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

by Noah Rasheta

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.

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.

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, 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.

the Buddha seems to be critical of god worship, telling a young man that it’s far more important to live ethically than it is to worship anything.

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order to really understand enlightenment, a person has to experience certain aspects of it directly. No words or concepts can adequately express what enlightenment is.

enlightenment can’t be explained; it has to ...

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?

Buddhism is to help us understand the nature of reality and suffering and let go of the causes of suffering.

“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.

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.

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?

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.

Buddhism urges us to look inward and ask ourselves, “Why do I feel the need to know these things?”

Buddhism, in addition to being a religion, is a way of life or a philosophy:

The Buddha encouraged his followers to test his teachings for themselves in their own lives.

Buddhist teachings are not something you’re meant to believe; they’re something you do—you put them into practice.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Greed is the mental state we experience when we want to get more of what we want, whenever possible, at whatever cost to others.

We often believe the misguided notion that if we could just get the things we want—

money, fame, power—they would somehow finally give us the happiness we seek and ensure we’d no ...

We also tend to want to change other people to get more things, like a...

Simply following our desires without taking time to understand them can lead to destructive behavior and mental confusion, which is why greed is considered a poison.

in order to be free from the bonds of hatred, we have to practice a different way of perceiving what happens to us.

As a mental state, hatred affects the emotional well-being of the person doing the hating more than the person being hated.

Buddhism encourages us to embrace the reality of our feelings, including any feelings of hatred we might be experiencing.

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.

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 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.

that loss is a natural part of the course of life, rather than something we need to fight against. When we understand that all things are impermanent, we can begin to find meaning and joy in every moment as it passes.

That kind of suffering is self-inflicted, based on a belief or concept, not on circumstances themselves. If we didn’t hold the false belief, the suffering wouldn’t exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

there’s no need to fear death, because while it may be the end of the song, it’s not the end of music.

There really is no beginning or end; there is only change.

rather than focusing on life after death, we can instead choose to focus on life before death—the life we’re living now. Rather than speculating about what happens when we die, we can anchor ourselves in the present moment.

We can begin here and now to make life meaningful by understanding that meaning isn’t out there waiting to be found—it’s in you, waiting to be created.

The Buddhist understanding of karma is actually quite different. Karma is simply the law of cause and effect. There is no justice, intelligence, or moral system behind it, no punishment or reward. It’s less “If I do something good, I will get something good” and more “If I do something, something will happen.” Karma is not mysterious or hidden. It’s the action that’s taken, not the result.

The central teaching of karma is that we can pause and break the cycle of reactivity.

“Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”

Ceasing reactivity doesn’t mean we need to let go of the discomfort that makes us feel like punching the wall. (That’s not really possible, in any case.) Letting go of reactivity is about avoiding the second arrow. It’s more an act of liberation than a sacrifice we have to make. Eventually we come to understand that letting go of pain is no sacrifice at all.

Buddhist practice doesn’t end suffering; suffering is a lifelong reality. But we can let go of our attachment to avoiding suffering, which paradoxically causes us so much avoidable suffering.

Right, or wise, understanding starts by simply recognizing that what we’re seeing might not actually be what it appears to be.