The Heart of Buddhism: A Simple Introduction to Buddhist Practice

I started to think about religion for myself when I was about fourteen. I think I was pretty confused, especially in my feelings. My family weren’t very emotional, and also at school feelings were pushed aside and you just had to cope. You didn’t cry, you didn’t show any ‘weakness’ because that was wrong. No touch; no cuddles. There wasn’t anybody I could talk to about this so it was all locked up inside, and I had to grapple with it on my own. Sex too was a big issue, especially coming from a very ‘male’ family and being at an all-male school. I was beginning to be fascinated by girls, but was also terrified! Generally I felt very split between my intellectual life and a deeper side of me that I could feel but not really understand. I tried to ask one of the priests about this and he said, ‘It’s just nature. You see it in the birds and trees. It is God.’ And that really confused me! So I left school with these big questions forming inside me. When I went to university I basically squashed it all down, and just had a bit of a wild time. But when I went on to do research I was spending a lot of time on my own in the lab doing experiments, sometimes through the night, and I started to think again.

Things were beginning to boil up again, and then one day I saw a poster for a public talk on Buddhism, and on impulse I decided to go. In walked this big monk and he sat down and talked for about an hour, and I felt his whole presence just fill the room. Something inside me responded to his strength and his peace, and my whole being just said, ‘Yes’. I wanted the strength that he showed. He seemed to know what it was all about. But afterwards I couldn’t remember what he said at all! I started going to a small meditation group that was meeting and then joined a Zen group in London.

Mary, another resident in the community, had had a rather different upbringing, yet in some ways her path to Buddhism was similar to James’s. Her father had been interested in the Eastern religions and had been a somewhat unconventional figure in their south of England commuter-belt town. Mary had been used to thinking about spiritual matters as a teenager:

I had been looking forward to going to university to discuss ‘the meaning of life’ with people, but as it turned out university wasn’t about that at all. It was about getting plastered. All the people I seemed to bump into were just into drink and sex and their careers! I missed the serious side of things dreadfully. After I left I worked for a couple of years and then planned an overland trip to China. Six months before I was due to go my father died. And during the week after he died I experienced, in the middle of all the feelings, a great presence of mind. I was thinking and writing about him, and remembering all the times I had felt critical of him. And I thought, ‘When death is possible, what is the most important thing?’ And I knew the answer was Love. This was a sort of turning point, and I gained some insights that I later realized were important in Buddhism, though I didn’t know it at the time. When I came back from my trip, which I eventually made, I went to a thing called a Western Zen Retreat – very nervously, I might say. I didn’t know what to expect. I was set this question to meditate on which was ‘Who am I?’, and I found an answer to it, a real one, that put me in touch with a level of being that I had not experienced before: infinite love, infinite peace, a different sense of who I am entirely. And that experience of course made me very interested in Buddhism. At this point I wasn’t quite sure what I was after, but I was jolly well after something!

Then I met a Japanese Zen Master called Hogen-san who came to England for a few weeks every year, giving talks and workshops, and he attracted me very much. I used to follow him around the country. He was very down-to-earth, not ‘holy’ at all. I remember one interview I had with him where we had Guinness for breakfast! I learnt to see that Buddhism was in everyday life, not in some special rituals or only on Sundays. Hogen-san’s quality was there in the pub as well as in the meditation room.

The last extract I want to give here is from my talk with Theresa, a 41-year-old American woman who was also living in the community and teaching meditation. She had grown up in an orthodox Jewish family, enjoying some of the rituals, but without thinking about what it meant at all. ‘It didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t specially resistant, but ... well, everybody has to have a religion, don’t they, and you might as well be Jewish,’ is how she remembers it. She impressed me as much as anyone I have ever met, with her unpretentious, light, warm manner which I came to see as the outward show of a great inner strength and peacefulness. The story of how she came to Buddhism illustrates another of the common threads – the discovery that what you thought was going to make you happy doesn’t. The piece that I want to quote here demonstrates not so much the powerful attraction of example, though that is there, but rather the way in which such qualities as she clearly had can grow from rather unpromising beginnings. If Theresa can make it, I thought, there really is hope for us all!

