Many people have tried to explain what Gotama taught using the language of philosophy. Buddhist philosophers have argued over the centuries about the best interpretation of his teachings, resulting in many well-intended but confusing distinctions. But Gotama sought to avoid clinging to views: fixed, rigid ideas, absolutes, ideals, and so on. He taught a way of training oneself to understand human experience directly, based on developing one’s powers of attention & awareness, analyzing experience introspectively, as it arises. For example, observing forms, affective feelings (pleasant or unpleasant sensations), perception (recognizing things, persons, other phenomena), rapid automatic mental patterns—habits (saṅkhāra), & consciousness (responses to the six senses, with thinking as the sixth). All this & more is to be observed intensely, at as small a scale as possible. The point is to see how all experience comprises only these sorts of activities, & not any solid self, & nothing that does not change very rapidly & continuously. This is a training, an understanding achieved by careful observation of what is actually arising in experience. It is practical, based on trying & learning, designed to show how dukkha arises, & how it can be overcome. Gotama’s teachings are a training manual, just like learning a musical instrument or a sport: the best way to learn how to do something—live without dukkha.
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practice
“Practice” in Gotama’s teachings includes a number of techniques for training the mind in calming, concentration, & insight (mindfulness, sati). These all represent a practical (pragmatism) means to the goal of liberation: seeing how things really are, or, if you prefer, what being a human being really is. Practice in techniques of meditation, concentration, & insight work with study of dhamma: Studying the teachings gives you some first ideas for understanding how things are, & basic ideas for practice; practice, in turn, prepares the mind for insights, seeing directly how things are. These insights, in turn, allow deeper appreciation for more subtle aspects of the teachings. This cycle repeats & deepens over time. We have to calm the mind, which normally races around, wanders, & is distracted. Then we can begin to look for the mental patterns Gotama describes in his teachings: the endless flow of mental events arising & passing, the lack of anything there like a solid self to which events are occurring.
Because there are so many good resources already for learning meditation, concentration, & insight, this site does not go into depth about these. Also, most people find practicing with a like-minded group, with support from experienced teachers, is the best way to go, especially (but not only) at the beginning.
mindfulness • pragmatism • sati • study
pragmatism
Gotama’s teachings are best understood as pragmatic, that is, practical, since they treat thinking as no more than a tool to achieve an end, rather than setting up a system of ideas as an end in itself. For Gotama, liberation from dukkha, human suffering & stress, is the goal. That practical effect is not an idea or a belief, but a new way of experiencing the world. He invites us to “come & see” for ourselves, offering suggestions for training, & language designed mainly to help us unlearn our habitual ways of being & understanding. As such, Gotama’s teachings can be understood in harmony with a naturalistic view of the world, without rigid ideals or views, or other metaphysical dogma. Gotama thus did not see himself as arguing with other people’s ideas, except to point out how his training might solve the idea-based knots in their understanding. Especially with those who advocated ethical behavior, he happily made common cause with them except where their misunderstandings caused them to create dukkha for themselves or others. Gotama understood why we want to create sets of ideals, systems of ideas, & abstract notions; he devotes an entire discourse1 to analyzing such ideas & the psychology behind them, showing why each one falls short in reaching the goal of ending dukkha.
- Brahmajāla Sutta, Dīgha Nikāya 1 ↩
psychology
Psychology tends to confirm the nuts & bolts of Gotama’s teachings, giving us some confidence to overcome any skeptical doubt about their value. Also, evolutionary psychology explains why dukkha is part of the human condition; dukkha is more likely to make us survive as a species. The concept of a separate self that must preserve & pass on this DNA coordinates human actions in many ways. At the same time, comparing Western psychology with Gotama’s teachings shows us the limits of psychology. Deep happiness is more than avoiding or curing mental illness. (Branches of psychology inspired by Gotama’s teachings are usually called “positive psychology,” which aims to promote “human flourishing.”) Also, the idea of the unconscious mind shows us how current behavior conditions future behavior: kamma. While Western psychology is rapidly (by historical standards) taking Gotama’s ideas on board, much remains to be understood & integrated, especially the evolutionary origins & role of ethics in Gotama’s teachings.
religion
Many varieties of Buddhist religion have sprung from Gotama’s teachings. In his own time, he must have been seen as a reaction to established religions; the earliest texts mention Brahmanism (root of the complex of strands now known as Hinduism) & Jainism most frequently. Whether his teachings should really be considered a religion, as such, is a vexed question, the kind of proliferation of thought that Gotama saw as endless, pointless, & a source of dukkha. His teachings offer a solution to the human existential problem; philosophies & religions also do that, as do many trends in current thought, such as secular humanism, & peculiar blends of science, technology & materialism (sci-tech-mat). Most religions—including Buddhist varieties—offer some form of the sacred, ideas to be accepted uncritically without proofs, although this is sometimes subtle & hidden. All of them attempt to do terror management. I believe Gotama’s teachings can be lived without resorting to anything like the sacred, which makes them more suitable in our current skeptical, science-based culture. The extreme fear & hatred of “the other” we see among people who use traditional religions to manage their fear of death seems to be increasing as science & technology weaken the ability to believe ideas that don’t square with natural science.
renunciation
The goal of Gotama’s teachings is reached by training to know our experience unfolding in the moment. Suffering & stress (dukkha) result when mental activity creates friction with the world (the way things are); our experience becomes that painful friction. To see this, we must train the mind to observe this process. One way to do this is by experiment: give up something desired, or tolerate something not liked, & watch the mind react. This practice is renunciation (nekkhamma)1, whether meditating for minutes, or practicing at a meditation retreat for days, weeks, or months. For monastics, it is a way of life. In this laboratory of experience, we can observe how pleasant or unpleasant sensations (vedanā) arise & pass away. We can see how much the mind is ruled by habits, by reactions to these sensations; the clockwork of our hedonic cycle is seen for what it is. Thoughts assemble themselves as reactions to experience. Three characteristics of experience appear with clarity: impermanence (anicca: mental events quickly arise & pass), not-self (anattā: events in the mind aren’t “who we are”), & stress & suffering (dukkha) constantly arises.
anatta • anicca • dukkha • hedonic • practice • sīla • three characteristics • vedana
- Strictly speaking, renunciation is a practice, rather than a topic for study. But it offers a good example of how study & practice are two sides of a coin: practicing renunciation, we see directly the characteristics of impermanence, not-self, & suffering. As we see this more clearly, our study of other topics becomes easier. ↩