The Buddha for Modern Minds

a non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings

Lenorë Lambert

• Publisher: Flourish Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780645065077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

How can the Buddha's teachings help me? Here? Now? In MY life?

A practical, feet-on-the-ground book answering all the questions and misconceptions that arise for people curious about the Buddha's teachings and what they offer in this modern life of ours.

For those with little or no knowledge this is a secular introduction. For those already practicing it's a secular reference book for key concepts and several of the Buddha's important lists.

Clear explanations of often-confusing concepts are brought alive with personal examples of the powerful impact of practicing the Buddha's wisdom - the dropping away of stress, angst and upset and the arrival of calm, clarity, energy, joy and open-heartedness.

The Buddha's core teachings are made clear using Western cultural terms to understand and apply them, including characters from Sesame Street, the Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek demonstrating ideas.

Cutting through the array of orthodox Buddhisms that often confuse beginners, this book strips away the trappings of the cultures through which they came to us, helping us know the Buddha, his core teachings, how meditation and mindfulness fit in, what happened to the teachings after his death, and how to practice them now.

It also answers many of the questions that often arise for newcomers like: Who was the Buddha? What is the dharma about? Is Buddhism a religion? What are the different 'schools' of Buddhism? Do I have to believe in rebirth? Is the dharma anti-pleasure? Is the dharma just meditation or mindfulness? Does the dharma teach passivity? Is the dharma anti-passion? Do I need to find a teacher or go to an Asian country to learn the dharma? Is the Dalai Lama a Buddha? Why are some Buddha statues fat? How do I start my own practice?....and more.

It integrates several concepts from modern psychology - the author's background - and shares many stories from her home life, work life, and her experience as a World Champion Masters hurdler to demonstrate how the impacts show up.

As the Buddha did, this book puts aside unknowable issues like rebirth which are unnecessary for fully practicing the teachings. Worse, they're a distraction from the very real and practical project at the heart of his wisdom - flourishing in this life. Here. Now.

From Stephen Batchelor, author of After Buddhism -

"This lucid and practical guide to the Buddha's teaching will be of value to anyone who seeks to lead a flourishing life in today's challenging and uncertain world. Lenorë Lambert unpacks with great skill and wit the core ethical vision and meditation practices of Buddhism, revealing them as an art of living that is as relevant today as it ever has been."

Chapter 1

The Buddha

Who was the Buddha?

M

ost Buddhist scholars today accept that there was a man named Siddhattha Gotama of the Shakya clan in the Ganges Basin in India. He was commonly referred to as the Buddha, which simply means ‘awakened one’. He most likely lived from around 480 to 400 BCE.

Understanding who Gotama was and the circumstance in which he lived is important because it helps us understand his teachings in context. It can help us sort out what might have been said as a spoonful of sugar in order to make the teachings easier to understand and digest. It can also help us to identify which parts of his teachings were original - those at odds with the prevailing assumptions in his time - and so more likely to come from him, rather than those around him or after him.

The traditional view

If you pick a random Buddhist book from the bookshelf, the story you’ll read is that Siddhattha Gotama was a prince. You’ll read that he lived a cosseted life inside the walls of his father’s palace. Then, on a series of outings to a nearby village, he saw four things that changed his life: a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and lastly, a wandering spiritual seeker.

This, so the story goes, was his first experience of suffering. He was so moved by it that he abandoned his royal life (and his wife and new-born child) to go forth as a spiritual seeker himself and discover the answer to the problem of suffering.

So, at the age of 29, he stole away in the middle of the night. He cast aside his royal garments, shaved his head and took up the life of a samana, a wandering ascetic.

Ascetics were wandering spiritual seekers, some of whom practised meditation and self-mortification. Self-mortification involved denying oneself pleasures and comforts and inflicting pain for two possible reasons: to transcend attachment to this world; or to try and have their bad karma processed in a job lot.

Gotama, a gifted student, studied with very accomplished meditation masters. He practised this way of life for six years, often eating only a few grains of rice a day. He almost starved to death.

This result was a wake-up call. Through this experience he came to the conclusion that while indulgence (the royal life) wasn’t the way to transcend suffering, neither was self-denial. He decided he would sit under a tree and meditate until he figured it out.

