Introduction

"Buddhism" is a relatively modern Western term. The body of spiritual doctrine and practice to which it refers has generally been known on its own ground, in countries across Asia, as the Buddha Dharma, which is perhaps best translated "way of the Buddha." This teaching came from one young man who "woke up" from life's melodrama more than twenty-five hundred years ago and was thereafter called the Buddha, "the awakened one."

Now it turned out that this enlightenment of the Buddha's was profound and brilliant, accurate and powerful, and also warm and compassionate. It was like the sun behind the clouds. Anyone who has taken off in an airplane on a grim and gloomy day knows that beyond the cloud cover the sun is always shining. Even at night the sun is shining, but then we can't see it because the earth is in the way, and probably our pillow also. The Buddha explained that behind the cloud cover of thoughts—including very heavy clouds of emotionally charged thoughts backed up by entrenched habitual patterns—there is continual warm, bright, loving intelligence constantly shining. And even though in the midst of thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns, intelligence may become dulled and confused, it is still this intelligence in the midst of the thoughts and emotions and habits that makes them so very captivating, so resourceful and various, so inexhaustible. This cloudy world of thoughts and emotions backed by habits continually churns out what I referred to above as life's melodrama, which from the Buddha's point of view is sleep. According to the Buddha Dharma, everyone can wake up from this sleep. Everyone is capable of becoming Buddha.

When we go to the movies, many of us don't only like to see nice, pleasant, lovable movies. Just as much, or perhaps even more, we like to see sad, tragic, painful, or aggressive movies, even horror movies. The positive and the negative both draw us under their spell. In the same way, the Buddha recognized, we keep our own personal melodramas (made up of thoughts once removed) juicy and entertaining with these same very effective, sometimes positive but often negative elements. According to the Buddha Dharma, the personal melodrama that we keep going in one form or another over the years is known as ego.

Basically, of course, we know that even ego, or the sense of self, is made up of that warm basic intelligence fully discovered by the Buddha, because there simply isn't anything else clever enough to produce and maintain ego. But some kind of confusion has arisen, like a storm blowing up out of a cloudless sky. It's a very pervasive and stubbornly persistent storm. It contains all our hopes and fears relating to the processes of birth, growing up, being in our prime, aging, sickness, and death—a lot of pleasure and pain. But since the Buddha himself had awakened from all that hope and fear, he knew awakening from it was possible. He taught people how to go about awakening from it. With some people he just showed them his profound, brilliant wakefulness directly, and they too woke up on the spot, just like shaking off a dream.

So that is what Buddha Dharma is about—recognizing our psychological condition and working with it so we can wake up from the confused aspect of it. Buddhists follow the way that the Buddha taught for waking up from ego's confusion. Of course, occasionally one or another Buddhist wakes up before completing all the steps recommended by the Buddha. There are always a few rascals around like that. But most Buddhists patiently continue following the Buddha's path.

The main method the Buddha taught to help people awaken from confusion is meditation. Meditating in the Buddhist way is not like praying. It is not trying to believe in anything or making utterances in your mind about your beliefs, longings, or intentions. It is more like relaxing and just letting things be as they are—without cranking anything up. We spend a lot of time in our lives trying to crank something up. In meditating, Buddhists take the approach of letting go of all that struggle and resting in the way things really are, which is however they happen to be.

Various techniques for taming attention, which tends to be wild and jump around erratically when people first begin to meditate, were taught by the Buddha. These techniques help to bring about natural composure in mind and body. This in turn helps us to relinquish ego's ongoing struggle. As we learn to relax from that, the turbulent and captivating ego world of thoughts and emotions begins to become transparent, and our basic profound, brilliant, and loving intelligence begins to shine through.

You might think that if you let go of your ego world, you might become passive and defenseless like some kind of crash dummy, and people will take advantage of you. Or that you might wander around aimlessly in the street without an agenda. If this were the case, as one contemporary Buddhist master pointed out, it would be necessary to have enlightenment wards in hospitals to take care of bruised or socially inoperative buddhas. But this is not the case. Rather than being inmate types, people who have become enlightened to any degree are builders of hospitals for other people. Their intelligence and compassion are relatively unobstructed, and they tend to become quite active and effective citizens.

Even though the Buddha Dharma is based on direct experience and encourages its practitioners to relate to naked experience with bare attention, there are aspects of the teaching, which help to form a background for the practitioner's effort, that seem like they are speculative thoughts at least one step removed from direct experience. For example, we have the notions of karma and rebirth. These sound like the usual kind of religious doctrines requiring belief or faith. But let us look for a moment at these two teachings.

Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning "action." The teaching about karma is that the actions we take now will have consequences later. For the most part, this is the everyday idea of cause-and-effect that most people take for granted. If you kick a ball it goes. If you lose your airline ticket, you have hassles. This is karma, action and its action, or effect.