I wasn’t thinking about any of the big questions as an adolescent, but I had a really rough time of it socially when I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. After school I’d come home and lie on my bed and listen to the Top 40 on the radio, and the words of the songs spoke to me about where I was at. They were sad and asking why you didn’t have a boyfriend and saying how wonderful it would be to be in love. The songs were very melaneholy and I was very sorry for myself. Life seemed so wrong. I didn’t feel that people liked me. I was lonely. I had been successful in school up to thirteen, and then my grades just plummeted. I lost all my self-confidence. There seemed to be such an emphasis on how people looked, and I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t fit the image of the ‘popular girl’ so the boys didn’t go for me. I just shrivelled up even more. And the songs were like my only friends. They understood me a bit.

When I went to college looks stopped being the all-important thing, and I started to feel more comfortable about myself. It seemed like I had a personality that was worthwhile. And I even got some boyfriends, so things really began to look up! I started to have a good time – but not thinking about what I was up to. It was cool to be an atheist, so I was an athiest. I was going to parties and drinking beer like I was making up for lost time. Four years! After I left college I went to Kansas City and worked for Hallmark Cards as a graphic artist. I was doing well in most people’s terms – I had a good job, I was making good money, I had a nice apartment and a car and nice clothes. I was going out on dates. I’d become ‘attractive’. I’d got all the things that as a girl I’d thought were important. I got to travel a lot in the States and Europe, and finally wound up married at 27 – because it was the next thing to do, and it kept my Mum quiet! So finally I had a chance to find out what it was all about. I began to question what it was that I’d got, vaguely at first, and then more seriously as my relationship with my husband began to go downhill. It was like I’d finally done it – all the things that are supposed to make you happy, even getting a husband. And I wasn’t. It hadn’t worked. I was in a bad way. I used to just lie down on the sofa and curl up and things would get very dark. I just didn’t want to deal with it at all. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I would get very angry and scream and throw plates. I was very difficult! We were living with my husband’s parents in North Carolina, and they didn’t like me at all.

My lifeline was a man I was working for at the university who I could talk to a bit, and he started talking about the possibility of feeling some inner strength and not just being pushed around by other people’s expectations and disapproval. And someone else told me about Transcendental Meditation, which was at that time all the rage in the States. So I thought, ‘Oh well. I’ll try it.’ I did the weekend initiation and learnt the technique. And I remember looking in the mirror the day afterwards, and I really felt different. I felt a real calmness. I liked myself. I felt warmly towards myself for the first time for a long time, maybe for the first time ever. I felt still, and accepting of myself And that experience made me want to practise the meditation hard, which I did. I faithfully did my 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening for two and a half years without fail. Then I started to feel it had lost its value in some way, like, whatever it was good for, I had got it. And I had a sense there was more than the calmness and relaxation I was getting from TM. I started asking people about other kinds of meditation to see what there was.

I went to a weekend retreat in vipassana (insight) meditation, where we just sat watching the rise and fall of our breathing, and walking very slowly. And I found it the hardest thing of my life. By Sunday I was ready to explode. It was so simple, what the teacher was asking us to do ... and I couldn’t do it. And that really showed me something, the fact that it was such a challenge. I hated it, but the challenge absolutely intrigued me. I was hooked. He talked about the importance in everyday life of awareness, of waking up to life and living fully. Many of the things he said felt so inspiring and so right. And I wanted the kinds of things he was talking about. I just dived in and started doing lots of retreats and sitting every day. I started having some of the experiences Buddhism talks about – really seeing into the reality of who I am, and beginning to understand why things had been so difficult. Simply that a thought is just a thought, and I don’t have to get all caught up in it. There is a way out of all the suffering, as Buddhism says, and I was experiencing it – in glimpses. It was mind-blowing. Right here, in this day and age, it is possible. Not 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught but here and now it is possible to see the end of suffering.

