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

by Noah Rasheta

Buddha is a title that was given to a man named Siddhartha Gautama. Siddhartha lived around 500 BCE in northern India and what is now Nepal. Generally, when people refer to “the Buddha,” they’re referring to Siddhartha, the man whose teachings became the foundation of what we now call Buddhism.

We know that they center on two main themes: the problem of human suffering and the methods that can bring about the cessation of suffering. The Buddha taught a method of living intended to be practiced, rather than a set of ideas he asked his followers to believe. His teachings, known collectively as the dharma, invite us to look inward and study our own minds in order to gain a clearer understanding of ourselves and of the nature of reality.

It’s likely that the Buddha would have spoken Māgadhī Prākrit, the spoken language of the ancient Māgadha kingdom in northern India. But we can’t say that with total certainty, as there is no written record of his teachings in his native language.

wasn’t until several hundred years after the Buddha’s death that the teachings were finally collected and written down. One of the oldest collections of his written teachings is known as the Pali Canon

Also common are words in Sanskrit, a language closely related to Pali and still used as a liturgical language in India.

The traditional story is that Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, sometime around 500 BCE. He was the son of a king, raised in luxury and affluence. By the age of 29, he was married, had a son, and was carrying out his princely duties when, one day, everything changed. While on a carriage ride outside the palace, he encountered first an old man, then a sick person, and then a corpse. Up until this point, Siddhartha had lived a sheltered life in the palace and had been shielded from the realities of old age, sickness, and death. These encounters shook him to the core. He realized that his affluence and luxury would not protect him from suffering and mortality, and it troubled him deeply.

Siddhartha renounced the life of a prince and began his quest for inner peace. He worked with gurus and teachers who practiced extreme forms of self-control and asceticism. After six years of devoted study and spiritual practice ranging from meditation to long periods of fasting, Siddhartha felt frustrated that he still wasn’t getting the answers to his questions or gaining the wisdom he sought. He eventually realized that the path to peace was to be found through mental discipline. At a site in northern India, he sat in meditation under a fig tree, where he wrestled with his own mind, struggling with the concepts and ideas that were blinding

After seven days, he suddenly understood that he was the source of his own discomfort and suffering, as well as the source of the joy and contentment he so desperately sought. Upon realizing that the wisdom he sought was to be found within himself rather than outside himself, he attained enlightenment. He would come to be known as the Buddha, from the Pali and Sanskrit word for “awakened.” The site at which he reached enlightenment would become known as Bodh Gaya and that tree as the Bodhi tree, in his honor.

even furious, in moments like these? From the Buddhist perspective, our perception of the reality of any situation (in this case, a car cutting us off) is influenced as much by ideas as it is by what actually happened. In this scenario, we might think, “This jerk cut me off!” But the idea that the other driver is a selfish, mean person who cut us off intentionally is a fictional narrative we created in our own mind. How do we know this person is a jerk? What if he or she just got devastating news and was distracted because of it? What

The reality of the situation is that a car cut you off, and that’s all you know. Everything else is uncertain; we don’t know who the driver is, why he or she behaved that way, or what is going on in that car. 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.

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. The idea of awakening and being awake runs throughout Buddhist philosophy. 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

After his enlightenment, the Buddha dedicated the rest of his life to teaching others how to realize enlightenment for themselves.

Before becoming the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama married a woman named Yasodhara, and they had a son named Rahula. Yasodhara and Rahula remained in the palace during the years Siddhartha was seeking his enlightenment, but tradition says they joined the order of monks and nuns he later established.

Because Buddha is a title meaning “awakened one,” there have been many Buddhas throughout history. 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,

distinguish Siddhartha from other Buddhas, Buddhists often refer to him as either Gautama Buddha or Shakyamuni Buddha (“sage of the Shakyas,” the Shakyas being his clan). Most depictions of Gautama Buddha show a thin man with long ears, usually in the pose of sitting meditation.

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.

more important to live ethically than it is to worship anything.

there are certainly cultural practices in some Buddhist traditions in which the Buddha is described as a type of god, though not a creator God like we think of in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

This means that enlightenment can’t be explained; it has to be experienced. So instead of teaching a set of beliefs, the Buddha taught a set of practices, a method to help people realize enlightenment for themselves.

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. We tend to go through life thinking that external circumstances are to blame for our suffering and our lack of contentment. The Buddha’s teachings help us alter that perspective and learn that the unnecessary suffering we experience has more to do with how we see things than with what we see.

The Buddha died around the age of 80 from a sudden illness, possibly food poisoning, after eating a meal offered by a lay follower. He did not name a successor. Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and attendant, had asked him before his death, “Who will teach us when you are gone?” The Buddha advised him that his teachings would serve as the teacher. Today,

Perhaps the best answer is “all of the above.” If you search any list of major world religions, you’ll certainly find Buddhism on that list, but Buddhism is different from most religions in that it’s a nontheistic tradition; it doesn’t espouse a belief in a supreme creator God as the source of existence. Furthermore, Buddhism isn’t concerned with many of the big questions asked by other religions, like: Is there a God? What happens when we die? Is the universe finite or infinite?

