What Is Buddhism?

It occurs to me that if I’m going to do a series of blog posts to tell people about Buddhism, I should write one as a general introduction to Buddhism.  I probably should have posted that one first, but I didn’t, so I’ll do it today instead.

Disclaimer: I want to clarify that I’m not a Buddhist myself, just an interested person who thinks that Buddhism has a lot to offer people living in the world today.  I’m also not an expert on Buddhism, so anything I say about it is my best understanding of what I’ve read and been told – an informed understanding, but an imperfect one nonetheless.

Now, there are a lot of ways to say what Buddhism is, but maybe the best through the central beliefs of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths (this link gives a great, concise explanation of each – I highly recommend you read it).  These are basically the equivalent of a Christian profession of faith.  Without further ado, here are the Four Noble Truths:

1. Life means suffering.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering.

“Suffering” is the most common translation of the Pali word “dukkha,” but I’ve been made to understand that “suffering” doesn’t have quite the right connotations.  Dukkha doesn’t refer so much to physical or emotional pain (though this is part of it) as to a more general, existential feeling of disquietude, a feeling that something is somehow awry.

That’s Buddhism in a nutshell, although it’s rather simplistic to speak of Buddhism as a unified whole.  Just as there are thousands of Christian denominations, there are countless varieties of Buddhism.  To put it simplistically, they differ by how to interpret the details of the third and fourth Noble Truths.  The exact details of the road to enlightenment are apparently pretty contentious.

Two commonalities do stand out, though.  For one, unlike the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), most Buddhist denominations have a heavy contemplative focus, i.e., they’re big on meditation.

The other big commonality is that for the most part, Buddhism is essentially atheistic (though Tibetan Buddhism may be an exception – the status of their deities is a sticky issue).  This is pretty shocking for most people – how can Buddhism be a religion if it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of any gods?  A blog post is too confining for me to really answer that, but the short answer is that, like any religion, it offers a means (i.e., nirvana) by which humans can transcend the finite conditions of their existence.  It just happens to be the case that Buddhism doesn’t conceptualize this means in terms of a deity/deities.  Try to wrap your head around that one.

-Aaron Bekemeyer