My Brief Guide to Buddhism
IMPORTANT I’m not going to try and convince you to become a Buddhist (I’m not a Buddhist but love the philosophy). However, I do feel the ideas that can be taken from Buddhism can benefit everyone from all different walks of life. Whatever religion you practise (devout to atheist) you will be able to use philosophical Buddhism to your advantage. I say philosophical Buddhism because we are only looking at the ideas and philosophies rather than the mystical, ritualistic and religious aspects. Let me now attempt the impossible, and summarise thousands of years of philosophical thought onto one concise page…Wish me luck!
What is it?
Buddhism is a religion/philosophy based on the insights of a man called Siddhartha Gautama (he eventually became known as the Buddha). After years of introspection, he discovered a system to alleviate human suffering. Siddhartha spent the rest of his life passing on this knowledge/wisdom to various students. Today, Buddhism is practiced all around the world by approximately 500 million people, making it the fourth largest religion in the world.
Where/when?
Buddhism originated in India about 2500 years ago and spread to China, Korea, South-East Asia and Japan where many aspects evolved into their own types of Buddhism. It now comes in all shapes and sizes and has a huge amount of variety across the religion.
How can Buddhism help us?
Buddhism has lots of things to say about dealing with challenges and difficulties. All of these statements are testable (and you really should test them out yourself). Let’s look at the golden rule in Buddhism and how it can help us.
Buddhism’s golden rule: Our mind is the source of our suffering.
If something is unpleasant and we’re struggling to deal with it, we should blame our minds. Our minds are responsible for how we feel about everything. We create unpleasant situations out of nothing (although it might not seem like nothing in the heat of the moment). Our minds are INCREDIBLY powerful and we must never forget this.
The interesting thing is that if our minds create our suffering, they can also relieve our suffering. In Buddhism there is a systematic way to overcome mental anguish (more on this in my first book). It essentially encourages us to train our minds to become more accepting of the present moment and more aware of the “now”. By becoming aware of the fact that our minds are making the situation worse, we can start to detach from these thoughts. Now this is no easy feat, but ultimately this skill will allow us to endure discomfort more easily. Any physical challenge that I’ve completed has tested this ability. I now know that my mind and thoughts are so powerful that it’s essential I try to get out of my head and connect with the moment. Some real life examples should help to illustrate this point:
The perfect example of “suffering” is getting stuck in traffic. I know, I know, hardly genuine suffering but hear me out. When we get stuck in traffic our immediate situation is unpleasant and frustrating. If you’re anything like me you’ll actually make this even worse by getting annoyed and angry with all of the other cars around you. It’s very easy to feed the situation with more negativity and unhelpful questions, making everything a lot more miserable (I’m much better at NOT doing this these days and it’s definitely thanks to Buddhism). We can’t control the traffic, so getting annoyed about it isn’t going to help. The source of our suffering is not the traffic itself, but our reaction to the traffic. This is so similar to Stoicism that it’s uncanny! With training and acceptance, we can learn to let go and just experience the traffic for what it is, without fuelling it with negativity and frustration.
Another great example is when we worry about the future. Maybe you’re about to complete a challenge that scares you a lot and you can’t stop worrying about it. Well this is “suffering” in a Buddhist sense. Your mind is making everything worse. The solution… Strengthen your mind and become aware of your internal chatter. The first step towards making a change is becoming aware that a change needs to be made. If you start to recognise that this type of worry can happen, then you can learn to be a little more objective about it all and step back from the immediate problem. Meditation is hugely important here and can really help us to get less caught up in our thoughts.
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
Bonus Buddhist tip: The only sure thing is that everything is constantly changing.
Everything is in a state of flux. Something difficult or unpleasant now isn’t always going to be like this. The only thing that is certain is that everything changes; nothing stays the same. We must accept that things are constantly evolving and that we have little control over everything.
By acknowledging this impermanence we can more easily endure hardships that we encounter. Everything will change and if we remember this, our immediate suffering won’t have the iron grasp that a permanent situation suggests. Acknowledging impermanence can help us to break through areas of difficulty. This is especially true when enduring actual physical pain or a wildly unpleasant sensation. When I’ve had a lousy night in a bivvy bag, I know that it is only temporary discomfort. It’s not permanent and I can endure it.
There’s so much that Buddhism can teach us about tackling challenges. It’s very easy for us to arm ourselves with tools and tricks from this philosophy and it’s very, very empowering. I explain the “Four Noble Truths” in my first book and how this system can help us face the more masochistic challenges in that book.
This is only really scratching the surface of Buddhism but hopefully it will spark the interest in you to explore it further.
The lotus flower.
The lotus flower is the symbol for “enlightenment” in Buddhism. The flower grows in the muddy swamp and represents how something beautiful can come from the murky grime. In other words, in testing conditions where hope looks lost, beauty and life can grow – “strength through adversity”. Even in the most dire situations, there is hope and ways to grow. The lotus flower symbol can be used to represent exactly what the challenges in my first book/project are there to do. We are trying to grow through adversity and become better at dealing with challenging conditions.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become. ”