Buddha’s Teachings

Buddha understood himself as something like a doctor who wanted to help suffering people to find liberation and redemption. However, everyone had to try out the means of healing for themselves. Buddha was something like a present-day psychotherapist who helps people to overcome crises in life, to understand the causes of suffering and so cope with it, to be content with their limitations, finitude and mortality. But the Buddha was more than a psychotherapist. He was more radical. He himself had experienced Enlightenment that human beings, if they see through everything, could recognize that all that they see is not stable, that nothing in the world is permanent. Everything is changeable; even the self, to which we so cling, basically has no abiding substance, but is just as transitory. ~ World Religions, Universal Peace, Global Ethic

Buddhism had its historical origin in the sixth century BC with Siddharta Gautama. In the Four Noble Truths, he taught insight into the cause of human suffering and with the Eightfold Path showed a way towards overcoming it. Through this insight, Siddharta Gautama became the Buddha, the Enlightened One. Buddhists do not understand the Ultimate Reality, the Absolute, as a personal deity or a creator God, but as the impersonal dharma, ie the eternal law which rules the universe and which is the subject of the teachings of the Buddha. Buddha’s teachings were gathered together over a long period; the most important are the Theravada canon (Tripitaka) and the Mahayana sutras.

The Eightfold Path

1. Right View
Right understanding of the origin of suffering,
right understanding of the cessation of suffering,
right understanding of the path leading to the cessation of suffering.

2. Right Intentions
Intentions of renunciation,
Intentions of goodwill,
Intentions to do no harm.

3. Right word
To refrain from lying
To refrain from slander
To refrain from harsh speech
To refrain from chattering

4. Right Action
To refrain from killing living beings
To refrain from taking what is not given
To refrain from an immoral love life

5. Right Livelihood
To earn one’s living by legal means and without violence

6. Right Effort
The effort of the will, not to allow to come into being unwholesome things which have not come into being, to make unwholesome things that have come into being disappear, to make wholesome things that have come into being unfold.

7. Right Mindfulness
Developing awareness of the body so the greed and hatred are reduced.

8. Right Concentration
To enter deep levels of mental calm through developing one-pointedness of need.