What is Buddhism?

Just like real math is very different from what most people think math is from their experience in school, real Buddhism is very different from what most people in the West have experienced as Buddhism. This is because Buddhism is young and undeveloped in the West, gradually making inroads in an inhospitable culture which intends to extract value from Buddhism for its own aims rather than to deeply understand it.

If you have read Buddhist scriptures or writing about Buddhism, that doesn't mean that you have any understanding of Buddhism. This is because Buddhism is a living tradition, passed down from teacher to student, which uses writing in a different way from how you are probably used to.

Central to Buddhism is the practice of Buddhism, not the doctrine. A Buddhist is one who practices Buddhism, just like a pianist is one who practices the piano, not just one who believes something or other about the piano. If you have not experienced the practice, then you are like one who not only has not played the piano but who also has not heard the piano: it is difficult for you to say anything worthwhile about it. What follows is a description of the piano for one who has never played or heard it: perhaps useful, but no substitute for direct experience.

The goal of Buddhist practice

Society is constantly making things up and believing in made-up things. The mainstream culture is willing to destroy life for the sake of made-up things like nations and money. This sort of make-believe play goes very deep: cultural norms are made up and believed in deeply, as well as ideological assumptions, hopes and fears, mythologies, rules and regulations, and personality traits. Even language is made up: there is nothing intrinsic to a table that produces the sound of the word table.

Make-believe is not inherently harmful, but it is harmful to be so addicted to it that you are willing to hurt living beings in order to maintain made-up things.

The goal of Buddhist practice is to break your addiction to make-believe so you stop hurting people with it. In this process, several things happen:

• You find deeper and deeper levels of make-believe. Things that you were certain were real turn out to just be more make-believe. As you progressively stop making things up, you become more and more aware of the true reality that is not made up.
• You become able to make things up in all different ways, since you are not addicted to a particular way of making things up. This allows you to deeply connect with a wide range of people and circumstances.
• You become able to make things up in a true and beneficial way, since you are not addicted to a certain way of making things up. This is particularly important for ideological design, and why the Monastic Academy has chosen to create a sect of Buddhism to address the global crisis.
• It turns out that there is only a finite number of levels of make-believe. If you let go of all levels, you enter nirvana, wherein nothing whatsoever is made up. In this state you directly experience reality itself, realizing the answer to Douglas Adams' famous question of life, the universe, and everything. This is called spiritual awakening, or bodhi, after which Buddhism is named.

The method of Buddhist practice

One model of Buddhist practice is the threefold training: ethics (śila), meditation (samādhi), and insight (prajñā).

In order to break the addiction to make-believe and encounter reality, it is important to become very ethical in your conduct. This is because any lapse in ethical conduct is a way in which you are at war with reality, saying This is the way I want things to be! and insisting that reality uphold your make-believe. The more ethical you are, the more you are at peace with reality, and then you can truly encounter it.

In addition to an ethical lifestyle, it is important to use a meditation technique for breaking the addiction to make-believe at its root, which is the mind. Through meditation one can cultivate mental states of great concentration, energy, discernment, and love which are not as susceptible to addiction.

(It should be noted that meditation is very different from its stereotype in the West. It is not usually relaxing; it is painful, effortful work, like running or fighting. It is not escapist; rather, in meditation you directly face everything in your mind that you wish to avoid.)

Each of these two trainings supports the other: through meditation you cultivate a mind which can behave more ethically, and through ethics you develop the inner peace and self-confidence needed for progress in meditation.

And thirdly, to the degree that you have broken your addiction to make-believe, you can attain insight into the reality which is not made up. This training in insight also supports the first two trainings, as it grounds mental, verbal, and physical behavior in reality rather than the made-up instructions that one must rely on when starting out.