Hehe I like your provocative questions, Zenda
Ultimately speaking, if you "believe" in anything, you're most definitely not a Buddhist. That's pretty much true. Quoting Siddharta himself, "Don't take my words just because they call me the Buddha" — meaning pretty much to keep an open mind, while being skeptic, not taking anything for granted, much less what others tell you to "believe" in. On the other hand, Siddharta left us some methods to achieve the end of suffering in an effective way. But, as he also said, "I gave you the methods; whether you achieve any results following them, it's up to you." This is mostly to make sure that it's not the "belief" in Siddharta as Buddha that will lead you anywhere. Not even the "belief" that the methods work will be of any help!
On the other hand, engaging in the methods and looking at the results will most definitely give you a certain amount of confidence in how well they can work. But you have to try them out first on your own, as explained by a qualified teacher; it's not useful just to "believe" they will work, you'll need to test them out by yourself... everything in Buddhism is about empirical experience.
Now, for us Westerners, it's important to understand a certain cultural background. Unfortunately, it's not automatically obvious that someone born and raised in a traditionally Buddhist country will automatically be a qualified teacher, much less a serious practitioner; and even if they are, it doesn't mean that their methods will be good for us (thus the importance of the qualified teacher: they will know what to do best). For some people raised as Buddhists, they have the need to "believe" in something — like, for instance, that Siddharta was someone "special" — and so they might have the same kind of devotion and veneration that Hindus (living next door!) have for their gods. And, naturally, they will confuse their own methods with some of the devotion practices of Hindus or Jains, and even eventually use similar language to describe things that are actually quite different... which will be very confusing. Specially if someone says, "I've actually asked a monk and he told me that he venerated Buddha as his personal god and hopes for a good reincarnation on the next life".
Mmh. Ok. Let's put this in context, shall we? How many of you know Christians that are able to explain in detail the mystery of the Holy Trinity and make you understand why it is so important for their religion? Even those that attend mass regularly might not be able to give you a good answer. It's true that they are not expected to be teachers — while Buddhists, at least on the Mahayana schools, are all expected to be able to help others by teaching them their methods — but my point is, Buddhist practice in Buddhist countries becomes routine, commonplace, and superstition, just like Christianity in Christian countries. It's obvious that's likely to have more good teachers coming out from Buddhist universities in the East than in the West (because there are so few in the West, if at all...), but it doesn't mean that "all Buddhists know what they're talking about". A lot obviously do, but not all. Even so-called, self-proclaimed gurus or lamas might in reality have little qualifications to teach — sometimes it's hard to figure out if they're talking about the Buddhadharma or something entirely made up.
The relation between Hinduism and Buddhism in India, or Buddhism and Taoism/Confucionism/Traditional Chinese Religion in China is also very confusing. Western academics, for instance, love to claim that Buddhism is a sort of "Hindu sect" (it's correct to say that there is not "a" Hinduism, but a plethora of schools with different views), because culturally they share a common language, architecture, and so forth — but the vision is rather the opposite. In China, for instance, the translations of the Sanskrit texts into Mandarin borrowed words from Taoism, since there were no other words to borrow from (Tibetans, by contrast, invented new words to translate the Sanskrit context) — so often Chinese Buddhist texts look like Taoist (or even Confucionist) ones. Again, let's put things into perspective. Suppose you could turn the clock some 1500 years back and look at a pagan Europe where Christianism was spreading. Christianism borrowed a lot of things from existing pagan religions and just re-explained them under a new cover. That's why we have Christmas trees and why Christians celebrate the winter solstice with a feast, a typical pagan ritual which was "borrowed" and re-interpreted. An Eastern scholar looking at European pagan religions and Christianity would easily make the same claim, that Christianity "emerged" somehow from paganism, absorbed its creeds, and just became something slightly different, but with similar rituals, using similar ideas and concepts, and so forth. Any Christian with a bit of understanding would easily spot how ridiculous those claims are.