Several of these quotations, as well as showing the power of person-to-person contact and example, also suggest that people may be predisposed, perhaps only unconsciously, to Buddhism as a result of encountering real unhappiness in their lives that the conventional solutions and distractions don’t provide satisfying answers to. Sooner or later they are touched by an experience of distress that seems to open their eyes to the great weight of ‘suffering’, as the Buddhists call it, that the world contains. The author of No Boundary, Ken Wilber, suggests that unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of inadequacy or mental illness, but of a growing intelligence,

a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense – to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided … It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions and enchantments that we agree not to question the root cause of our [troubles] ... But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail in their soothing and concealing purpose and, as a consequence, we begin to suffer.

For James the process started while he was still at school; for Mary it was her father’s death; for Theresa the unhappiness and depression of her marriage. For some people it is not until they themselves are ill, or old, or close to death, that the questioning begins to start. For many it is some kind of personal brush with distress that cannot, this time, be shrugged off.

It is interesting that it is precisely this dual impetus – waking up to suffering, and encountering someone who seems to deal with it better than we do – that got the Buddha himself started on the intense six or seven years of enquiry that ended with his ‘enlightenment’ under the bodhi tree at Bodhgaya in Northern India, and his discovery of the insights that now form the heart of all Buddhist teaching. According to the myth of Buddha’s life, he was born into a rich family to a father who was determined to shield him from any possible problems or unhappiness. He grew up with every conceivable luxury, and it seemed that his father’s plans were working out well until, one day when Buddha was out in the town, he saw a sick person, lying uncared for in the street, an old person, and a dead body, and these suddenly brought home to him the existence and the inevitability of suffering. But on one of his jaunts he also met a wandering monk, whose inner peace in the face of all this unhappiness impressed him greatly, and inspired him to set out on his quest to find the deepest, most lasting solution he could to the problem of suffering. It is partly the fact that there are people around today, Western as well as Eastern and female as well as male, who appear in some subtle way to have ‘cracked it’, just as Buddha did, that accounts for Buddhism’s growing appeal.

Why now?

These stories illustrate a number of themes that we shall be exploring in more detail as we go along. What I would like to pick up now are the pointers to why Buddhism seems to many people to be the most timely of the traditional religions

Perhaps the most obvious reason for its appeal is that it actually seems to work. People can feel its benefits in themselves, in friends and family members who have been practising, and most strikingly, as we have seen, in the Buddhist monks and teachers that have inspired them. It is mundane and practically helpful. In fact Buddhism is uniquely equipped to meet the particular anxieties and attitudes of the times. Our general feeling of insecurity is partly due to the incredible rate of change in the world – change in values and lifestyles as well as in technology and forms of employment – and change is one of Buddhism’s most central concepts. You could almost say that how to handle change is precisely what Buddhism teaches. It is when personal beliefs and philosophies are weak and conflicting that Buddhism really comes into its own. In more traditional, settled times and cultures, it is only a few unusual individuals who endeavour to peck their way out of a substantial shell of routine ways of thinking and behaving. But in our times the certainties are few and far between, the shell is already cracking, and attempts by traditionalists to keep asserting that the old shell is still valid do not seem, to many people, to be enough. Like it or not, many of us in the Western world are in the pecking business, puzzled about how to live, about how to bring up children, about what it means to be a good son or daughter, about what constitutes maturity, about our responsibilities to the earth, about what occupations are worthwhile, and a host of other such questions that seem to be pressing but difficult. And Buddhism is at hand with teachings and techniques custom-built to help us chip away at old assumptions and present confusions until we see clearly and unequivocally what matters most, and an intuitive wisdom begins to emerge and guide us.