This story nicely illustrates how Buddhism takes a pragmatic approach to tackling the challenge immediately at hand: that in life, difficulties arise and we experience suffering, much as we would if shot by a poison arrow. The Buddha taught that the wise thing to do is not to spend time and energy focusing on irrelevant details but to remove the arrow. Rather than trying to answer these existential questions, Buddhism urges us to look inward and ask ourselves, “Why do I feel the need to know these things?” Because Buddhism is less concerned with big, unknowable, supernatural questions, we can comfortably say that Buddhism, in addition to being a religion, is a way of life or a philosophy: a set of practices that don’t depend on any dogmatic beliefs, a way to live that maximizes our chances for peace and contentment in the present moment—

The short answer is no. Various schools of Buddhism use different texts and writings as the source of their teachings, and a text that’s venerated in one school may be completely unknown in another. For example, the oldest collection of Buddhist writings, the Tipitaka (known in English as the Pali Canon) is the standard collection of scriptures for Theravada Buddhists. Tipitaka is Pali for “three baskets,” and the text is split into three general categories: the Vinaya Pitaka (the “discipline basket,” which contains rules of discipline for followers), the Sutta Pitaka (the “sayings basket,” which contains the discourses and sermons of the Buddha), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (the

Other writings are used in other schools of Buddhism. In the Mahayana schools, including Zen, some of the most popular scriptures are the Heart Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, and the Diamond Sutra. Another popular Buddhist text is the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha.

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.

The Buddha’s teachings began to spread out of India and Nepal into neighboring countries in Asia and have continued to spread for 2,500 years.

differences. The two major branches of Buddhism are Theravada and Mahayana. Mahayana has several subsets that you may have heard of, like Zen, Tibetan, and Pure Land Buddhism. There is also an extension of Mahayana Buddhism called Vajrayana, which is sometimes referred to as a distinct, third branch of Buddhism.

Theravada is the main form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, while Mahayana dominates in China, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, Mongolia, Korea, and Vietnam. Vajrayana is the main form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and the form that the Dalai Lama practices and teaches. Of the various forms of Buddhism that exist today, Theravada is the oldest, but Mahayana has the most practitioners. Many denominations of Buddhism, like Zen, Tibetan, Jōdo Shinshū, and Nichiren,

But ideas, like languages, change over time. People have developed different American accents in different regions of the United States, and the Spanish spoken in Mexico is different from the Spanish spoken in other Latin American countries and in Spain. Likewise, Buddhism has evolved to fit different cultures and time periods. There’s no right or wrong form of Buddhism to

the two main schools of Buddhism differ primarily in what they consider the ultimate goal of their practice. 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.

Another key difference is that Theravada Buddhism is primarily a monastic practice, meaning that most practitioners have renounced their ordinary lives and taken vows to become full-time monks or nuns. The lay community provides support for the monastic community, but laypeople don’t necessarily follow the same devotional path to enlightenment. In Mahayana schools, it’s more common to find a devotional path for laypeople who aren’t interested in becoming monks or nuns.

The various traditions also rely on different texts for their teachings. Theravada Buddhism follows the Pali Canon exclusively, while Mahayana practice is based on the Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist canons. The Tibetan and Chinese canons contain

Theravada schools tend to use the Pali form of common terms, like sutta and dhamma, while Mahayana uses the Sanskrit versions (sutra, dharma).

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.”

Buddhism began to arrive in the United States through Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800s, as well as through Americans and Europeans who had visited Asia and brought Buddhist texts and ideas back with them. Buddhist concepts began showing up in the literary works of authors like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

by the 1950s and ’60s, there were Zen centers established in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Spiritual seekers, like Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn,

Enlightenment is the ultimate goal of all Buddhist teachings and practices, and the Buddha taught that anyone—that means you!—can realize enlightenment. That’s what Buddhist teachings and practices are for—to help regular people like you and me along the path to that goal. The Buddhist conception of enlightenment isn’t intellectual. It’s experiential.

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.

think of enlightenment as the experience and understanding of reality just as it is, without the influence of the concepts, ideas, and beliefs that so often muddy our perception of it. Awakening, on the other hand, is the process by which this new way of seeing life begins to unfold.

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.

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.”

From the Buddhist perspective, calling ignorance a poison is specifically referring to a lack of understanding about the nature of reality. So, for example, when we perceive things to be permanent and independent from other things, this blinds us from seeing things as they truly are: impermanent and interdependent. This misconception fuels our suffering.

Ignorance is a poison because it prevents us from seeing things as they are, which

Greed is the mental state we experience when we want to get more of what we want, whenever possible, at whatever cost to others. It’s one of the three poisons because of the effect is has on our minds.

Hatred is what we feel when we want to harm anyone or anything that stands in the way of getting what we want—anyone or anything that poses, or seems to pose, some kind of threat to us. 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.

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. The main idea here is that we’re hardwired as social creatures to be kind and loving to each other.