The same happened with "Hinduism" (between quotes, since there are so many schools with differing views) and Buddhism. In fact, Hinduism as we know today was strongly "contaminated" by Siddharta's ideas — there are few Hindu lineages which can be traced to dates earlier than Siddharta. Concepts like tantric meditation, non-duality, and so forth were quickly "adapted" by many Hindu lineages and turned into a theistic practice — often, with good results, as they were easier to explain that way. Buddhist scholars, after hundreds of years of mutual contamination between some Hindu lineages and Siddharta's lineage, had to write whole treaties just to explain what is Buddhism and what is not; with the Islamic invasion of India in the 14th century, Buddhism was pretty much wiped out of India, and when it was slowly re-introduced, Hindu lineages were completely different and much more sophisticated than before — this goes on to this very day.
The emergence of some Hindu sects, for example, closely resemble the model used by Christians in the US. Just take a look at the Vedas, extract a few ideas from them, claim you're an avatar of some deity, and you have a new Hindu sect. This is not different from the thousands of Christian groups who pick up a handful of excerpts of the Bible and start a new church.
To make matters even more complicated... even though we can trace Siddharta's lineage pretty much to the origin (the first council where the oral teachings were finally written down), Siddharta left us with tons of methods (traditionally, as Zenda explained, they are numbered as being 84,000). Not all apply to everybody; different people make more progress with some methods than with others; thus, obviously, this means that all those methods were preserved in the hope they might become useful to someone in the distant future (i.e., us). But tens or hundreds of thousands, in the past 2,600 years, have followed some of those methods, attained the same results as Siddharta, but lived in different cultural environments, with different students, and so gave them new methods. The result? Nowadays, it looks like there are gazillions of different "Buddhisms", some of which look
very weird (even among fellow practitioners), since the techniques and methods are so completely different. Which ones are "correct"?
Well, fortunately, Siddharta was wise enough to also give us a method to figure out which ones are correct and which are not — they're called the Seals of the Dharma, and, by applying them to whatever is being taught, you can figure out what is Buddhism and what is not. This is particularly important to apply to some very advanced esoteric Hindu schools who have very similar techniques and externally seem to look very much like some Buddhist schools — but they have a completely different vision.
Let me take a simple example: reincarnation. In many Hindu schools — and not only there, of course — there is this belief that "something" can cross the physical death of a body. Call it "soul", "life force", "subtle self", whatever you wish... there is "something" that carries over, and, as such, Hindu schools teach about the importance of an ethical conduct and the proper rituals to make sure you get a good reincarnation on your next life. Now one of the Seals of Dharma teaches that nothing is permanent, and that is a fundamental statement of Buddhism. This means that "nothing" — no matter how you call it, with more or less fancy words — will "carry over" to a "next life". So "reincarnation", in the sense of metempsychosis (the Classical Greek definition for "transmigration of the soul"), does not make sense in the Buddhist sense. Even the popular Western description of a "mindstream" that somehow "continues" after death is a bad analogy — it would be the same as claiming that the "mindstream" is somehow permanent and has intrinsic existence, and, as such, would be not a Buddhist teaching.
So when Buddhists explain that our actions have consequences, and that these consequences will have effects either on this life or on a future life, this seems somehow to imply that Buddhists "believe in reincarnation". Well, this is but a simplification, appropriate to teach the law of cause and effect to a beginner. The classical explanation is to imagine a candle: before the candle burns out, someone uses a stick to light the flame of a new candle. The new candle, if it's made of the same material and size, will shine as brightly as the first one. But it's not "the same candle". It has similar qualities, of course — same material, same size, burns about with the same intensity, and so forth — and one candle is pretty much like the next. But it's not "the same". Nevertheless, if we hadn't used the stick to bring the flame from one candle to the other, the new candle would not be lightened. So we can say that the first candle is one of the "causes" of the second candle. If we let the first candle burn out before we use the stick, the second candle will not be lit. But "nothing" is really passed from one candle to the next. What Buddhists say is that there is a casual connection between one candle and the next, and this casual connection is important, but not that one candle "is" the other candle, or that there is a fundamental "candleness" in the Universe which passes through one candle to the other. Nothing of the kind.
