say, how can we "have" something but not experience its effects? What Buddhism says is that we are just confused and believe that this confusion is our natural state; an often employed image is that this confusion is like a second skin, that we have worn for so long, that we believe it's our true skin. So what the Buddhist training does is to remove that confusion, and let the bliss and peace of the ultimate happiness — which was already there all the time — shine through.

Sounds mystical? Well, let's see a few analogies. In our daily lives, we see a dirty window, and we say, "let's wash the windows so that the sun can shine through". In truth, we're not washing the glass; we're only removing the dirt on top of the glass. The nature of the glass is to be transparent; it's the dirt, which is not part of the window, that obscures the light of the sun. Similarly, when we see clouds in the sky, covering the sun, it's not the sky that is obscuring the sun; the clouds are not intrinsically part of the sky. As a kid, this might not be obvious to us until we take an airplane for the first time, which flies above the clouds, and we see that the sun is always shining there! Both analogies apply to what Buddhism has to say about our nature — known as "Buddha nature", and all sentient beings, not only humans, have it — which is always there, it's not fabricated, it cannot be described with words, but can be experienced: as soon as we remove the obscurations that prevent us from experiencing it.

Again, there is nothing mystical or magical about the experience of something we cannot describe. Consider chocolate, for instance. I'm assuming that you have tasted chocolate, so you know how it tastes, and how it makes you feel (unless you're allergic to cocoa!). Once you've tasted chocolate, you can immediately recognise it, and when you meet someone who has already tasted chocolate, you can relate with their experience, because you've shared the same feelings and emotions. But now imagine you have to describe, with your own words, what this experience is. You could start by talking about the chemical properties of chocolate, the way it's manufactured, then go further to explain that chocolate is both bitter and sweet at the same time, how eating it stimulates the taste buds, which in turn stimulates the production of seratonin, which in turn affects the nervous system to produce a feeling of pleasure, and so forth. But someone who had never eaten a tiny bit of chocolate would not have a clue about what you're talking about, and just by reading your description, could not recreate the experience. Oh, sure, they could memorise the explanations, and even become an intellectual in the art of chocolate manufacturing, explaining to the tiniest detail how it works (how chemical reactions produce the exquisite taste of chocolate).... but, without tasting it, they would never have the experience of tasting chocolate. The same applies to a lot of experiences: from sex (or crossdressing!) to jumping with a parachute, there is a huge range of experiences that we have, that we can relate with others who have the same experience, but we cannot put them into words. There will always be something missing, as you might have noticed when you had your first sexual experience, after listening to other people's stories and even watched lots of porn movies. It's the experience that matters, not the descriptions.

Experiencing one's own Buddha nature, or the nature of our mind, is similar. We can write about it, but, without having experienced it, we don't know what it is. The good news is that we can learn methods in order to remove the confusion from our minds and to propitiate the experience. In Buddhist terms, this is usually referred as "purification" and "merit", and I'll talk about it later. Again, this is not supposed to be very mystical or magic, but just rather straightforward. If you want to provoke the experience of tasting chocolate to another person who never had that experience, you can give them simple instructions: go to the supermarket, buy a bar of chocolate, eat it. Similarly, you can give good descriptions on how to experience the thrill of parachuting, of sex, or of any other of those indescribable experiences: there are always methods to teach others how to reach that experience. Experiencing the nature of our own mind is not different, once you've got that experience, you can tell others what to do to get the same experience. Yes, it's a bit harder than to eat a bar of chocolate, but it's not impossible. And rest assured, once you've got that experience, you won't forget that ever again and be able to notice when others have the same experience — just like you immediately recognise the facial expressions of someone who has just eaten their first bar of chocolate (or had their first sexual experience...).

In Zen Buddhism, this first experience of your mind's true nature is called satori, and it's actually not very hard to reach, if you train diligently. However, the purpose of Buddhist training is not to have just a single experience. It is said that when that first moment of satori is reached, then the training is actually begun: now comes the difficult part, which is to remain in that state of experience for all moments in your life. If you can do that easily and effortlessly (it becomes easier with training), congratulations — you're now a Buddha, which can also be defined at someone who remains all the time in the recognition of one's own nature.

Seems simple, right? Well, the Buddha himself, when reaching that state, was a bit baffled. It's recorded in the Lalitavistara Sutra that he said: "This truth that I realized and awakened to is profound, peaceful, tranquil, calm, complete, hard to see, hard to comprehend, and impossible to conceptualise since it is inaccessible to the intellect. [...] If I were to teach this truth to others, they would not understand it. Teaching the truth would tire me out and be wrongly contested, and it would be futile. Thus I will remain silent and keep this truth in my heart." (I particularly like this passage, because it shows how human the historical Buddha was, even after Awakening!) Eventually, as we know, he was persuaded to go out and teach, and did so for some fifty years, but he understood that he would have to go step by step, adapting his instructions depending on his audience. Every time someone was able to follow his simpler instructions, he would give more complex ones. That's why we have so many different teachings! No one is to be excluded, just because some techniques are incredibly hard to accomplish; others are rather simple and still very effective. And that's why ultimately we need to have some method to figure out which teachings are really Buddhism, and which are not — this is the purpose of the Four Seals of Dharma.

Also beware of teachers pretending that Buddhist Nirvana is merely a physical place of some sort, like a Christian/Jewish/Muslim heaven or something like that (Hindus might believe that Nirvana is an actual place). Nirvana is, ultimately, just a state of mind — precisely that state where the mind recognises its own nature, and abides in that state, moment by moment. Also, Buddhas don't "grant" access to Nirvana if somehow you perform magical rituals, make offerings, pray to them, etc.

A great teacher of contemporary times, often quoted by my main teacher, was once asked to explain how Buddhism is different from other religions or philosophies. This was a provocative question, specially because most Mahayana teachers have taken a vow not to comment upon other religions (there are good reasons for that!). So, in a funny way, this is what he came up with:

"Hinduism is the religion of the King. When you have a problem, you go to the King and ask him to solve your problem.

Christianity is the religion of the Prince. When you have a problem, you go to the son of the King and ask him to intercede with the King to solve your problem.

Islam is the religion of the ambassador. When you have a problem, you go to the ambassador of the King, and ask him to talk to the King on your behalf; so your problems get solved.

Buddhism is the religion of the construction worker. When you have a problem, you roll up your sleeves, and start fixing it by yourself."

It's tough and hard, but it has a huge advantage: you don't rely on anyone else but yourself to get things fixed

[Sandra M. Lopes]

I've attended some Buddhist practices, and it seems to me that they are just like other religions: chanting, recitation, bowing to statues, offering candles of light — lots of rituals, and lots of prayers to the Buddhas. So what has all that to do with what you've explained earlier?

In the West, Buddhism is sometimes "stripped down" to essentials — a view often known as "Consensual Buddhism", which states that one reason why Westerners don't like Buddhism so much is because it has all those rituals, and many people, coming from other religions, wish to get rid of the hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo, and just go down to essentials. Zen Buddhism, as taught in the West, is often an adaptation — "real" Zen Buddhism also has a lot of rituals, but they're watered down to be more palatable to Westerners.

