No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners: Clear Answers to Burning Questions About Core Buddhist Teachings

by Noah Rasheta

In our day-to-day lives, we’re continually making meaning and creating stories about everything that happens. A thought arises, we create a story about it, the story evokes an emotion, we create another story about that, and on and on until, before we know it, we’re hardly paying attention to our lived reality at all, trapped in a habitual reactivity to our own thoughts.

But there is great freedom in releasing ourselves from the stories that cloud our perceptions and starting to feel okay with not always understanding the situation we’re in.

This is why Buddhism is often referred to as the Path of Liberation. Liberation is the moment you don’t react to being cut off in traffic—because you don’t know what actually happened, so there’s nothing to react to. Liberation is experiencing reality as it is.

Buddha is a word that means “awakened one” or “a person who is awake” in both Sanskrit and Pali.

Buddhism teaches that there’s reality as it is, and then there’s reality as we humans perceive or understand it. Our perception of reality is influenced by how our minds are conditioned; in other words, our ideas, cultural beliefs,

concepts, and opinions all directly affect how we see reality. A Buddha is someone who is completely liberated from the mistaken perceptions of reality to which we are all so susceptible, thus experiencing nirvana (a Sanskrit word meaning “blown out” or “extinguished”), which is the state of awak...

One such person was a Chinese Buddhist monk called Budai, also known as the Laughing Buddha or the Fat Buddha. When you see a statue of a fat, bald man with a smile, you’re seeing Budai,

not Siddhartha Gautama, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded.

The Buddha was a teacher, not a god. When you see Buddhists bowing to statues or images of the Buddha, they’re not necessarily worshipping him but rather making a physical expression of their humble intent to follow the Buddha’s teachings in order to overcome an ego-centered life. In

The Buddha’s teachings are meant to be put into practice, and the resulting experiences are to be verified by each individual practitioner. Instead of determining whether these teachings are true or not, we are encouraged to verify if they work or not. In other words, do these teachings really lead to the reduction, and ultimately the cessation, of suffering?

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, says that “the secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself.”

The Buddha taught that we are essentially prisoners of our own minds, bound by our beliefs, perceptions, and ideas. We see an inaccurate version of reality—a version, not coincidentally, that causes us unnecessary suffering.

How many realities are we blind to simply because we already hold an idea, concept, or belief that prevents us from seeing reality as it is?

Buddhist writings are not considered to be dictated or revealed

by a deity. They’re meant to guide us on the path of enlightenment, not to indoctrinate us in a particular set of beliefs. Buddhist teachings are not something you’re meant to believe; they’re something you do—you put them into practice.

There’s no right or wrong form of Buddhism to practice, just like there’s no right or wrong accent in which to speak English or Spanish. The Buddha said that the greatest of all teachings is the teaching of impermanence. How could Buddhism possibly stay the same in a

world that’s constantly changing? You can learn something from all the various Buddhist traditions, finding which teachings ring true for you and resonate with your specific personality or learning style. And as you change, your practice can change with you.

In Theravada Buddhism, it’s to become an arhat, a practitioner

who follows the Buddha’s path and realizes enlightenment. In Mahayana Buddhism, the goal is to become a bodhisattva, one who vows not only to become awakened but also to awaken all other beings.

This difference in approaches arises from the Mahayana view of interdependence, which holds that one being can’t be fully enlightened unless and until all beings are enlightened. Vajrayana Buddhism, an offshoot of Mahayana, also focuses on the bodhisattva vow and adds various forms of intensive meditati...

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Zen is a form of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China around the sixth century CE, then spread to Japan and beyond. It’s notable for its focus on meditation, including extensive zazen, or “seated meditation.” Many of the teachers who popularized Buddhism in the West were from this school, which is why some Westerners think of Zen as being synonymous

with Buddhism or even use the word Zen to mean “calm,” “relaxed,” or “being in the moment.”

To be enlightened is to be liberated from our habitual reactivity, freed from our perceptions and ideas in order to see reality as it is without wanting it to be different.

I would go further and say that enlightenment is also freedom from wanting to be enlightened. Any notion we have about what enlightenment is can get in the way of actually experiencing it.

Buddhism teaches that enlightenment is our true nature. It’s not something we can become, because it’s something we already are. We just have to realize it.

Awakening, on the other hand, is

the process by which this new way of seeing life begins to unfold. I see awakening as a path with several stages and levels, while the final, radical shift in perspective is the moment of enlightenment.