So, he sat there for a few weeks meditating. Eventually he gained deep, penetrative insight into how suffering works and the most effective way to deal with it. The traditional account would summarise his discovery as the middle way between indulgence and denial. (It’s interesting that the middle way receives such prominence in some orthodox teachings, yet in his 45 years of teaching he only ever mentioned it once - in the first discourse referred to below.)

At first he wasn’t sure if he could articulate his insights, but eventually he decided to give it a whirl. So he set off to seek out his three ascetic buddies with whom he’d self-mortified for the past few years, and see if he could communicate what he’d found. He did. They got it. And the wheel of the dharma began to turn.

A modern view

As Stephen Batchelor notes in his book Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, there is actually very little written about Gotama’s life before his awakening. Batchelor set out on a voyage of discovery to try to know this man a little better. He notes that even from the suttas (recorded dialogues) in the Pali canon it’s clear that Gotama wasn’t a prince at all; he was the son of an elected leader in what’s most easily understood in today’s parlance as a small republic. He was a member of the warrior caste which made up the ruling council in small republics like his. His father would have been more like one of our state premiers than a king. (In Australia, a state premier is the leader of that state’s government.)

It’s unclear what he did during his early adult years. He would have been a savvy person as he was exposed to the politics between his father’s ruling class and other clans, as well as to the powerful (and sometimes murderous) royal figures who occupied the area. Numerous suttas detail conversations with the regional kings who sought out Gotama’s views. Batchelor speculates that he may have even attended the progressive Taxila University, then part of the Persian empire, with some of his contemporaries, where he may have been exposed to ideas and philosophies from different cultures. (He lived at around the same time as Socrates.)

Batchelor points out that the suttas show that the world Gotama occupied was a complex and sometimes dangerous one. Gotama was very engaged with the world, securing patronage and protection for himself and his fellow monks and nuns where possible. He seemed to manage intelligently the need to negotiate support from powerful people, as well as his role as teacher and custodian of his followers. He seemed to have little tolerance for organised religion and was openly critical of it.

Gotama’s way of life was very much engaged with the world. He and his followers would spend the few months of the rainy season in sedentary retreat, but when that was over they would wander between places meditating and teaching along the way. Through the suttas we see that he interacted with all sorts of people, from royalty to the town drunk. He owned virtually no stuff (material goods) and referred to the life of the householder as ‘cramped and dusty’. It’s interesting to contrast this with the illustrious Buddhist temples we see today, full of sedentary monks and nuns.

You can also see this emphasis on engaging with the world through some of the rules in the vinaya, the part of the Pali canon containing the rules for monastic life. For example, monks were not allowed to dig soil (to grow their own food). Gotama didn’t want his followers shrinking from the world into their own little self-sufficient hermit lives. He wanted them to be interdependent with the villagers and to share the teachings with those around them in a helpful way.

Gotama lived in a society that believed there was a big gap between the spiritual and the everyday - the sacred and the profane (as do many modern religious communities). Life would have been pretty tough in India in the 5^th century BCE: the idea of transcending it would have been understandably attractive.

His own clan is likely to have had an animist spiritual view and were known to be sun-worshippers. They would have believed in a similar gap. Brahmanism was taking off in India at the time and was starting to get a foothold in Gotama’s region. It too offered a consolation for the difficulties of life: union with Brahma, the godhead; a way out.

In contrast, Gotama taught that spiritual practice is all about this life, indeed these moments that we are inhabiting in this body right now. He taught an approach to living that is an honest confrontation with our experiences of all sorts, an invitation to embrace them, and to learn to live peacefully with the whole thing - the pleasant, the unpleasant and everything in between. His teachings are about confrontation, not consolation; facing and embracing life, not escaping from it.

The traditional fable of Prince Siddhattha is harmless enough. However it doesn’t portray the savvy worldliness of the man who is revealed through the suttas.

 

Chapter 2

The teachings

What is the dharma about?

O

n one level Gotama’s teachings are about how to understand and end unnecessary suffering in your life. The word suffering is a very common translation of the Pali word dukkha. As I promised I’ll only use ancient Indian words when there is no appropriate English one that reflects the original meaning. I’m mostly going to use the word unpleasantness but this word is at the core of the dharma so I want to be very clear about what I mean.