When a Buddhist says, "in the past I have been a very impatient person, that's why I look so ugly" this is just a consequence of the laws of cause of effect, there is nothing "magic" or "transcendental" in it. Take a look at two persons about the same age, one who is very patient, kind, understanding, and laughs easily; and another who is always angry at other or worried about everything and never smiles. As they grow older, the latter person will have a grim face, full of wrinkles, from all that effort and anger — while the first one will look much healthier and younger with twinkling eyes and playful lips. I have seen this happening with me and my younger brother; we were burn just 18 months apart, but he looks 5-10 years older than me, because he's always so serious and so worried, while I'm easy-going and happy most of the time
Now imagine we both die on the same instant — he worried and serious, me happy and at ease. What kind of imprint will this give on the subsequent life? In the candle analogy, this would be like lighting the candle with a rotten, foul-smelling stick, or a stick made of some fragrant wood, like sandal. Even though the candles would still give pretty much the same light, both might have a lingering taste of the wood used to light them. This is a bit what is supposed to happen: our actions and mindset, specially near the time of death, will leave an imprint in our future lives, although the word "our" is out of context here. As said, the candles are not "the same". It's just that the way they were lighted matters. And, to a degree, by looking carefully at how a candle is shining, we can try to figure out how they were lighted. This is what is meant by actions in past lives somehow having an effect in the present one, and how we should do an effort to do something right so that our next life "smells better".
Now someone will say, "but some Buddhists claim that they remember past lives!". Well, yes, perhaps, in the same sense that we remember what we did when we were teenagers. While we can relate our current existence to a past existence several years ago, but also know that we're different — more experienced, etc. — so that, in truth, "we're not the same person", some very realized masters, fully aware that they are "not the same person" as in the past, have also realized that time, like Einstein explains in his Special Relativity, is
not absolute. These people are able to somehow switch their viewpoints in time, pretty much as we can do very easily when recollecting our own youth, but I would be very weary of such claims made in public: true realized masters never boast about their degree of realization, specially because they would know very well that such boasts would just be very confusing and not helpful at all. Instead, they just teach exactly what Siddharta has taught, in exactly the same way. And, of course, it's impossible to know who is realized and who isn't (unless, of course, one's realized as well), so I would be very skeptic about most people claiming they "remembered past lives". However, by analyzing one's current habitual tendencies, and not finding any reason for them (say, someone who is angry all the time for no particular reason), one can infer that, on a previous life, one has also been an angry person, and this left an imprint on our current one. I gather that when some people claim to "know who they were in a past life" are just referring to this point: the more you analyze yourself, the more easier you can see how you were in the past, which conditioned how you are today. But there is no "magic" in this: psychologists, after all, use a similar technique, asking people about events in our youth to try to figure out why we behave today. There is, after all, a connection, even if we usually aren't aware of it.
Finally, it's interesting that the issue of "dissolving into nothing" popped up here (as opposed to some Hindu schools who believe in souls "merging" with the Creator, or "dissolving" into Bliss or something like that), since by mere chance (or perhaps not!) this was part of a teaching I got today... The "dissolution into nothing" is a complete misrepresentation popularized by Theosophists in the mid-19th century in the West, who mixed up Hinduism, Buddhism, and Esoteric Christianity and Judaism in a complete package. While Theosophism is not so popular any more (there are still many of them around!), their translations of Buddhist terms have remained to this very day, which is rather unfortunate. We get people talking left and right about "Non-Self" or even "nothingness" and assume that Buddhists are nihilists, because that's how Theosophists believed Buddhists to be.
