Key Buddhist Teachings

The following are simple explanations of some key Buddhist teachings.  To expound upon them at length would take more space than is practical, but hopefully these explanations will encourage people to explore the teachings  more thoroughly.

The word karma literally means action but for Buddhist purposes it is defined cause and effect. Simply put, causes are things that make other things happen and effects are the things that happen due to causes. The seeds of karma are produced by thoughts, words or actions stemming from a deluded view.   Karma may be experienced  by ourselves or by others, and karmic  effects may also mature.  This is  called flowering or ripening. Effects ripen depending on the conditions they encounter.  These conditions are also known as secondary causes which make it possible for karma to ripen just as fertile soil makes it possible for plants to grow.

Karma has both potential and actual aspects. Karmic seeds which reside in our consciousness represent the potential for our subsequent existence in the realm of Samsara (realm of birth, death and rebirth). Karma fuels the mechanism of rebirth, and so is considered to be the energy that fuels the Samsaric process.

When Siddhartha became a Buddha he thoroughly realized that all phenomena arise as the result of cause and effect. Each cause gives rise to an effect, which then becomes another cause, and so on in a seemingly endless cycle.  The Twelve Links represent one complete cycle of life:

• Ignorance of the true nature of reality.  The mind dissolving into its own fundamental state of unconsciousness.
• Mental Formations.  The gradual stirring of mental activity caused by karmic energy.  This activity  begins the active phase of the pre-rebirth process.
• Consciousness.   The ability of the mind to recognize something other than itself as an object.  A sense of self arises, and phenomena are perceived as being separate from this self (self-and-other).
• Name and Form.  The manifestation of the rising sense of self.  Some-things perceived by “some-one.”
• The Realm of the Six Senses.  This consists of the six senses (Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking) as well as the objects of those senses.
• Phenomena.  Contact with the phenomenal world; the contact between sensory subjects and sensory objects, a sort of tactile sensation.
• Feeling or Sensation. Value judgment of the actual experience of contact (rough or smooth, hot or cold, etc.).
• Desire or Craving.  A tremendous yearning for experience.
• Grasping or Clinging.  Powerfully driven blind will to achieve physical rebirth, to manifest into some form that can have experiences.
• The Process of Becoming. The culmination of the will to exist. Abandonment of the endless nature of mind in order to give rise to the birth process.
• Rebirth. The physical process of birth.
• Suffering, Aging, Illness, and Death. The consequences of rebirth into Samsara, the conditioned realm in which we exist.

The Buddha, beginning with the reality of Samsaric existence, traced the rebirth process back to fundamental ignorance.  Suffering is dependent on Rebirth, Rebirth is dependent on the Process of Becoming, etc.

This commonly misunderstood term refers to the fact that all phenomena are “empty of” (do not have) a totally discrete existence apart from all other phenomena.  The teaching of interconnectedness, interdependence and interrelatedness.

1. Full Attention (mindfulness).
2. Full Inquiry (investigation of phenomena).
3. Tireless Energy.
4. Unworldly Joy.
5. Tranquililty (lightness and peacefulnesss).
6. Stillness.
7. Equanimity.