The main reason for that dislike or distaste of the rituals is that they usually aren't correctly explained, or not explained at all. I've mentioned rituals before: they are a way to order our lives, and make us remember what is essential. Thus the "ritual" of placing the car keys always in the same spot on the table, so we don't forget them.

Rituals become pointless if you don't know what they're for. While this could be a whole new chapter, I'll just address a few of them. One is obvious: why do Buddhists recite texts? Because they're trying to memorise them, or at least, recall the instructions. If they're written in verse and chanted, they're easier to remember; that's why we sing national anthems, for example. At grammar school, we repeat the multiplication table as a ritual to make us remember — it works, since any of us knows immediately how much "five times seven" is.

Of course, if you're reciting something in Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit or Japanese, you might have no idea what you're reciting, and it will just be meaningless sounds. There are good reasons for reciting them in the original language, but, again, that would require more explanations The point is that these recitations are typically the instructions of what we're supposed to be doing.

My main teacher remembers when he started meditating in his teens, and he had to attend one-hour sessions. During that hour, over twenty minutes would be spent with endless recitations. He was quite annoyed at "wasting" so much time with all the ritual mumbo-jumbo. So he asked, what was the point of all that? Couldn't they just meditate and that's it?

Well, no. Meditation without the proper motivation — the knowledge of what your ultimate goal is — is said to be like throwing a rock in the dark: you'll never know what you'll hit. You might be lucky and hit what you wish, but it's way easier to turn on the lights and see what you're doing!

Thus, Buddhists start by remembering themselves why they meditate — and the depends on their vision, which, in turn, depends on what vehicle they're following. Then they might recite the actual instructions for meditation. Sure, after years, you might think that it would be second nature to you; but, even if it is, you're not losing anything by reciting the instructions over and over again. In fact, one of the points of meditation is that you shouldn't limit meditation to "sitting down cross-legged one hour per day", but meditation should be done everywhere at any time. So obviously you can also meditate on the instructions or even use sound — the sound of recitation — as a basis of meditation. But essentially, those recitations at the beginning are to recall our own motivation.

Some teachers are known to stop their explanations every 15 minutes or so, and remind students for their motivation for attending the teachings (and remind themselves of the motivation to teach!). This might sound extreme, until we realise that in 15 minutes our mind is constantly wandering and getting distracted — so how can we be sure that we haven't lost our motivation, too? A successful meditation session is not one where you have "few thoughts" or "achieved tranquility" or anything else; you can have thousands of thoughts and be very anxious or excited or even very tired; the whole point is if you have been paying attention to what goes on in your mind, and haven't lost your motivation during the whole session. In that case, with good motivation, any meditation session will be fine.

An American student once went to a great teacher of the 20th century, and told him, "I meditate every day for two hours, and have done so for twenty years, but I haven't attained anything. What am I doing wrong?" The teacher asked him, "Do you recite your motivation prayers before every session?" "No," the American said, "that would be just wasting my time, I already know what my motivation is, I just do shamatha and vipassana for the whole two hours." The teacher smiled sadly and just answered: "Come back to me in another hundred years, perhaps you will have had some results by then". The point here is that without constantly checking our own motivation, the results are not guaranteed.

Obviously, if you're unhappy about singing in strange languages, I see no problem in reciting the motivation prayers in your own language, without sing-songs, and subvocalise them just loud enough so that only you can hear it. In fact, another of my main teachers — a Canadian living in the US — recommends that some of the texts are recited both in Tibetan and in English, so that the students remember what they're actually supposed to be doing.

At the end of a meditation session, Buddhists will also chant some praises and aspiration prayers, and dedicate the merit. I will talk about merit on the next section, but first I'll try to explain why there are "aspiration prayers" in these sessions.

When we use in the West the word "pray", due to our Christian background, we will always think of praying to a God so that "miracles happen". In Buddhism, this obviously doesn't work, so why "pray"? The explanation is not very obvious, and requires some analogies. It has to do with the principle of interdependence, and of cause and effect.

When we have an exam at school, we start reviewing our lessons, studying for that exam. Why? There is a notion of cause and effect: if I study, I will be better prepared to do the exam. So we don't pass exams by "luck", or because our teachers like us; it's by studying that we learn, and pass an exam successfully. Thus, studying is the cause of passing an exam; passing is the consequence of studying.

We might also like to study in a group. There are always some people in a group that easily grasp certain things better than we do, and so we tend to support each other — some things might be easier than others for different students. When we study together, our individual faults in remembering things might be "softened out", we help each other, and, in general, we study better that way. Nothing "magical" happens in group study: it's just that each of us is different, and each understands some things better than others; together, we achieve better results.

If someone in the study group has some extraordinary abilities to understand a subject very well, all the others will benefit from their skills much more than if they study individually. So we gain a lot from the experience of that extraordinary student. Again, there is nothing "magical" in this — it's just the natural interdependence of a group at work: we tend to become better if someone very good in the group is raising the level, and helps us along the way.

Now, what has this to do with aspirational prayers in Buddhism? Well, most of them have been written by greatly accomplished beings (or even by some Buddhas). These have successfully put those aspirations into practice, because, well, they were greatly accomplished beings. What we're doing is pretty much joining our own feeble aspirations to the aspirations of those beings. There is a resonance effect at play here. This is actually quite natural: you might have noticed how at a concert or a football game, when people start clapping, they usually fall into the same rhythm, and, when clapping all together, the noise is much louder. This happens without the need of someone actually "leading" the way; it's a resonance effect, not unlike what happens when you put a lot of clockwork clocks with pendulums in a room — after a while, all clocks will swing their pendulums in exactly the same rhythm. Resonance effects happen all across nature and are not uncommon. What Buddhists do is to use a resonance effect between the aspirations of great practitioners and  ourselves; while we might not have great realisation, we will still benefit somewhat from being "in sync" with those great practitioners, who have actually already accomplished their aspirations.

If you're skeptic about that, well, you should be — I never cease to repeat that skepticism is encouraged in Buddhism! In that case, you might think of aspiration prayers in the following way: they are "recipes" to what you are supposed to be doing once you reach the same state as all those highly accomplished beings who wrote those aspiration prayers. So, if you're reciting something simple like, "May in the future all beings be free from sorrow and frustration", you can think like this: "One day, if I continue to do my practice, I will attain the same state as the Buddha did; when I do that, I can teach others how to stop feeling frustrated; so this aspiration is my own personal goal, and I'm working towards that". This can be very encouraging and gives a strong purpose to one's practice.

Why are Buddhists always talking about "virtue", "merit", "purification", just like other religions?

Again, these words are bad translations, and often the meaning is confused with the Christian/Jewish/Muslim interpretations, just because those are the original meanings for those words.

