Why I'm a poor Buddhist

There is a sense in which we can say we are all Buddhists, as they say, we have "Buddha nature," if we want what is right and true, except maybe sociopaths.  Many who even do what we see as evil are motivated by their Buddha nature, deluded though it may be.

When Gautama sat under his Bodhi tree and persisted in meditation until he hit upon it (became Enlightened), what came of it is what is called the Four Noble Truths, which, to summarize crudely, consists of the assertions that to live is to suffer, the cause of this suffering are our desires, especially our grasping desire to continue living, that this causes the cycle of rebirths (reincarnations as it is miscalled in the West) and so we continue to be born again and again in life after life of suffering, and the solution is to break the desire to live and hence avoid rebirth.

I must interject that this is by no means a summary of Buddhist teaching, as there is much more to it.

Up to the point where the teaching gets into being reborn, most people readily accept the idea that we suffer because we have desires.  After all, we either get what we want, in which case we have to hold onto it, and that is not possible, and sooner or later we will suffer loss, or we don't get what we want, in which case we suffer frustration.  I have to say this insight is profound and important and useful, but also is common sense and hardly unique to Buddhist thinking in history.

Does that mean that by accepting it and acting accordingly (watching our desires that they don't get control over us) that we are Enlightened.  It would not seem so since at the time the Buddha became enlightened all sorts of miraculous things happened, including a visit by Brahma himself.

This is often the case with myths -- things are out of proportion.  The story of how the teaching came into the world, with the meditation and miracles and so on, is out of proportion to what it is.

Still, the insight is helpful and important.  We suffer because we want things and have other desires.  We of course want sex and food and so on, and we also want to be admired by others, to be loved, to be successful and have a lot of face, to have comforts and luxuries, to be secure and safe and healthy, to have friends and family and a place in the world, to be entertained and able to learn new and interesting things, and so on.

The thing is the pursuit of these things sometimes leads to trouble or our doing things that are wrong, and often leads to frustration, since we obviously cannot have everything, and of course sometimes we necessarily must as a result experience grief and other times experience pain.

However, and here is where I think maybe I make a poor Buddhist.  There is the other side of all this -- that we also experience satisfactions and pleasures and even from time to time are able to help someone else and inevitably experience the gratification of that, even if that was not our intent. 

So while the truth of the Bodhi Hill insight is useful and undeniable, there is a further truth that it is not the entire story.  When we experience frustration, we have to remind ourselves we probably are over-reaching: when we experience true pain we remind ourselves to do something medical about it and if that is not possible then it is not possible.  When we die, well, then we die, and I don't see the point of making this fact the basis of an entire life philosophy.  To be sure death plays a role in how we approach things, but while we are alive it is less important than that we are alive.