This idea is conveyed by a famous koan (a paradoxical statement that Zen Buddhists meditate on) that says you can enter this state of awakening only through a gateless gate. This is a seemingly simple but rather profound teaching: As long as you think there is a gate, you will not be able to ent...

in that awakened state all along. You arrive there by realizing there is no “there” there. The only thing keeping you from seeing this is the mistaken belief that you were ever outside a gate in the first place. In a way, you become awakened the moment you realize you don’t need to...

From the Buddhist perspective, good and evil are not inherent forces out in the universe; instead, they’re internal states of mind. Buddhism teaches us to look inward. There we can find the source of all the good things we say, think, and do, and likewise discover that we ourselves—our own minds—are the source of any evil.

Rather than thinking of evil as an external agent acting upon us, Buddhism teaches that greed, hatred, and ignorance are the sources of what we typically think of as “evil.” In Buddhism, these three qualities are called “the three poisons” or “the three fires.” The challenge the three poisons pose in our lives is that they drive us to look outside of ourselves to try to achieve happiness or avoid suffering. Because external things, like money, fame, or power, can’t bring us lasting joy or contentment, we’re setting ourselves

up to experience unnecessary suffering by chasing after them. Material things can be nice to have for a time, but the happiness and fulfillment we seek is not found in external sources.

The most dangerous manifestation of ignorance is the belief in a permanent self that exists independent of other people and the rest of the world. Clinging to this false, or ignorant, sense of self and wanting to protect it give rise to greed and hatred. Ignorance is a poison because it prevents us from seeing things as they are, which is necessary to reach enlightenment. The antidote to ignorance is wisdom about the nature of both reality and the self.

Greed is not just about material things, though. We also tend to want to change other people to get more things, like attention or affection. We mistakenly think that once we change others, we’ll find lasting happiness.

A skillful way of dealing with the poison of greed is to try to understand it. We start that process by looking at the things we desire and asking ourselves, “Why?” Why do I feel such a strong desire to have this thing or that person? Why do I feel the need

to achieve this or that? It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the feeling of desire; it’s that we can become blinded by it, especially when we don’t have a thorough understanding of the intent or causes behind why we feel what we feel. Simply following our desires without taking time to understand them can lead t...

Buddhism teaches that hatred is a poison because it can so easily consume all our time and energy.

From the Buddhist perspective, letting go of hatred is not a moral issue. The problem with hatred isn’t whether it’s morally right or wrong. Clinging to hatred is simply an unwise action because it creates unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others.

So it’s not wrong to feel hatred; in fact, it’s natural to feel this emotion from time to time. It is, however, wise to try to understand why we feel it.

What other emotions might be hidden underneath the hatred? Are feelings of sadness, loneliness, or vulnerability in some way causing the emotion of hatred to arise? Rather than evading the painful truth of how we feel, Buddhism encourages us to embrace the reality of our feelings, including any feelings of hatred we might be experiencing. We strive to understand the causes and conditions that allow the feeling of hatred to arise, turning inward for understanding rather than acting on destructive impulses.

moments of awareness evoke a tremendous sense of gratitude and awe, and they can be experienced anywhere at any time. You can try this yourself by asking, “Where am I? What am I doing? What did it take for this moment to arise?”

From the Buddhist perspective, people are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, but we all have the potential to connect with an inner kindness and compassion known as Buddha-nature.

To see this inherent nature in ourselves and others, we have to peel away the clay—all the ideas, opinions, and beliefs that are preventing us from seeing how things really are.

If there were no humans on the planet, gold and silver would have no inherent value. It’s a conceptual truth.

We live in a world full of conceptual truths, but it’s easy to forget that. Our incredibly complex social, political, financial, and religious systems all depend on shared, agreed-upon beliefs. We wouldn’t be able to trade paper money for goods, like bread and milk,

unless we collectively believed that a piece of paper or metal had real value. But the value of a five-dollar bill is not true in the s...

Buddhism teaches that we all see the truth from a unique perspective and that, like the blind men, we can’t see all perspectives. We’re bound by space and time to one unique view in the here and now. There are also, however, some absolute or universal truths taught in

Buddhism, and these are not bound by space and time or constructed by collective agreement. The Buddha taught that there are three universal characteristics of life, also known as the three marks of existence: dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anattā (nonself). These three concepts form the core of what could be considered the truth in Buddhism.

The nature of reality is that all things are constantly changing, and therefore all things are impermanent.