We also live in a rather individualistic age, when the sense of autonomy, of being on our own, of having to make it on our own, is strong. The major concern of the times is with personal and local happiness, with ourselves and the few people close to us, and Buddhism looks from the outside as if it is again tailor-made to offer that personal salvation. It buys in to the preoccupation with the individual and his or her well-being. Buddhism does not tell you to pull your socks up and be nicer to everybody, nor does it wag a stern finger at you when you behave badly or thoughtlessly. The fundamental problem in Buddhism is not of sin, but of delusion, and the way forward is therefore not through the uncomfortable shove that guilt is supposed to provide, but through insight. So the initial sense is of working on yourself for yourself.

It would be a big mistake, though, to suppose, as some critics do, that because Buddhism starts with oneself, it also stops there. Far from it. Buddhism tells you that if you work at it you will be happier and kinder. Being a ‘good person’ is not a matter of denying yourself but of knowing yourself, and the better, the more clearly, you know yourself, the more everybody wins. Thus although many people are drawn to Buddhism for ‘selfish’ reasons, they discover that the package deal on offer includes a greater sense of natural concern for others, as well as the anticipated peace of mind. (In fact the emphasis of different schools of Buddhism is somewhat different in this regard – some stress the personal and some the more social benefits – but at root the development of equanimity and magnanimity must go hand in hand.)

The fact the Buddhism helps people to become kinder as well as more peaceful is not just a fortunate by-product, however. If the first question that drives the search which may lead to Buddhism is, ‘How can I be happier?’, there is a second one just behind it, ‘How can I be helpful? How can I lead a life that is not only happy but worthwhile as well?’ People who are neither terminally cynical, nor suffering from acute ‘compassion fatigue’, are aware of the suffering and distress in the world, but at a loss as to how to respond to it. There is so much of it, the result of stupidity, cruelty, madness or bad luck, in the papers and on the TV every day, that it seems impossible to know where to start – especially when one’s resources are stretched as it is, holding one’s own life together. There is Band Aid and Oxfam, Save the Children and Help the Aged, telethons and little envelopes in the letter box. There are causes to give one’s time to as well as one’s money: Fight the Cuts, Save the Seals, Rebuild the Church Tower, Campaign for Anti-Racism or Back to Basics in the local school … The list of ways to be helpful, to promote one’s ideals, is endless and intimidating. Confused about what to do for the best, it is small wonder that we tend to retreat from these impossible decisions into issues that seem somewhat more manageable – what to give Sam for her birthday, or whether we would be less tense if we moved out of London.

Because Buddhism works, it offers us not only teachings and practices, but also the example of people who seem more cool, calm and collected than we are. Such people, as we have seen, often provide the stimulus for getting more involved with Buddhism; but they also constitute a continuing resource. We have a chance to learn from who they are, from how they deal with everyday life, and to pick up some of their skill at living in the time-honoured fashion of the apprentice – by watching them at work. In some ways, though, this method of teaching by example is unfashionable, and serves to make people suspicious. The individualistic spirit of the times tends to produce a rather anti-elitist attitude, in which the idea of having ‘heroes’, people you look up to and admire, is seen as an unhealthy dependence. To be a ‘grown-up’ is to be as good as the next person, and to be able to make it on your own, thank you very much. Such people tend to see the acceptance of another human being as a mentor in the art of living as dangerous, because it gives one person power over another, and thereby creates the possibility of exploitation. In some measure this is true, and we shall talk more about this kind of risk later in the book. But the attitude of students of Buddhism, whilst not naive, is more likely to be that they are actually not making a terribly good job of it on their own, and could do to swallow a bit of false pride and accept some help and guidance.

