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

by Noah Rasheta

The problem is that even if we know this, we continue to cling to things as if they were permanent because we want them to last. When we look at the world around us—city streets and buildings, trees and lakes—we perceive it to be solid and fixed. We know intellectually that one day those trees will die and those buildings will crumble, but we continue to perceive them as permanent.

Buddhism teaches two types of impermanence: gross and subtle.

Gross impermanence happens on a larger scale: Matter decays, people die, empires rise and fall, societal norms change and evolve. This is the kind of impermanence we see all around us. Like clouds, things arise, endure for a while, and then pass. Subtle impermanence, meanwhile, is smaller-scale, moment-to-moment change. At this very instant, you are physically undergoing change as the cells in your body die and regenerate. You are not the same exact person from ...

are: collections of impermanent, momentar...

When we start to understand the nature of impermanence, our tendency to cling to outcomes and expectations will begin to diminish. That doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy to lose a job or a loved one. It just means that the suffering of loss will go more smoothly when we learn to see things as they really are: that loss is ...

When we understand that all things are impermanent, we...

meaning and joy in every moment a...

Buddhism teaches that there are three different types of suffering. The first is called “the suffering of suffering.” This is a natural form of suffering that we experience on a regular basis. Pain might be a good word to summarize it. It’s what we experience when we stub our toe, stay up all night with the

stomach flu, or start to feel achy as we age.

The second type of suffering is called “the suffering of loss.” This is what we experience when, for example, we lose a job, a loved one, or our youth and vitality. This form of suffering is also natural, and like the suffering ...

The third type of suffering is called “the all-pervasive suffering,” and it’s the type Buddhism is most concerned with. Unlike the first two types, all-pervasive suffering is self-inflicted, and it generally arises ...

It tends to have very little to do with our actual circumstances and a lot to do with how we perceive and...

If we didn’t hold the false belief, the suffering wouldn’t exist. This all-pervasive suffering is difficult for us to detect because it requires us to scrutinize our deeply held views, ideas, and beliefs.

In other words, things are because of, and in relation to, other things, but things do not exist by themselves as permanent or separate entities.

I perceive myself as separate from others and others as separate from me.

The irony is that we each exist in the most fundamental sense only because of the actions of other people, namely, our

parents. Without any effort on your part, certain causes and conditions resulted in your existence here and now. This is true of all things. Everything has c...

We’re always making adjustments as we go, so there’s no fixed, permanent version of us, only the continually changing combination of causes and conditions. Are you more you when you’re hungry or when you’ve recently eaten a meal? Is the authentic you the one that’s well rested or the one who’s sleep-deprived because you’ve been laboring over a work project for the past week? Is the real you the one who was raised in a loving home or the one who endured an experience of trauma as a child?

The Buddhist teaching of nonself says that there is no permanent or fixed you—there’s only a complex web of inseparable, impermanent causes and effects.

We start to see ourselves as dependent on everything that makes us who we are. We are the sum total of all our parts (and we ourselves are parts of families, communities, societies).

Ask yourself, “Which me is the real me?” This question helps me remember that there is no permanent me.

The me of now is not the me of yesterday or five years ago or five years from now. This is what Buddhism teaches with regard to nonself.

What Buddhism does teach is a concept called nonattachment, which is different from detachment.

To understand nonattachment more clearly, we must first understand that in order to be attached, two things are required: the person who is attached and the object of the attachment. But, as we just learned above, there is no “self” that’s doing the attaching.

Think about attachment in the context of the labels we apply to ourselves: our job titles, belief systems, political views, opinions, and so on. We attach to these concepts and identify with them to the point that we feel tremendous suffering when they’re attacked or we lose them. Our tendency is to think that we must be either attached strongly to an idea or detached from that idea entirely.

Buddhism proposes a different option: We can be non-attached to our ideas. Without dropping our labels and concepts completely, we loosen the death grip we have on them. When someone attacks a belief or opinion we hold, we can see that they’re attacking the idea, not us directly. When we’re nonattached to our ideas, they no longer own us—we own them.

The Buddhist understanding of emptiness is that all things are devoid of meaning until we assign meaning to them. Reality is like a blank canvas, bare until the painter comes along and creates something on that emptiness.

From the Buddhist perspective, all things are like this: empty of inherent meaning. That’s not to say they’re meaningless. It’s just that the meaning comes from us, the givers of meaning, not from the things themselves.

is, and then there’s the story we create about it.

“Who knows what is good and what is bad?” This is emptiness. It’s the understanding that as life unfolds, it doesn’t mean anything. It is neither positive

nor negative. All things simply are as they are.

From the Buddhist perspective, birth and death are not the beginning and end; they are not separate from

one another. Death is simply the culmination of a phase that started with birth, but the overall process of life started long before our individual births and deaths, and it will continue long after.

Life is a lot like music, and our lives are like songs. While songs all have a starting note and an ending note, even when a song ends, music itself goes on, regardless of what song is playing. And the beauty of each song is found in the continual changing of the n...