Like any religion, Buddhism is a collection of beliefs about the world and a prescribed way of acting based on those beliefs. And, like any religion, its adherents would generally say there’s a lot more to it than that. Just as a Christian might tell you that their religion is about being born again or about a personal relationship with Christ, a Buddhist might tell you that their religion is about waking up to the true nature of reality or about vowing to save all sentient beings.
(Interestingly, you’ll sometimes find both Buddhists and Christians telling you that their religion is “not really a religion”, possibly in an attempt to distinguish theirs from all of the other ones. Dictionaries remain unchanged by such assertions.)
But I figure the best way to explain Buddhism plainly is to speak briefly about its history, then briefly about its beliefs, then briefly about the practices based on those beliefs. And then! Back to more history, more beliefs and more practices. Trust me, I’ve been over this in my head. You can’t talk about the Buddha without then explaining what realisations make him a Buddha. Then you can’t talk about what makes him a Buddha without talking about what’s supposed to make other people into Buddhas. Then you can’t talk about Buddhist practices without acknowledging that there are different schools of Buddhism, which you can’t do without talking again about the history of Buddhism.
To do any of them justice, I have to do all of them justice, eventually. So, without further ado…
A Brief History of the Buddha (Part One)
Contrary to popular belief, this fellow is not the Buddha. He's a wee fat Chinese man.
So here’s the story of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. 2500 years ago, Gautama was born the son of a local chieftain who was, presumably, doing pretty well for himself. Gautama lived a protected upbringing (in some versions of the story, intentionally protected by his father) and it wasn’t until he was around 29 that he saw four things that shook him: a sick man, an old man, a corpse and a monk.
Those first three sights taught him about the inevitability of suffering in life – we all get sick, we all get old, we all die. This disturbed Gautama, and he saw it as a problem that needed to be resolved. The fourth sight, that of a holy man who had renounced material wealth, gave him the notion that there were at least other folk trying to work this stuff out too.
So he left his life, which happened to include his wife and newborn son, and set off to work out some kind of solution to inevitable suffering, not just for himself but for everyone. He wandered about, studying under various spiritual teachers, proving an excellent student but eventually finding each teacher to be unsatisfactory.
As was the fashion among monks at the time, he practised extreme asceticism, allegedly getting so thin that he could feel his spine from the front of his belly. After passing out and almost drowning, he had a brief insight that maybe starvation wasn’t the key to success. He started eating a bit better, to the disappointment of his ascetic friends. Then he sat down under a tree and vowed never to leave until he’d sorted the whole deal out. His friends left in disgust, figuring he’d gone off the rails into worldliness and had given up the holy path of starving yourself to death.
Mythologically, during this time he was tempted by various gods and demons to leave the path he was on, and he ignored them all. You can pretty much take this as expressions of how he was personally tempted at times to give up. Or you can believe in various gods and demons. It doesn’t particularly matter.
There he is, the silly goose.
Then, 49 days later, sitting under what came to be known as the bodhi tree, Gautama attained enlightenment and became worthy of the title “Buddha”.
Like “Caesar”, “Christ” and “The Doctor”, it’s a title, not a name. Well, maybe it’s a name for the Doctor. “Buddha” is a title meaning “Awake One”. When people talk about the Buddha, they’re generally referring to Gautama, as opposed to any other sentient being who happens to be fully enlightened. Certainly Buddhism acknowledges the potential, and often the reality, of there being many Buddhas, many sentient beings who are fully enlightened.
And here we have to pause, because we’ve hit a term that needs to be explained: enlightenment. So from history/legend we’ll move into basic Buddhist doctrines, in the next thrilling installment of Buddhism 101: Four Noble Truths. (Probably tomorrow.)