"Virtue" and "merit", in the case of Buddhism, just means gathering the conditions to realise the nature of one's mind. Unlike theistic religions — "good" is what a particular god tells us what "good" is — Buddhism doesn't really talk about "good" vs. "evil", but of functional things vs. harmful ones. Functional things are the ones that make us live better, more fulfilling lives, without harming others, and while we strive to do so, we create the causes to attain realisation.

"Purification" is the act of getting rid of everything that clouds our true nature. So it's not like "purging evil" from ourselves, but rather understanding that certain actions, words and thoughts are just preventing us to go further in our practice. For example, when we irritate others with angry words, we not only make them angry, but we're reinforcing the idea that we are more important than others, so they ought to shut up and leave us in peace — this is called "ego-gratification", a process which tries to persuade ourselves that this thing we call a "self" does truly exist and is very solid, so we need to reinforce it over and over again. But Buddhist mind-training encourages us to look at this "self" and see how it actually is (made of thoughts, emotions, feelings, and so forth, which do not exist by themselves, but only in an interdependent way). So all actions, words and thoughts that prevent us from seeing the "self" as it really is — namely, everything which gratifies the ego — are to be abandoned: this is what we call purification.

In essence, the constant practice of a Buddhist can be summarised in the following verse, explained by the Buddha himself:

"Refrain from all harmful destructive behaviour
Put genuine goodness into practice
Train and tame your mind completely
This is the Buddha's teaching"

So there is something to abandon — harmful, destructive behaviour; something to adopt — virtuous practice; something to learn — how to tame one's mind. When we accomplish all of them, we become Buddhas.

One might wonder how this is possible (or why it is so simple). The Mahayana vehicle is also known as the causal vehicle — this means that our practice is to create the causes and conditions that allow us to penetrate through the confused mind, eliminate the obstructions, and reveal the true nature of our mind which is hidden beneath all those layers of obscurations. To do so, we have to refrain from engaging in harmful behaviour, while engaging in virtuous behavior — there is no other way. But note that Buddhism is not a "do this, don't do that" kind of religion, where somehow the Buddha has written the Ten Commandments in a stone tablet and handed it to the future generations. Figuring out why some actions are harmful is part of the training. It's only when we understand why they're harmful that we can truly progress in our practice. So long as we are just doing things "because our teacher told us to", we're just carrying a burden, and that won't make us more happy. Instead, it's when we understand what our goal in life is — getting rid of dissatisfaction — and put all our efforts into accomplishing that, then we also truly appreciate the instructions to refrain from harmful actions and engage into actions that benefit others (and ourselves).

You can also view things in this way: harmful actions are all actions that make others unhappy. This is not very different than the "do unto others..." teaching that was left by Jesus of Nazareth to His followers. There are always lots of people trying to convince us that Jesus was a secret Buddhist practitioner; while I don't think how that can be possible — Jesus was a Jewish practitioner and definitely believed in a Creator God — one has to understand that the Ancient World was not so isolated as we like to think. In the time of Jesus, the city of Alexandria in Egypt was the cultural capital of the Roman world, and it is known that there was at least a Buddhist monastery there, since at least the time of Alexander the Great, who brought Buddhist teachings (and teachers!) to the West; and certainly the Mahayana teachings were quite well known in Alexandria by the time of Jesus. And, of course, we all have read in the Bible how Mary and Joseph were forced to emigrate for a while... to Egypt. Not a coincidence! So, it's not totally absurd to imagine that the child Jesus might have found some Buddhist monks and/or people who were in touch with Buddhist philosophy, and found it interesting enough to incorporate some aspects in it, while still adhering to a strict Jewish practice.

Whatever the case might be, and this is not very relevant (sorry for the digression), the whole point is that all Buddhist training has three aspects — vision, meditation, and action. The vision (slightly different for each school) is what we wish to accomplish. The meditation is the practice with one's mind. The action is what we put into practice when interacting with others (it's also often translated as "ethical conduct", but, again, Puritans might read too much into that expression...). This is actually not strictly confined to Buddhism; all religions, philosophies, and ideologies have those three aspects, but, of course, they're different from each other, and all are different from Buddhism

Just to give a simple example... if, at the simplest level, your vision is to be rid of depression, anxiety, frustration, and all harmful effects of strong emotions, then your meditation will be in realising the non-intrinsic existence of a self. Your action will be to refrain from harming others. This is what some Hinayana schools propose. Mahayana schools have the vision of becoming Buddhas for the benefit of all beings, and their meditation is to create the causes of enlightenment (purifying obscurations in our confused mind that prevent us from realising the nature of our own mind, and actively engaging in thoughts, words and actions that benefit beings), and the action will be to accomplish the benefit of all beings (i.e. practicing altruism without expecting a reward).

So what this all means is that a Buddhist is not "merely" meditating in a cave! There is a bit more to it. As said, it's pointless to meditate as a form of escapism, somehow trying to create your little pocket of heaven where you can hide yourself from the harms of the ugly world around you. Buddhism is a way of life which promotes functionality and engagement: we train our minds so that we can actively work in society in a more functional way, and promote universal well-being through our words and actions. Even though it's true that many Buddhists become hermits and remain in retreat for most of their lives, they don't do that because somehow they wish to escape from the world; rather, in their view, the distractions of everyday life are so absorbing that the only way to have some time to practice to reach enlightenment — the constant abiding in the state of recognition of the nature of one's mind — is to go into retreat, and stay there until they accomplish the result of their practice. Then, as a highly realised being — even possibly as a Buddha! — they can start teaching how to achieve that result to all others. For some practitioners, this is the only way. For others, the simple life of a monastery is enough — and you can start to practice your accomplishments by immediately benefitting your fellow monks or nuns. For the rest of us, we understand that most people in the world do not want to become monks or hermits, so we will need to work with them while immersed in their activities, and still achieve the same results as a monk or a hermit — because meditation can be done everywhere and every place, not just in retreat centres, monasteries or hermitages.

There are some curious enlightened beings everywhere, even today. As said, one of my teachers was a litigation lawyer for large Internet companies; you would expect that an "evil lawyer" wouldn't be able to attain any realisation with Buddhist training, but that's certainly not the case! There are known masters, who are very likely Buddhas already (we will only know that for sure when they die), who work as butchers in shops (which might be shocking for Mahayana pratictioners, who are usually vegetarians), and they're completely anonymous and will never attract attention — except when highly-ranking teachers visit that place and start doing prostrations to them! There is a nice, part-fictional and part-fictional story about a gymnast, Dan Millman, which was turned into a movie called "Peaceful Warrior" which stars Nick Nolte as a low-profile spiritual teacher which works at a gas station and helps this gymnast out to regain confidence in his abilities after a serious accident (today, the gymnast gives conferences about his self-helping methods). The philosophy and the training shown in the movie are very close to Buddhism (close enough that you might even apply the four seals to it!), even though the book's author refuses that classification (but is fond of quoting Buddhist stories), and never truly answers if his mentor was real or fictional. But the idea of having great accomplished beings working at perfectly mundane places and thus benefitting others in the strangest possible ways is rather appealing to me; Indian and Tibetan Buddhist stories are full of similar, historical examples, so they are not uncommon. I only know of lawyers and notaries who became accomplished practitioners, so why not butchers, gas station attendants, or supermarket workers?

