The word "Buddhism" to mean somehow "teachings of the historical Buddha as practiced by his followers" is quite misleading; the very name "Buddhism" is what the Western world called what they imagined to be that religion/philosophy. Since the Western world has nothing that combines, under the same set of teachings, a science of the mind that implies an ethical conduct to provide relief from all suffering, and which precisely describes the methods and techniques to achieve that goal, it's easy for us Westerners to get a bit confused about what Buddhism actually is.
To make matters even worse, when the 19th century Theosophist Society founded by Mme. Blavatsky brought (and widespread) the first teachings in the West in a systematic way (Buddhism, under one form or another, can be traced in the West since a century before Christ), they mostly saw the amazingly colourful rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, and, being an esoteric society, they marvelled at the richness of this "religion" which has been kept away from the West for so many centuries. The first translations, thus, incorporated common philosophical/theological words from Christian/Jewish doctrine as a (very bad) attempt to explain what Buddhism was all about. This lead to terrible consequences, attributing completely opposite meanings to some major key elements of Buddhism, which have been propagated to our century, and are still believed by many Westerners as being correct — leading often to rejection.
And finally, since India has sprouted so many different religions and philosophies, many of which incorporating common elements, it's very hard for a Westerner to distinguish between all of them. Most notably — as we shall see — Buddhist practice is often confused with Hindu meditation, because externally they look similar (sitting down with crossed legs). Many Westerners just think that Buddhism is a form of Hinduism where gods like Shiva or Krishna have been replaced by the historical Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni, but that it's pretty much the same — when Buddhism rejects the whole idea of "gods" and is just a set of atheistic principles to provide relief from suffering.
Eastern Buddhists, speaking non-Western languages, will probably just smirk and laugh at the ideas and concepts used by Westerners when describing "buddhism". The mere notion of "a Buddhist" is laughable — there is no "religion of the Buddha", nor "worship" in the sense used by the Religions of the Book, so there are no "buddhists" in that sense. If by Buddhism is meant "achieving the state of the Buddha", then this is also misleading — we all have the exact same Buddha nature, whether we realise it or not, and in that sense we are all "Buddhists". The word describing the teachings of the Buddha is usually dharma in Sanskrit, which, alas, also has several meanings, and is employed by many religions to mean completely different things. A good meaning is "the truth", in the sense of "things as they are", and the method of experiencing things as they are, as opposed to how they appear. People applying these methods in their daily life are simply known as "practitioners". A teacher of those methods is known as a "virtuous friend", which also gets often translated as "spiritual friend" (but the word "spiritual" has to be explained, too), and which corresponds to the Sanskrit word Guru or the Tibetan word Lama. These are neither supernatural beings, and much less "priests", but merely good practitioners that managed to integrate in their daily routine the way things appear with the way things are.
It seems pretty simple, but the problem is that we're conditioned, from a very tender age, to see the world as it appears to us, and this makes us react as if it is really like that. For example, although we all know pretty well that we reacted differently to things when we were 8 years old, 20 years old, or 80 years old, we have a "sense of continuity" that makes us believe that we're the same person. But we can look at pictures with 8, 20, or 80 years, and see how our body has changed; our ideas have changed; we just have memories of our past; we can just dream of how we behaved when we were 8 years old, but not truly recreate the experience; we had different friends, possibly lived in different places, and so forth. Friends might have become lovers and then utter enemies after a divorce. But nevertheless we still believe we're exactly the same person, even if all evidence points to the exact opposite.
This conditioning that pushes us to believe that we have an intrinsic self (as opposed to actually noticing how our so-called "self" has changed to much over time, depending on our experiences, our thoughts, our friends, the political and financial situation, and so forth...) makes us to immediately protect and preserve it from harm. When that protection is temporarily achieved, we feel pleasure, or what we tend to believe to be "happiness". When we cannot preserve our selves — from attacks, either verbal or physical, of other people; from cold, hunger, misery, and so forth — we suffer. What everybody notices is that our efforts in self-preservation are, at best, temporary. The luckiest people can maybe protect their selves for several decades, but inevitably, at some point, we will die. Most of us are never that lucky: we suffer from diseases, from weather conditions, from so-called "friends" and lovers who have betrayed us, from politicians that demand our taxes in return for our votes in a peaceful society... we consider ourselves "happy" if the amount of those unwelcome things don't happen so much to us, and "unhappy" while those conditions last.