In addition, one might think, looking around at the world at large, that a few more people with integrity and wisdom would not be a bad idea; people who are not embarrassed to talk from the heart about deep issues, both personal and global, and who are able to remind us of our better natures. People who, especially in confusing and conflicting situations, are able to keep sight of the ‘big picture’, and to act confidently on the basis of true values rather than expediency. A meditation teacher who now lives in France, Thich Nhat Hanh, tells the story of the hazardous voyages in rickety boats undertaken by refugees from his native Vietnam. In the frequent storms people would be inclined to panic – and in doing so increase the risk of drowning. But the presence of even one person in the boat who could stay calm and not lose his or her presence of mind would exert a calming influence on all the passengers, and they would be able to respond to the situation in a more intelligent, less hysterical way. Just so, he says, the world needs all the wise and peaceful people it can get, and to be on the look-out for them is a sign not of dependency but of basic sanity. Despite the misgivings of the ‘rugged individualists’, therefore, Buddhism’s concern with wise and responsible leadership is another reason for its timeliness.

A less contentious way in which Buddhism suits the times is in its rational, non-magical nature. This may sound odd, as it is often thought of as complicated and ‘mystical’, and indeed some forms of Buddhism do look rather weird on first acquaintance. If you want to take your Buddhism with a pinch of spice and mystery, you can do so. If you want to see pictures of enormous golden statues of Buddha, to hear stories of monks who can keep themselves warm while sitting overnight wrapped in wet sheets in a snow-storm, or to learn how to chant in Tibetan, there are lots of books that will show you and tell you. But this isn’t one of them. In fact much of the popular view of Buddhism is not central to its concern. Any particular form of ritual, of clothing, of haircut, of name is not essential. Being a vegetarian is not essential. Not killing mosquitoes is not essential. Being able to tie your legs in a knot is not essential. The details of Buddha’s life story are not essential. Reciting long chunks of the sutras (scriptures) from memory is not essential.

The heart of the matter, which I am trying to concentrate on here, is most straightforward and pragmatic. You do not have to believe in miracles, nor stretch your powers of credulity. The possibility of enlightenment is entirely reasonable, and the proof of meditation is in the doing. There is an important role for understanding, even for remembering, what the great teachers have said, but this is always an adjunct to the development of your own, first-hand understanding of human nature based on unshakable self-knowledge. Close to the end of his life, Buddha is reputed to have said, ‘Do not believe anything just because some authority, even me, has said it. Be a light unto yourself.’ What the teachers have to offer are maps and guide-books for the journey to self-realization, not edicts that are to be taken as ‘gospel’. Even the doctrine of reincarnation, which some people find hard to swallow, is not an essential part of the Buddhist prescription, and can be interpreted in a way that does not clash with a scientific way of thinking.

Perhaps there is just one leap of faith that is required, and that is the belief that it is possible for one’s personality, one’s way of looking at the world, to change. For people who are wedded to the idea that the way they see things is the only possible way, that their point of view is the only point of view (or the only right point of view), for such people the suggestion that things could look different, or that other people who don’t share their opinions might be at least as ‘right’ as they are, is going to be hard to take.

Yet it is this egocentric attitude that begins to look irrational when we examine it, not the possibility of change. We know that our own perspective alters depending on whether we are in a good mood or a bad one. A problem that had seemed insurmountable becomes much more manageable after a heart-to-heart with a friend, or a good night’s sleep. When we are ‘on good form’ the fact that it is raining on the day of the picnic can seem funny, and an opportunity to do something silly like go anyway and get wet, or to sit on the living-room floor eating with your fingers. When we are ‘off-colour’ the whole thing is a disaster, and the rest of the day is spent sulking or picking a fight with the children. All that Buddhism is asking of us, as the price of admission, is an openness to the possibility that we can acquire the knack of being on good form more powerfully, and more of the time, and that there are other people from whom we may have something to learn. We do not have to accept these people as authorities because somebody tells us to. All we have to do is to be on the look-out for people who seem to us to have mastered the art of living more comprehensively than we have ourselves. The odds seem to me to be overwhelmingly in favour of the existence of such people. (Of course there are also charlatans, and we have also to trust our intuition in steering clear of those candidate ‘gurus’ who do not feel right. We shall have more to say about ‘shopping’ in the last chapter.)