Whatever the role these practitioners play in society, one thing is for certain: a self-proclaimed Buddhist "teacher" who wishes to escape society and the company of others, and promotes escapism and "hiding the head inside a hole", is definitely a fraud Buddhism is all about engagement and interacting with others and making the world a better place — by changing people's minds into realising their own potential. One major difference between Christian charity and Buddhist compassion is that Christians strongly believe that by giving others material support, they will give them some relief from unhappiness and sorrow, and that is "God's will", so they actively engage in spreading out material support. Buddhists do not reject material support at all (generosity is also a mandatory practice for Mahayana Buddhists, for example), but they think it's even better if they can teach people to train their own minds. Of course, if you're starved to death and freezing from lack of home and clothes, your mind will be such a wreck that you can't learn anything; so material support is fundamental to at least make you able to listen to the teachings and put them into practice without fearing of death from starvation and cold.

[Sandra M. Lopes]

What does "detachment" really mean? Why are Buddhists so keen on "renunciation"? I don't wish to get rid of everything I own and live as a beggar!

Unfortunately, "detachment" and "renunciation" are terms often confused or badly explained, although the translation is not too bad; it's the explanation that is often incomplete or erroneous.

Briefly put, Buddhists don't renounce to happiness (which would be stupid — Buddhism is all about happiness!). What they renounce is to the causes of unhappiness, and this often gets confused into claiming that Buddhists have to renounce to everything, even their own emotions!

To explain this a bit further, one has to go back to the first public teaching given by the Buddha: the Four Noble Truths. The first one states that we should observe how everything is pervaded by dissatisfaction (sometimes also translated as "suffering"), which we have seen is an explanation that everything is impermanent, even happiness. This is something we should observe carefully.

The second Noble Truth states that dissatisfaction has a cause. So it's not random, it's not acausal, it doesn't happen "because we're unfortunate" or because "it's predestined". For example, because we want to believe that things are permanent (while they're not), we create huge expectations about grasping and possessing those things; when they fade away, break apart, or disappear, we're incredibly frustrated. So in those cases, the cause of our unhappiness is the clinging to the irrational idea that things are impermanent. This is just one example; there are several causes for unhappiness, but, in general, we can summarise them into three main areas: ignorance of the true nature of things (this has nothing to do with being uneducated) — we see permanence in impermanent things, for example; attachment to desirable objects (we exaggerate the qualities of certain objects, and wish to possess them — note that in this context ideas are objects too!); and aversion to unpleasant objects (again, we exaggerate the bad qualities of certain objects, and wish to avoid them; or we see things and persons as obstacles to possessing objects with exaggerated positive qualities, and express aversion against those obstacles).

The third Noble Truth explains that when you stop the causes for dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction disappears. So, if you get rid of ignorance, attachment and aversion, you cannot become unhappy/not satisfied any longer. This is pure logic: if those emotions create dissatisfaction, and are their causes, removing the causes will remove the dissatisfaction. It's like having a fire under a pot, to heat it — remove the fire, and the pot will cool down.

Finally, the fourth Noble Truth says that there is a way to get rid of those causes, which is the Buddhist method to deal with the problem. Originally, the way that was explained is known as the Noble Eightfold Path — a set of eight rules to live a life which will slowly eliminate the causes of dissatisfaction. Further schools refined that way, but, in essence, they are the same teaching.

So, when Buddhists speak about renunciation, they're talking about the third Noble Truth: cutting through the causes of dissatisfaction.

Let's try a few examples to understand this point better, which my own main teacher is always fond of telling. Imagine you're at a car stand, having just done a test drive. You've enjoyed driving the car, it looks lovely, and you're prepared to buy it. But before you sign the contract, a huge 18-wheeler suddenly loses control when their brakes fail, and crashes into the car, smashing it completely. "Too bad", you say. "At least it's insured and nobody was hurt." This is because the car wasn't yours; you certainly enjoyed driving it and found it extremely beautiful, but you had no attachment to that car.

Now imagine the exact scenario, but you have just placed your signature under the contract. Your check, of course, might not even have been cashed, but in your mind there is already a new thought: "This car is MINE." When the truck crushes the car completely, you go nuts, and yell: "OH NO! HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN WITH MY BRAND NEW CAR!!!"

In both cases, exactly the same thing happened, but your reaction is completely different: in the first scenario, because you didn't feel that you "owned" the car, you've dealt with the situation in a cool, functional way: nobody was hurt. The car is insured. No problem! Things are impermanent anyway, this just happened a bit sooner than we expected. But on the second scenario, you have created an attachment to the car — it is now "yours" — so you cannot be so cool, logical, and rational. Now you have "lost" something you valued, and that creates extreme frustration. Or even anger — you might yell or even hit the truck driver for having done this to you!

But the difference is just a squiggle in ink on a valueless piece of paper. The car is still insured, nobody has been hurt, and the situation is just the same as before. So why can't you be rational about it and keep your calm? Well, that's because of attachment: attachment to things, persons and ideas makes us act like we're insane.

In fact, those three emotions — ignorance of the way things really are; attachment; and aversion — are known in Tibetan as "nyon mong", which roughly translates as "things that make you crazy and blind". They are also known as the Three Poisons — because your mind gets poisoned and you behave irrationally because of that.

Now, I know what you're thinking: in our society (in all societies, in fact), it's expected that we behave that way, so these emotions are "normal", and the reactions we have to those emotions are "natural".

Let's put this into question. When we do something that is natural to us, we feel good about them. For instance, we might be hungry, so we go out to eat, and if we're not exactly gorging ourselves with junk food, the food will appease our hunger, and make us feel well. That's "natural" — the consequences are a sense of well-being. Being hungry, by contrary, makes us feel grumpy, or, if we take it too far, we will even get ill from lack of food or even starve to death. That's not "natural". Another example: when we have some kind of illness, we're unhappy, and we suffer; being ill is not natural. After we take some medicine which relieves the pain of illness, we feel better, and once we recover completely, we're quite happy again. So being ill is not natural for us.

Now, if we're furious about something, our blood pressure rises, our bodies start working in a different way. We might get a bad digestion, which will make us ill. If we persist in being angry all the time, we start getting heart problems and possibly an ulcer or two. So, our body reacts to anger negatively — surely that is a sign that it's not "natural" to be angry?

By contrast, imagine that you're not feeling too well, due to the 'flu, but nevertheless you decide to go to the movies with your S.O., and have a romantic dinner afterwards, and enjoy yourself. Maybe you even stop thinking so much about the 'flu. So the 'flu, by itself, is not automatically "bad" — it's much more important what you think about the 'flu that makes you unhappy. That's why hypochondriacs, always worried about all kinds of diseases, real or imaginary, are in states of perpetual distress, anxiety, and even depression, even if they are physically healthy.

