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.

In fact, in one Buddhist scripture, 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.

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 the Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, a monk is so troubled that the Buddha hasn’t addressed these types of existential questions that he threatens to abandon his monastic vows unless he can get satisfactory answers. The Buddha responds by comparing him to a man wounded with a poisoned arrow who, absurdly, won’t accept treatment until he knows who shot him, what clan the archer was from, what the archer looked like, what materials the arrow was made of, and so on. “The man would die,” the Buddha concludes, “and those things would still remain unknown to him” (Majjhima Nikāya 63).

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?”

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. Put another way, enlightenment isn’t something you get or find; it’s something you rediscover—a state of being that has always been in you but that has been covered with made-up stories and false concepts. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Clinging to hatred is simply an unwise action because it creates unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others. As a mental state, hatred affects the emotional well-being of the person doing the hating more than the person being hated. 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.

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 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.

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.

Perhaps a better approach to this question is to ask yourself, “Are my beliefs (or nonbeliefs) preventing me from seeing and experiencing reality properly?” Our minds are already full of beliefs, conclusions, judgments, and our own understanding of the “facts” of reality. We’re usually far more interested in what we already think we know than in learning something new.