Every being — not even only humans; all animals do the same — thus strive to protect themselves from unhappiness, and try to get some happiness, by all sorts of techniques and methods. Commonly, we believe that by earning more money, we can buy food, clothes, a home, and medicine, and at least, with that, we can ease the more fundamental causes of suffering. If we earn a bit more, we can have luxuries, public recognition, even some fame and glory, and earn the respect from others. By competing from very early on — getting good grades at school, finishing one's degree at university, doing our best at work to get noticed by our employers and thus proceed in our careers — we believe that we can push our happiness further and further; getting surrounded by the "right" kind of friends (those that can achieve us better jobs, an easier promotion, or simply make us laugh when we're feeling down) seems to be a factor in reaching that level of happiness more easily. Along the way, we pick up spouses, create a family, and surround us with all kinds of luxuries because we derive some pleasure from all that.
However, soon we'll see that all these things come to pass. Friends come and go (enemies accumulate!); jobs get lost, or promotion might become impossible; fame and glory might last for a few decades, but as we grow old, we're replaced by younger, more attractive people who steal our limelight. For some, this happens very quickly, and the struggle to get back to where we were is tremendous. For others, we might feel we need more and more to reach ever-lasting happiness, and suddenly, one day, we die from old age — while constantly trying to protect all that we have achieved: family, status, wealth. So, what exactly did we achieve?
When Buddhist speak about suffering, what they mean is that every source of mundane happiness is temporary, and thus we suffer because of that. "Mundane happiness" requires some explaining. A more correct word for that would be ecstasy, in the sense of a very intense sense of pleasure — what we experience, say, during an orgasm; but as we all know, we can feel a similar amount of intense pleasure when we're hanging out with friends, dancing in a club, or enjoying our 15 minutes of glory on TV. On a daily basis, the feeling might not be so intense, but we nevertheless smile with happiness at the rising sun, a rainbow in the sky, or how a sweet kitty meows at us demanding attention. We smile at children playing in a garden. So we constantly have these small moments of pleasure — and sometimes, if we're lucky, we might even forget that these moments are temporary respites, and that we soon will miss those good moments.
So does this mean that everybody is depressed all the time? No. Fortunately, we're kind of resilient — some of us learn to accept things as they are, or simply aren't even aware of how things happen, and only very strong emotional moments — the joy of graduating, the grief when our favourite grandparent unexpectedly dies — tend to make us pay attention to those moments of intense happiness or intense pain. The Buddhist notion of ignorance is tied to this: we simply aren't paying attention to how things really are. At least not most of the time. But that's because we were taught — and conditioned — not to see things as they are.
So, because we have this idea that we can bring happiness to ourselves and our dearest ones via external sources — as said, wealth, fame, glory, reputation, and so forth — we suffer when we cannot reach any of those goals. We hope to achieve them, and fear the consequences of not achieving them, and in either case, we suffer.
I remember saying to one of my teachers, "But I don't suffer all the time!" And most people don't. In truth, the word suffering is another bad translation. The Sanskrit word for it is dukka which means insatisfaction, and this is more close to what we feel. Every great party by the swimming pool will come to an end; we'd love to continue, but we have to go away at some point. A chocolate cake might be wonderful to eat, but after a handful of slices, we simply cannot eat more (but still wish to do so). A lovely summer day is a pleasure to enjoy, but we cannot enjoy summer days all the time — winter will come, too! The weekend is wonderful to rest and to have fun with our family and friends, but Monday morning we're back to the grind. Even if we simply adore our work, and feel a sense of accomplishment when working, and are eager for Monday morning... well, then we'll feel sorry when the work hours are over, and grumble because our body is tired and we have to sleep. So there is always insatisfaction — even the insatisfaction that good things inevitably come to an end.
(To be continued)
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