Imagine also that you spend night after night just thinking about that wonderful new iPhone that you're going to buy; you wish it so badly that you can't even sleep properly; so, after a few days, you feel irritated or even slightly feverish from sleep deprivation. Is that "natural"?

A colleague at work has been pestering you and making a nuisance, and possibly even working all the way to your boss so that you might lose your job. Now you spend all the time, even during the night, thinking of vengeance — or in panic because you might be unemployed soon and have no money to pay for your mortgage. This constant stress will take its toll. Again, this is not "natural".

But back to the point. While we're socially conditioned and educated to think that craving things is "natural", the truth is, when these emotions are very strong, we get flustered, anxious, cannot sleep at night, become nervous, touchy, or even ill. So how can all these emotions be "natural"? Our "natural" state is not being ill! In fact, when we're healthy, relaxed, and with few worries, we feel great! That's also a reason why we often wish to artificially induce that state of calmness and relaxation: when we're frustrated from a hard day at work, we turn on the TV and stupefy ourselves in front of them to relax. Somehow, we have a predisposition to find a state of relaxation and calmness, and try several methods to do so — so we are also recognising that being calm, peaceful, and tranquil is "natural"; being agitated, anxious, frustrated or depressed does "not feel right".

What Buddhism teaches is a method to get us back in touch with that natural tranquility. But do not confuse "being calm" with "apathy", as I warned before! Apathy is a form of escapism where the mind is absent. By contrast, Buddhism thinks that apathy can be as bad as a state of agitation — apathy is also not natural, since we cannot function that way: we cannot feed ourselves, we cannot work, we become completely useless. Instead, Buddhist practitioners wish to become calm and tranquil in order to become lucid, more functional, more able to deal with the everyday issues (good or bad!).

The trick here is thus to recognise those emotions, the causes of our agitation and worries, and prevent them from establishing conditioned responses. If you wish to see it that way, it's like we have been educated to react to those emotions in a conditioned way; we were "brainwashed" by society, by our parents, by our own ideas of what is "justified", to think and believe that those conditioned responses are adequate. As a result of that brainwashing, we suffer, in several possible ways. What Buddhist techniques do is to try to "de-condition" ourselves: we will still experience the full range of emotions, but, because we are paying attention to them when they rise (we might even be experiencing the emotions much more intensely than before!), we are able to identify them as they are — triggers to conditioned responses — and decide not to act in a conditioned way.

In certain cases, of course, the reaction might externally look as if it is "conditioned". Consider the following case: you're watching over your infant child, and suddenly she makes a dash across the street and a bus is approaching, which she isn't seeing. This will trigger an emotional response. Obviously, we don't want to react in an apathic way, chant "Om!" or something stupid like that, put on an idiotic smile, and babble "it's just karma, I shouldn't react" or something equally idiotic, while the child is flattened to the ground by the approaching bus! You'd be surprised how many so-called spiritual groups actually promote techniques to induce that kind of thing! Instead, Buddhism will teach you how to be more alert: the instant the bus is visible, but while there is still plenty of time to react, you will be able to yell at the child, or even grab it from the street back to safety, and even if externally you might look as if you're angry or furious, internally you are fully aware that this is the correct reaction to have: sometimes, in extreme cases, an apparently aggressive reaction is the more appropriate one. But what the Buddhist methods do is to allow you to be able to react appropriately to such emergencies, without entering in a panic, without suddenly yelling in despair and saying "Oh my poor child! What can I do!" and freeze in panic, or become wild and uncontrolled and do more harm than good. Being able to act in the best way in all circumstances, by paying close attention not only to one's own emotions, but also to everything around us, is what Buddhist training achieves.

Sometimes you notice the difference in very small things. For instance, I'm known to be clumsy, always dropping things, and so forth. Since I've practiced a little bit, I now pay more attention. Sometimes, I might still drop something, but, because I'm more alert, I might catch it before it falls to the ground and breaks. And even if it breaks, Buddhist teachings still help me! I know that everything will break apart one day, so, if that precious vase from my grandmother shatters to the ground, I won't be too worried. After all, it would have broken sooner or later; it just broke sooner. Nothing lasts forever anyway, no matter how precious or valuable it is.

Another tiny difference is that I tend less to forget things around the place (like where are the car keys, where did I leave a book, and so forth), so, thanks to the practice of paying attention to everything, I'm actually a less forgetful person. It's those tiny little things that become noticeable after a while, even with little practice!

All right, so I'm at least curious about Buddhist meditation and practice, what should I do next? Can you recommend me a good book?

Well, I'll answer the last question with a big NO. Buddhist practice is not a self-help thing, that you buy a few books and/or videos and start doing things on your own. As said, you need, first and foremost, to find a qualified teacher. Then you listen carefully to their instructions, and put them into practice. But not the other way round!

So the first thing is to look for one good, qualified teacher in a Buddhist group near you. Ideally, a good group should even have a small temple, or at least a special room for practices. However, many groups, knowing that Westerns might be put off because of the excessive rituals, might have special beginner classes in a more "neutral" environment (one reason for the popularity of Zen Buddhism is that their temples tend to be simple and austere, although at least in Japan and the other countries like China and Korea, where Ch'an/Zen is the major Buddhist school, they have their temples much more decorated than in the West). Knowing that they have a temple shows that at least they're not ashamed to teach you Buddhist meditation, instead of something mixed together with other things to be more "helpful" to Westerners. In fact, I would recommend to be wary of groups or organisations who do Hinduist meditation in the morning, Reiki classes in the afternoon, some Western Yoga three times a week, some Tibetan Bowls therapy (note: there is no such thing, this is also a Western invention, but you can be sure that China's Government is quite fond of selling "Tibetan bowls" to the tourists and exporting them world-wide), and perhaps have a quasi-Buddhist meditation session once in a while. Of course, this is not really an universal rule: some very good Buddhist groups might be small and poor, and they will often use whatever rooms other organisations supply them.

Then, examine the teacher carefully. As said, it's hard to see his or her motivation, but there might be some signs: if they buy a Porsche every other month, something might be not right The Buddhadharma is always taught for free, but it's customary to offer the teacher a gift in exchange for their teachings; in the West, because people are not so willing to be spontaneously generous, it's usual that these groups accept donations. But if you really cannot afford to pay anything, they should have a way to allow you to participate (you might be able to offer some simple service instead, like making sure the rooms are clean before each class or something like that).

