![]() It’s about looking into the very core of your own mind, or whatever, whereas the practice of mindfulness – which I think is the Buddhist meditation par excellence – is actually going in the opposite direction. Again we often find in some later forms of Buddhism that meditation is basically introspective. The third point that I think is distinctive is the Buddha’s emphasis on the cultivation of mindfulness, mindful awareness, regarding the specificity of experience. And fourthly, of the four noble truths – to embark on a way of life, or to bring into being a way in which your humanity can flourish in all of its aspects from the way we see things, think about them, speak, act, work, apply ourselves, pay attention, and focus our minds. Thirdly, to actually try to find a space within one’s own experience whereby one is no longer prompted or driven by fear, attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride. In other words, to fully embrace the suffering of oneself and the world, to let go of grasping and craving which so often in a sense prevent us from that honest embrace of reality and reduce everything to my own personal desires and fears. The second point is the practice of what are called four ennobling truths which I prefer to see as injunctions rather than descriptions. ![]() One of the most authoritative accounts of the Buddha’s awakening is his awakening to paticca samuppada, the processual, contingent, fluid, unfolding, interconnected nature of life. The first of these is the principle of contingency, or conditioned arising, or dependent origination. What I have concluded tentatively in recent years is to identify four points that the Buddha taught that cannot be derived from the socio-historical context of his time, in other words that are distinctively and non-controversially his own ideas. That, of course, is a very arrogant presumption on one level. ![]() ![]() I’m supposed to take a risk and say in 25 words or less what Buddhism is. ![]()
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