Nothing could be further from the mark; whole libraries have been written by Buddhist scholars of the past and the present explaining how Buddhism utterly rejects any form of nihilism. Even today, calling a Buddhist a "subtle nihilist" is a common insult between schools. It's important to understand that when Buddhists talk about "Non-Self" they simply mean that the self doesn't exist intrinsically, i.e. it is dependent on a lot of things: for example, you need a body, a brain, and your brain needs to be in working order, and so forth. This is to contrast with pretty much every other philosophy or religion out there which "believes" (and this applies to most branches of science, too!) that there is "something" somehow embedded in the brain which is the "self". Some might call it "soul", "life force", "mindstream" or even just "mind", or "a bunch of special neurons which encode the property of self in the brain", and so forth; the name is unimportant, the point here is that most schools of thoughts "believe" that there is "something" which exists on its own and somehow produces the self. Buddhism, by contrast, just says that what we call the "self" is just a collection of thoughts and ideas, many of which derived from sensations, and that the self changes (just think about how different you are today than you were 20 years ago). Put into other words, the "self" is just an assembly, a mental construct, a label that we give to a lot of different things bundled together, a concept we use to describe the sensation we have of existing as a sentient being... but break up some of those parts, and you lose the "self" — it doesn't exist on its own. Anyone can experiment that after drinking too much
and starting to behave differently from "their usual self". So, ok, philosophers claim that there are several degrees of "self", and that deep, very deep at the core, there is "something" that persists, even if we can't see it and don't know what it is or where it is... which Buddhism utterly rejects. There is no "something", there are just deeper and deeper, more subtle sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, cognitive processes, and so forth: the deeper we go, the less we find this "self", but just more of the same, just far, far subtler than at the surface.
What Buddhist methods do is to engage in techniques for one to experience this — to start at the surface with the more obvious examples, and go deeper and deeper searching for all those parts that we assemble together and label them as "self". But there is "nothing" permanent and eternal deep down; we just believe there is. It's clearly seeing how this "self" is assembled together out of many parts that is part of some Buddhist techniques.
Now something important has to be said. When you do these kinds of techniques, you're not "dissolving" the self, or "making it disappear", or "merging it in nothingness", or anything of the kind. You're just realizing that the word "self" is just a label, like the word "chair" is just a label of a construct made of wood with 3 or 4 legs and that some people use to sit on top of it. But that construct is not intrinsically "a chair" — we just name it that way. Someone who never sat on a chair would not recognize it, or even give it a name; it requires someone to teach us how to use a chair, and label it as such, for our minds to create a mental image of a chair and label it forever that way. The same happens to the "self". It's just a convenient label of a mass of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and so forth, but it doesn't "exist" as such, outside all those interdependent parts. But when you realize this, these things don't "disappear". They are still there. It's just that you clearly see how they are just parts of your "self", which is nothing more than a word you use to describe them. Absolutely nothing has changed — except one's attitude to believing that this self has an intrinsic existence.
If nothing is changed, why is this so important? Well, at a more mundane level, if you fully realize that the self is nothing more than a word, then you start giving less importance to it. If this self is just a bunch of ideas, why bother about pleasing it and protecting it so much? So this is why most realized practitioners are easy-going and relaxed; it's not some kind of "dumbing-down" relaxation technique, but just because they give much less importance about constantly pleasing their "selves", since they don't bother about it — this makes them less stressed about what they do, and give them "breathing space" to enjoy things as they are, instead of trying to constantly follow the "demands" made by their own non-intrinsically-existing self. This works rather well. My most recent instructions from my main teacher: "Just learn to laugh at your own thoughts and see how ridiculous your own opinions are." This is a good start
Unfortunately, in the Theosophist translations, the notion of a "non-intrinsically-existing self", which is at the core of Buddhism, was mistranslated as a "non-existing self", which is a nihilist preposition which has nothing to do with Buddhism. But sadly this is the idea that has been propagated in the West in the past 150 years or so, and it's very hard to get rid of the idea. I remember perfectly that this was exactly the idea I had — from the few books I had read, all of them mistranslated — and for many years I considered Buddhism a sort of nihilism which sounded very scary.
We now have a lot of work to get this image of Buddhism erased
It won't be simple — it has been too widespread. This is why koans like the one quoted by Zenda — "Before enlightenment chop wood and fetch water — After enlightenment chop wood and fetch water", or my own favourite, "Before satori (Japanese word for reaching a brief moment where one experiences the nature of the mind), mountains are mountains, and trees are trees. During satori, mountains are not mountains, and trees are not trees. After satori, mountains are mountains, and trees are trees." These sayings don't make any sense if one sees the process as "dissolving the self" or something like that. Rather, they just point out that things are pretty much the same, as Zenda explained, but the attitude one has towards the self (or, in the Mahayana teachings, pretty much everything in the Universe) has changed: we understand how everything arises interdependently and has no intrinsic existence. But that's not saying that they do
not exist — it's just saying that they do not exist
intrinsically, and that is the fundamental point here.