A serious group might start even the simplest and shortest rituals — usually at least with some prostrations to the teacher and to an image of the Buddha, and some motivation prayers. Here the rule is simple: do not do anything you don't understand. Imitating others just because you're ashamed of doing something wrong is plain stupid. Absolutely everything in Buddhist practice has a reason and requires a thorough explanation (in fact, in some Vajrayana schools, each simple thing might have three or even seven meanings, and you might get taught them in turn, as you get a bit more familiar with the logic and the reasoning behind that). My best advice is to approach the teacher before the class and tell him you're new and clueless, but willing to learn. There is no qualified teacher that will be "angry" at you because you wish to learn and do not know what to do! The purpose of any teacher is just to teach, they are supposed not to do anything else. So, in a mixed class, where there are always a few beginners, a good teacher will be quite happy to teach the basics again just for your benefit, and won't worry at all if that means all other students will hear something over and over again (in fact, it's part of their practice to be patient and rejoice at someone who wishes to learn!). Some groups might ask you to come a bit earlier to get taught the very basics before the class; it's ok to ask them for that.

On small groups, the teacher is usually very accessible, and that means that you're quite welcome to ask for a private audience with him or her. If you do that, it's customary to bring some gift — it can be just a packet of biscuits or some candles! It's not the value of the gift that matters, but your intention to be generous that counts; and, remember, a teacher's time is limited (they have many practices to do and are constantly studying) and they will be spending some of their precious time just with you, so you should be grateful for that. Larger groups might have several teachers, and the main teacher can be so busy organising everything, that they might not grant personal interviews. This is something you should ask first. I'm quite sure that on those large organizations they will at least get you an older student to help you out with your first steps; don't feel that you're being neglected somehow because of that! Remember the importance given to the teacher-student relationship: if someone is assigned to you to explain things, rest assured that their own teacher has seen their accomplishments and trusts them enough to be able to explain the basics. It takes a little time to get used to that idea, but that's how it works; also, a good student who was given permission to teach the basics will very often tell: "you will have to ask that to my main teacher, I don't know". They're not supposed to "invent" things on the spot just to show how clever they are. Instead, they should be quite aware of the limitations of their own knowledge, answer truthfully to everything they know well, but refer you to the main teacher if they don't know an answer. This is normal, and even highly realised teachers will sometimes do that! They practice being humble that way!

During a teaching, it's customary to sit on the ground, cross-legged, without wearing shoes, but that's not really a "ritual" — in most countries of the world, that's the normal sitting position, and when we're young, that's how we preferred to sit anyway. Later on, we learn about chairs and sofas. Also, it's not an "Eastern thingy" — in China, for example, people traditionally sit on chairs, too, while in Japan, they don't, and Japanese also go barefoot at home. So every country is different!

However, most groups will be happy to provide you a chair if you feel too uncomfortable. If not, you are definitely allowed to change position to be more comfortable. Just take care not to point the soles of your feet towards the teacher or any images of the Buddhas — this is considered quite rude. Why? Well, if you're barefooted, then your feet might be dirty, and pointing dirty things at people is rude anywhere.

While the teaching is being given, you should refrain from interrupting, but taking notes is usually allowed (if in doubt, ask first!), although most groups frown at taking pictures, recording videos or sound. If there is something you don't understand, memorise your question, and wait until later. At the end of each session, traditionally there is a period of questions & answers, where anyone can ask whatever question they wish, although it's considered polite only to ask questions related to that particular teaching. Why is this done just at the end? The main two reasons are that it helps you to memorise things and fight the urge or impulse of interrupting just because you feel your question is important; and, also, very often your own question might be answered on a later stage of the teaching, so it's pointless to ask "too soon". If you have questions that fall outside the scope of what has just been taught, then it's customary to arrange for a private interview, where all questions are welcome. Some groups also hold generic question & answer sessions, where any kind of question is allowed.

Many groups also sell books about meditation techniques. You should see them as an effort that was made by the group to provide you with a memory aid, and that's something that takes time: often, the book has to be translated from a difficult language (Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese) and a translator of the Buddhadharma takes an infinite time to make sure that the translation reflects the original most accurately, in order to make sure that nobody misunderstands the meaning! This takes time and has a cost; also, there are not so many good translators out there (but the ones that exist are outstandingly good). So, the books are really precious. It's not a "money-generation" scam to force you to part with your money! Even if some groups might get some financial return from the books they sell, helping them to pay the rent, or to pay to invite a good teacher to come to their group and teach, in most groups the books are often underpriced. They only charge for them because students should understand that they are very valuable! That's also a reason why most groups might lend you a practice book during a session, but they will not give them away so easily.

By contrast, a teacher noticing that a student is quite willing to learn, might occasionally offer them a book or two. This is something you shouldn't "expect" to happen but you should, instead, be willing to be generous towards others who have taken so much of their time to create a book that you can use to help you with your practice.

Be also wary of some groups that tend to "push" you into accept to do a lot of things that you might not be sure about. Some groups, as soon as someone starts appearing regularly, start immediately "demanding" that one takes vows, makes some commitments, and so forth. You should never be "pushed" or even bullied to do anything! In the Tibetan tradition, for example, it is said that a student should examine the teacher for at least three years, in order to make sure that the teacher is really qualified. Then, in turn, the teacher should examine the student another three years, to see if he or she is worth taking as a student. And, remember, in the recent past, that meant staying together with the teacher 6 years, full-time! So if you just see a teacher once a week or so, it should take even longer until both parts are happy with entering into a teacher-student relationship! What I mean with all this is that there should be no hurry. For many people, after a few weeks or months, they start seeing so many benefits that they immediately wish to make some sort of commitment with the group. Just take it easy: sometimes this is just the natural excitement of something new and fascinating, and it will fade, and then you might regret what you've done. Instead, just take your time, no rushing!

Finally, don't worry if you somehow find a group, but think "it's not for you", because you either dislike the teacher, the group, or their overall attitude. It's quite fine to try someplace else. That's also one of the reasons why there are so many different teachings, so many different schools, and so forth. Don't judge the whole of Buddhism just because you happened to dislike a particular person who claimed to be a Buddhist or because you find a certain teacher too hard/too serious/too demanding.

I can tell you that I have a main teacher, who is highly accomplished in his practice, but our group routinely invites several other teachers regularly — I've got teachings from at least another four different teachers. And they are, indeed, quite different in the way they speak or how they explain things, and even on the attitude they have. Some people like some of the teachers more than the others, and that's normal. Also, they come from all parts of the world: from Belgium, from the US, from India, and from Tibet. Some are monks, most are normal householders and have day jobs, one has the equivalent of a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy, others have no fancy titles. Each has lived in different cultures, surrounded by different people, and, as such, they present things in a slightly different way. But all of them have the same level of accomplishment (and also of knowledge!); it's just that obviously they're different people, and, as such, they explain the same thing slightly differently, using other words, and sometimes this is enough for things to "click" and make sense!

Thanks!

If you were able to read until the end, my thanks to you and for your patience. I hope this might somehow be useful for you, and encourages you to find a good, qualified teacher to tell you how to practice correctly. Remember, I'm no teacher and much of what I've said might not be entirely correct; I did my best, based on my own experience, but obviously I have not enough practice. It is said that to be an expert at anything, you need to train it 10,000 hours. That's why an university degree is usually about that long. And airplane pilots also need thousands of hours until they can start piloting huge commercial airplanes. Meditation is not different from any other human activity, and no, I haven't reached those 10,000 hours, not by far, and, as such, no wonder I still have many doubts and several limitations

So if you found anything I wrote to be useful, or at least interesting, then all the merit is due to my good teachers (who have meditated way, way longer than 10,000 hours ), who are exceptionally good in everything they've set to accomplish. May their lives be long so that they can teach many people that way!