Every Buddhist tradition centres on some iteration of the Four Noble Truths; the heart of both the Noble Truths and of the dharma itself is the concept of dukkha. Because the concept is so core, it’s worth taking a moment to understand it.

Dukkha

Most authors I’ve been exposed to translate dukkha as suffering. Other common words are stress, angst, unease, unsatisfactoriness. Let me explain why I’m not going to use these words. Grab a pen and paper and do a little free association exercise. Hold the word suffering in your mind and write down whatever comes into your mind. Next, hold the word unease in your mind and do the same.

Chances are the word suffering prompted a list of some pretty unpleasant experiences - loss of loved ones, severe illness or injury, people starving in developing countries perhaps.

I’d guess the word unease prompted much milder and perhaps subtler forms of unpleasantness - perhaps you didn’t like the tone of voice your work colleague used with you today.

The word dukkha covers all of these and more. It covers everything from the disappointment that there are no more chocolates in your boxes anymore (as Leonard Cohen sang) to the agony of a mother losing her child. The word unease clearly understates the latter example. Perhaps unpleasantness does too but it strikes me as more generic. A short handy definition could be: anything from the vast range of unpleasant experiences in life.

To really cement your understanding, here’s the meaning of the actual Pali word.

Dukkha is a compound word (made up of two words):

du = bad, lousy, crappy, difficult, unpleasant, not good. (The opposite is su which means ease)

kha = space (often interpreted as the empty space where an axle would fit into a wheel)

So you could think of it as any difficult or unpleasant space in your experience.

Metaphysics is a distraction

By ‘metaphysics’ I mean that which is beyond physics (for example ideas of an afterlife, soul, rebirth), ideas that can’t be experienced here and now in the world and that we can’t know directly.

In one of Gotama’s conversations, a monk in his following demands that he tells him the answer to the metaphysical questions that still dog our species. Is there life after death? Do we have a soul? How was the universe created? etc. He tells Gotama that unless he answers these questions, he’s going to leave his community of monks.

Gotama gives him a bit of a verbal clip under the ear for missing the point so badly (this was an experienced monk!). He tells him that he teaches how to understand and deal with unpleasantness and does not pretend to address any of these metaphysical questions. In this and other suttas, he pointedly refuses to declare an answer.

The reason for his reprimand was that these questions don’t help deal with the very real issue of unpleasantness in this human life of ours. Flourishing in life through changing our relationship to unpleasantness is the core of Gotama’s teachings.

But even worse, these questions distract us from the task of living the dharma. In essence he saw metaphysical debates as a waste of time. Indeed in one sutta, Gotama describes intellectual arguments about his teachings as wrong use of the dharma, likening it to grabbing a snake at the wrong end. Not only does it result in harm for ourselves and our relationships with others, but it takes up valuable time that could be devoted to the very real tasks involved in full human flourishing here, now! According to the Buddha, to entertain these metaphysical propositions was as futile as to speculate about the direction in which a fire had departed once it had gone out.

In another well-known sutta, he tells a parable of a man who’s been hit with a poisoned arrow. The man refuses to be seen by a doctor until and unless he first knows the name and clan of the man who wounded him, how tall he was, the colour his skin and where he lives, as well as what kind of bow was used to shoot the arrow, what the bowstring and shaft of the arrow were made of, what kind of feathers were on the end of it, and what type of arrow tip it was. Of course he wouldn’t find out all of these things and in the meantime he’d die.

Gotama saw metaphysical questions as distractions from what he was on about, that lead us to spend our mental energy on unhelpful questions rather than on the very real project of dealing with unpleasantness and flourishing here and now, which is the very reason why he repeatedly refused to answer such questions.

This is an important point as it draws a clear boundary around what Gotama was and was not teaching. It baffled me a little why that wasn’t emphasised more in the dharma books I read as I began my exploration.

It also helps explain why you can hold religious or atheistic beliefs (both equally ac...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Glossary
• Chapter 1: The Buddha
• Chapter 2: The teachings
• Chapter 3: Some common confusions
• Is yoga a part of the dharma?
• Chapter 4: Buddhism
• Chapter 5: Dharma practice
• Choosing an approach
• Chapter 6: The First Great Task
• Chapter 7: The Second Great Task
• Chapter 8: The Third Great Task
• Chapter 9: The Fourth Great Task
• Chapter 10: Floating your boat
• Some Resources
• About the Author