But according to the Buddha, action's action sometimes happens on a more subtle level. Sometimes the conditions necessary for action's effect to happen are not present. Let's say you murdered somebody in the woods. There was no one else around and no evidence. Nobody suspected you at all. Yet there was a horrible moment of raw aggression, unforgettably vivid. Does that just go away? Of course we have the memory of it. But what is memory anyway?

According to the Buddha, action's action does not tend to dissipate. The effect will tend to happen some time, whenever suitable conditions are present. That moment of horrible aggression is likely to have its backlash some time. But will that backlash happen to you?

This question connects the idea of karma to that of rebirth, or reincarnation. In the India of the Buddha's time, in the first millennium BCE (as to a great extent in the India of today), the notion of rebirth was taken for granted by almost everybody. According to the popular Indian idea of reincarnation, you get reborn again and again in different forms, sometimes as a human, sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a god, sometimes in hell—in all kinds of better or worse circumstances. What you do now, it is thought, will effect your future rebirth. If you're greedy and mean, you might be reborn as a dung beetle. If you're a splendid person, you might be reborn as a god or a king or queen. A murderer will suffer a hideous situation somewhere along in the series of his rebirths. Other karma might come to fruition first, but some time or other the backlash of his aggression will strike him—with a corresponding force and character, of course, because it is the action of his earlier action.

The Buddha's teaching about karma and rebirth resembles this picture in some ways but differs from it essentially. How? One of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha is egolessness, the fundamental unreality of the self. If there is no self that gets reborn, what does rebirth mean? And can you just die and get away with murder?

According to one Buddhist text, the Kalachakra Tantra, the karma of sentient beings is so powerful that it brings worlds into existence in order to reach fulfillment. Between the existences of worlds—at the right moment, when the necessary conditions have gathered—karma, the incompleted action of the previous action of sentient beings, begins to activate the basic particles of space. The particles come into motion generating a vast karmic wind that stirs up the other cosmic elements—fire, water, and earth—and a world or worlds are formed.

It can also be said that individual sentient beings, like worlds, come into existence through the coming together of the force of karma and other necessary conditions. Causally related karmic elements tend to hang together in the transmigratory history of sentient beings. In that way, memory itself seems to be an expression of karmic continuity. But in most cases there are no coherent conscious memories of the relationships that related the karmic elements that are the threads of our everyday lives.

But according to the Buddha, karma is not all-pervasive and all-determining. The wind of karma only blows in the cloudy weather systems of thoughts related to passion, aggression, and willful ignorance. In the endless brilliance of the cloudless sunlit sky, there is nothing for it to blow. In open, unobstructed space of sentient beings' basic intelligence, karma becomes inoperative. The awakened one is victorious over karma.

Understandings such as this, which may seem abstract, are part of the Buddha Dharma, because they were included in the vastness of the unobstructed direct experience of the Buddha and other enlightened masters of the Buddha Dharma. They have been handed down through unbroken lineages of enlightened teachers stemming fromthe Buddha himself as part of the support system provided to help people wake up. But they are not required articles of belief. The Buddha discouraged people from taking his teachings on blind faith. He invited anyone wishing to follow his path to verify all his teachings personally and to maintain a healthy skepticism until realization clears up doubts. So all the Buddhist teachings are provided for the practitioner's examination and concrete testing. It is always helpful to remember that the Buddha himself was not a Buddhist.

The editors of this book have chosen a variety of texts from the centuries' store of Dharma writing to give readers convenient access to the essential teachings of the Buddha. The selection begins with a brief life of the Buddha and a quick factual survey of Buddhist history. Then follow texts expressing the thought and practice of the three main divisions of the Buddha Dharma, the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. The works of great Buddhist masters of the past and present have been included.

An introduction to meditation practice will be found, as well as chapters to help answer common questions about karma and rebirth. Thus interested readers will find what they need to acquire a comprehensive impression of the Buddha Dharma that has both depth and breadth.

Not all the selections in this book make easy reading. A passage may be difficult because it runs against the current of our habitual thinking. Sometimes meaning may be elusive because the subject matter is subtle and profound. Also, specialized terms have been developed over the centuries, and they have been translated into English in different ways. (To standardize foreign terms and lessen confusion, we have changed most Pali terminology in the selections to Sanskrit. A glossary is also provided, of which the reader is encouraged to make liberal use.) Still, with a little perseverance, the reader will be able to gain insights that may bring helpful new perspectives to everyday life. Trying meditation might be helpful. It is the way par excellence of discovering the great truths in one's own experience.

Traditionally it is said that when a person catches a glimpse of ego's confusion and connects this with an aspiration to awaken, he or she begins to enter the stream of Dharma. When you find you are trusting yourself in all kinds of new and fresh ways you never imagined before, you are really getting your feet wet. These days more and more Westerners seem to be doing this.