May also all of you feel encouraged to at least try Buddhist meditation, and, who knows, eventually accomplish something fruitful that way.

[Anatta]

Kia Ora Sandra,

Another insightful and no doubt helpful down to earth discourse...


However, if left up to me, for Buddhism basics I would have just wrote "Form is Emptiness...Emptiness is Form" Now go figure it out for your'selves'

Metta Zenda

[Sandra M. Lopes]

That's true, but it takes a teacher to explain the meaning of that!

[DriftingCrow]

Holy crap Sandra, did you write all that yourself? It's like a book, I don't know which one to give a thumbs up with. That's some of the most adventurous posting I've ever seen.  Seriously, my mind is blown thinking about how long it must've taken to write all that.

[Kia]

Please take into account that I'm not a qualified teacher,

You are now officially qualified! by the Kia School for Contemplative Arts, at least

Really though, there were people in my Religious Studies classes at college who couldn't produce this kind of material to this degree of wonderfulness. Maybe you're the first teacher of your lineage

[YBtheOutlaw]

that is a very comprehensive, and simply explained text about the Buddhadharma. i really appreciate you, but frankly i didn't read the whole text, still there's this thing i noted in the bit i read, but i'll have to read it all over to find the fact i want to quote, so sorry i'm not quoting but hope you remember you mentioned about the possibility of a butcher being a buddhist practitioner. i guess i should elaborate a bit, considering that you've mainly focused on meditation. pardon me for my weak vocabulary, i was taught all buddhist concepts in my native language and pali, so i don't know the exact english equivalents for many.

'karma' stands for anything preceded by a motive, 'chethana' in pali. there are 6 main motives; 3 bad and 3 good- greediness, hatred, ignorance, willingness to give, compassion and wisdom. guided by these 6 motives we basically do 10 good deeds called 'kusala karma' and 10 bad deeds called 'akusala karama' which you may call sins. apart from meditation and practicing mindfulness and all, a buddhist practitioner is encouraged to avoid doing akusala karma by avoiding bad motives, and doing kusala karama with good motives. I'll list them out below, and you'll understand that they will immensely support you in your journey to nirvana. meditation only cannot get you the ultimate results of practicing buddhadharma. the achievement of the peace of mind is actually getting completely rid of the bad motives. you need to manipulate your motives and that and meditation will bring you the peace of mind you anticipate, so following these terms give you an extra support. even if you are not a buddhist practitioner it's good to try your best to follow these, because these lead not just to personal gain, but the betterment of the whole society.

Akusala Karma
1.Destroying life (killing and injuring animals and people)
2.stealing
3.sexual malpractices (some interpret this wrongly, including being gay and lesbian into this, but this is about prostitution, rapes, sexual harassment etc.)
4.telling lies
5.telling tales (i mean, turning people in. this doesn't include complaining to police and all seeking justice. it has to be guided by one of the bad motives. and this basically includes telling tales to make people hate each other)
6.speaking harsh words and filthy words
7.talking about useless things
8.having greedy thoughts
9.having hateful thoughts
10.believing in evil philosophies

kusala karma (the opposites of above)
1.protecting lives and respecting the right of living of every being
2.being protective of others possessions and respecting their ownership
3.avoiding sexual malpractices
4.telling the truth
5.telling things that make people friends with each other
6.speaking well mannered words
7.talking worthwhile things
8.being generous (sorry for not being able to come up with an exact equivalent, i mean to say 'willingness to give')
9.compassion for everyone
10.believing in true philosophies

doing kusala karma and not doing akusala karama do not only help you achieve peace of mind, but also improve your luck and bring you a comfortable life to continue your practices without distractions and disturbances.

you can do the above in 3 ways

• following them yourself
• encouraging the others to follow them
• teaching others of the good that follows when everybody follows them

as for the butcher, he is not deprived of learning buddhism because he kills, in fact any human in existence has no obstruction whatsoever to become a practitioner, but once you become a proper practitioner you will give up all the akusala karma not because somebody asks you to, but because you understand they are bad.

i'm not a proper practitioner and i do a lot of akusala karma, but i'm constantly trying to avoid them. i was born buddhist (though i don't like putting it that way. you can be born to buddhist parents, but you become a buddhist only after you trust and follow the Dharma by yourself) so i have learnt so much of it all my life. but i understand only a minute part of everything i know. it is the understanding we all need to achieve, so i'll share bits i know whenever i have time and my mind is settled enough.

[Anatta]

That's true, but it takes a teacher to explain the meaning of that!

Kia Ora Sandra,

There is no question that you have (even if you might humbly shy away from complements and praise) a wealth of knowledge to disperse amongst us lay Buddhists practitioners...

I was part joking  -part serious  with my somewhat 'off the cuff' post :

Kia Ora Sandra,

Another insightful and no doubt helpful down to earth discourse...


However, if left up to me, for Buddhism basics I would have just wrote "Form is Emptiness...Emptiness is Form" Now go figure it out for your'selves'

Metta Zenda

...

If a person's 'karma' is ripe and ready, then that person who comes across the words "Buddhism" & "Form is Emptiness-Emptiness is Form" their (already primed) enquiring-mind will seek out what lies behind the statement, and so begins the Dharmic path, which might come in the form of, books, CDs, Youtube clips, teachers-in the flesh etc...

Even though I agree for the most part that being in physical contact with a teacher is a 'up close and personal' blessing, sadly for some seekers they don't have this luxury...

But fortunately we live in the modern age of technology, where as at the time of the Buddha one needed to physically have contact with a teacher in the flesh...Nowadays teaching can come from the net, teachers can be cyber ( Lama cyborgs so to speak)...

It also depends upon the student's diligence, commitment and (from a Buddhist perspective) 'karmic' connection....
After all, thus I have hear, the Buddha is reported to have said, "Don't just take my word for it- experience it-see for your 'self' !"....

Metta Zenda:)

[Sandra M. Lopes]

Really though, there were people in my Religious Studies classes at college who couldn't produce this kind of material to this degree of wonderfulness. Maybe you're the first teacher of your lineage

Definitely NOT!! That would make no sense to me, lol — the whole point of a lineage is to have it unbroken from the Buddha. What little knowledge I have is just thanks to my teachers, who are incredibly patient with a student that has little ability to remember things properly...

I have read a few transcripts of debates of great contemporary students from highly accomplished masters. While they are "merely students" and not even allowed (yet) to teach, I was completely astonished at the amount of information they knew by heart, and how they were extremely eloquent when discussing the fine details of Buddhist logic, most of which eludes me. I read those transcripts to learn about being more humble!

