Download Buddhism!! ! ! Goals The Four Noble Truths Life sucks

Goals
You will learn:
Central Buddhist teachings include:
Buddhism!! ! !
Philosophy
The Four Noble Truths
The Eightfold Path
Taking refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and the
sangha
Dependent co-arising
There is no “self” and no God
The goal is nirvana, or enlightenment
The Four Noble Truths
The Four Noble Truths revealed by the Buddha include:
Life is suffering
Suffering is caused by desire
The cure for suffering is to end desire
Release from suffering is possible. To do so, one
must follow the eightfold path.
Rule #1
Life sucks
The sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha.
Buddhists believe that life is always uncertain; that it
always includes anxiety and dissatisfaction.
Even if you are happy today, you may be unhappy
tomorrow.
This is because nothing is permanent.
This causes suffering.
A bit depressing, isn’t it?
Rule #2
You brought this on yourself
Suffering is caused by desire, or tahna (meaning thirst).
People always want more and more. After all, don’t we
all want to win the lottery so we can buy more stuff?
Rule # 4
Follow the yellow brick road
The way to end suffering is to follow the
8-fold path (also called The Middle Way):
Right understanding
Right intention
Right speech
Right action
Right work
Right effort
Right meditation
Right contemplation
Rule #3
You broke it, you fix it.
If we put an end to desire, we can put an end to
suffering.
But how to we make this happen?
The Eightfold Path
The eightfold path is an outline of a program to free
yourself from desire and attachment.
Right understanding is simply about recognizing that
nothing is permanent- not happiness, not sadness, not
life, nothing! It is also about accepting the four noble
truths.
Right intention, speech, action and work are about
living ethically. So no more lying, gossiping, bullying,
swearing, stealing, killing, sex, or working in any job
that involves harming others (such as selling weapons,
hunting, fishing)
The Eightfold Path
The Five Precepts
In Buddhism, there are rules that everyone is asked to
follow (kind of like the ten commandments).
Right effort means following the middle way- not too
much, not too little!
Right meditation and contemplation- means that
Buddhists will meditate and reflect on the Buddha’s
teachings about life, suffering, desire, impermanence in
order to cultivate an inner peace.
Monks and nuns must follow 227 precepts, but lay
people are asked to follow five main rules:
1. No killings/harming living beings
2. No stealing
3. No sexual misconduct
4. No lying
5. No use of intoxicants
Yep, they like numbers
Just to review, Buddhists believe:
There are Four Noble Truths
There is an Eightfold Path
There are Five Precepts to follow
And that is just the start...!
The Three Jewels or Three
Refuges
The Buddha told his followers they can “take refuge in” or turn to three jewels as
they seek enlightenment.
The Buddha
The Dharma- meaning the teachings of the Buddha
The Sangha- the community of followers and those who have attained
enlightenment
The Three Jewels are part of a ceremony undertaken when making a
commitment to Buddhism, during which participants recite: “I take refuge in
the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma; I take refuge in the Sangha”
Dependent Co-arising
The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent, that
everything is always changing. Impermanence in
sanskrit is annica.
This belief that everything is in flux is called “dependent
co-arising.”
The idea is that there is a connection between suffering
and desire, that they create one another. Does this
cause and effect sound familiar?
Let me blow your mind!
Buddhists believe that there is no “self”. What we think of as our “self” is really just
a collection of five elements (or skandhas):
the body
the senses
perceptions
responses
consciousness
To think of this simply- “You” do not exist in any permanent sense. Your body, your
thoughts, your feels, your eyesight, your hearing, your mind is always changing.
For Buddhists, it is senseless to talk about the self as having any real ongoing
existence.
Nothing is permanent
The idea that there is nothing permanent, unchanging,
or eternal in the whole of existence has some
interesting implications.
If things only exist in relation to one another, there can
be no God in the way we usually understand God. i.e.
there is no Creator of the universe, no eternal being
that is separate from humanity.
There is also no “self”, no enduring individual nature or
character, no “soul”. The Buddhist word for this is
“anatta”
But why is this important?
The only way to overcome suffering, is to free yourself
from attachment to particular hopes and ideas.
An attachment to the idea of individuality, of a self, is
one of the most difficult attachments to let go of
(particularly for teenagers- after all, how much time did
you spend doing your hair or picking out your outfit this
morning?)
Nirvana
Confused yet?
However, it is only through recognizing that there is no
“self” that one can attain nirvana, or enlightenment
The Buddha didn’t real say all that much about what nirvana was
like.
But what is nirvana? Is it like heaven?
There is a traditional Buddhist story about a fish and a turtle. The
turtle has just returned from dry land and the fish, who has only
ever known water, insists there can be no such thing as dry land.
For Buddhists, nirvana is a state of nothingness.
Literally, nirvana means “blown out”, such as when a
lamp goes out when all its oil has been burned.
Nirvana has been described as like waking up from a
dream and realizing that everything you dreamed and
thought was real was actually an illusion.
Nirvana continued...
The fish challenges the turtle to describe dry land using only
adjectives that describe the world the fish knows, that of water.
The turtle tells that fish that dry land is not wet, nor nice and fresh
and cool; that light does not penetrate it and that it is not soft; that
it does not move or flow in streams nor rise up in waves.
Nirvana
To this, the fish replies, “There now...if it isn’t a single
one of these things, what else is it but nothing?”
The turtle didn’t like this very much and said...”Any one
who knows what is water and what is land would say
that you were just a silly fish, for you think that anything
you have never known is nothing just because you
have never known it.”
So it is with nirvana.
Although nirvana cannot be described, according to
Buddhism we can know that it is a desirable state,
since those who attain it are filled with wisdom and
compassion. These people are called arhats.
Reincarnation
Reincarnation
One of the most difficult things to understand about
Buddhism is that although there is no self, Buddhists
believe in reincarnation.
Remember those five elements that people perceive as
the self?
Even the Buddha, while sitting under the bodhi tree,
had visions of past lives.
Buddhists say that these elements pass from one
lifetime to another as a flame is passed from one
candle to another.
But if there is no self, what is reincarnated?
Karma
Just like in Hinduism, Buddhists believe that the circumstances
and events of your current life are tied to your behaviour in
previous lives.
Buddhists also believe that you can be reincarnated to different
stations, but for Buddhists, you can come back as a god, human,
animal, ghost, and even into other “realms”.
Your station upon reincarnation depends on the actions of one’s
previous lives.
In the end, the goal is to overcome desire and suffering and attain
nirvana. Interestingly enough, one can only reach nirvana from the
human realm.
Review
You have learned:
The four noble truths are the primary Buddhist teachings.
The eightfold path is the means to attaining enlightenment.
The Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are the fundamental resources upon which
each Buddhist is to draw.
The doctrine of dependent co-arising teaches that all things are interdependent
and only exist as temporary combinations of elements.
When you understand there is no “self”, you can reach nirvana.
In spite of the Buddhist belief that there is no self, Buddhists believe in
reincarnation and karma.