The fun bit of the Buddhadharma is that every moment you start learning something, you realise there is a whole lot more to learn, and that you just have started with the tip of the iceberg. I understand that even great teachers feel the same way: there is always a lot more to learn, and once you think, "so, I've learned everything there is to know", you've lost your way A good student will always find more and more and more to learn...

[Sandra M. Lopes]

that is a very comprehensive, and simply explained text about the Buddhadharma. i really appreciate you, but frankly i didn't read the whole text, still there's this thing i noted in the bit i read, but i'll have to read it all over to find the fact i want to quote, so sorry i'm not quoting but hope you remember you mentioned about the possibility of a butcher being a buddhist practitioner.
[...]
as for the butcher, he is not deprived of learning buddhism because he kills, in fact any human in existence has no obstruction whatsoever to become a practitioner, but once you become a proper practitioner you will give up all the akusala karma not because somebody asks you to, but because you understand they are bad.

Ah, you're quite right!  See, I did one typical mistake of a beginner — something that my teachers, before each class, are eager to repeat over and over again, but which I keep forgetting. This is a classical fallacy, known as one of the Five Erroneous Ways of Remembering the Teachings. In this case, it's mixing different levels of the teachings, and presenting them together as if they belonged to the same level!

That's a very serious mistake, and I do apologise for that.

So, to correct my mistake... I understand from your presentation that you follow the Theravada/Hinayana path. At that level, you're quite correct to establish that a butcher should realise he has a wrongful way of support, and, after some time, he or she should realise that for themselves and give up his job as a butcher, and pick something different. This is the recommended procedure in the Theravada/Hinayana path, and, as you so well said it, it's not an "order" or a "rule" but something the practitioner should figure out for themselves after reflecting upon the teachings.

I forgot to explain that being a butcher is perfectly allowed at the Vajrayana level (and, to a degree, a Mahayana Boddhisattva would probably also have no problems, but that would depend a lot on his particular school), but that's because the vision is slightly different. No, Vajrayana practitioners are not supposed to be allowed to kill beings :-) However, once they transcend the usual duality coming from a confused mind, they might be able to actually benefit the beings they kill. This is impossible to explain at the other levels of Buddhism; it doesn't make any sense! And even for Vajrayana Buddhists, this does not mean that a beginner is allowed to kill any being; they are supposed to become Buddhas first, and, once they achieved that level of realisation, then they are actually able to do things that would sound incredibly strange to us. So, all serious Vajrayana Buddhists will also avoid killing and will instead be protecting lives while they're on the path — but once they reach their destination on that path, they might begin to act in ways that would seem very, very strange to us, and still benefit beings that way.

The problem here is that some people might think, "oh, Vajrayana sounds rather cool, so I will abandon my current path, because I want to become a butcher" (or some other job which is not "proper"). That's completely perverting the meaning of the teachings! The whole point is that once you're a fully realised being, thanks to following the path until its completion, then there are no limits in the way you can benefit beings — even by being a butcher. And yes, there have been people like that, but they are naturally very, very few. What we have (sadly) more is a group of people pretending to have high realisation and, because of that pretense, actually engaging in insane activities, without any regard to the beings they're harming. That's unfortunately quite frequent, and one of the reasons why the Vajrayana teachings were kept relatively secret for many centuries.

Vajrayana practitioners are bound to the same "rules" (I prefer the word "precepts") and take the same vows as all the other Buddhists; not harming beings is definitely at the top of the list. And, of course, they refrain from harm because, like all other practitioners, no matter what path they're taking, understand the benefit of that, and the consequences of harming beings. The problem are people like me, who sometimes mistake one path with another, confuse both visions, and speak nonsense!

So thank you for clarifying this! It was really my serious mistake. To put it succinctly: even on the Vajrayana path, you're not supposed to be harming beings, unless you're already a Buddha, who will engage in some actions that might appear externally to harm beings, but for them they're actually benefitting them. We just can't see it that way because we're not Buddhas (yet). So, a good Vajrayana practitioner will know that he or she isn't a Buddha yet, and refrain from acting wrongly, just like any other school.

I can't resist to tell a story about that. A 20th century Vajrayana teacher was once asked by a student, "when will I know that I'm already enlightened?" Obviously the student wished to engage in certain kinds of activities that will only make sense when you're enlightened. The teacher said, "Well, classically, the test is jumping out of a mountain without a parachute and surviving the fall without any harm. You could also jump out of the window of this building, if you wish. If you don't die, you're enlightened" (transcending the physical appearances and not being compelled by them). The student was obviously not happy, and replied, "But if I have doubts about my enlightenment and jump out of the window and die, then this test was worthless!" The teacher smiled benevolently and said, "There is a simpler test: if you can put your hand over a candle and not get burned by it, then you're probably enlightened. If not, you'll just burn your skin, which is painful but not lethal, but you'll still know you're not enlightened."

So, putting it in a humorous way, if you get burned with candles, then don't become a butcher

[Sandra M. Lopes]

But fortunately we live in the modern age of technology, where as at the time of the Buddha one needed to physically have contact with a teacher in the flesh...Nowadays teaching can come from the net, teachers can be cyber ( Lama cyborgs so to speak)...

Ah, Lama Cyborgs... I like that concept (teachers speaking over a non-physical medium!), because it reminds me of some of the esoteric teachings in Vajrayana. The Vajrayana schools, unlike the Theravada, claim that enlightenment is simultaneously of the mind and body. When that happens, the newly enlightened being will have two form-bodies, one to benefit himself and other highly accomplished beings, and another, which we could call "ordinary", since it is visible to ordinary beings to be able to benefit them.

Now this might sound like too much hocus-pocus in some of the Vajrayana schools Contemporary teachers, however, have it easy. They just tell their students, "look, what's the difference from having the same teacher physically in a room and, simultaneously, connecting via Skype to give the same teaching to others who live remotely and have no physical connection to them?" We can say "it's different", but for a good teacher, this is a very good example: a Buddhist teacher, nowadays, thanks to technology, is not bound to a single physical location to benefit beings, but can teach over the Internet and reach anyone in the whole world. That sounds like magic — to someone from the 19th century, of course! But we find it commonplace. So when Vajrayana teachings talk about the ability to use non-physical forms to teach highly accomplished beings, I always have this idea that those ancient teachings were talking about the Internet and how it would be possible, for the ones who have Internet access, to receive teachings directly from a teacher without any physical connection to his location

I mean, any teacher can do that today! So where is the "magic"? :-) It's just because, well, in ancient times we were unable to even imagine something like the Internet that we would say, "this is magic, this is physically impossible". Now we laugh at that!

There are a few advantages of the physical contact with a teacher, of course, and nowadays it's rather easy to get that contact — as so many excellent teachers are spread over the whole world — but if we happen to live in a place where there is no hope to get access to a good teacher "in the flesh", well, be glad that most of them are fine to teach over the Internet, and it's far, far better to have a "Cyber Lama" than to have no teacher at all!