An Introduction to Buddhism
Tim Crabtree
Schumacher College
“We must distinguish between spirituality in
general terms, which aims to make us better
people, and religion. Adopting a religion remains
optional, but becoming a better human being is
essential.” Mathieu Ricard
‘Spirituality can be defined as “the eternal
human yearning to be connected with
something larger than our own egos”’
Parker J. Palmer
Stopping and looking deeply
There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a
horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it
appears that the man on the horse is going
somewhere important. Another man, standing
alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you
going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know!
Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are
riding a horse, we don’t know where we are
going, and we can’t stop.”
Peace is every step:
it turns the endless path to joy
Many of us believe that happiness is only
possible when we have achieved certain
objectives: a partner, a job, status, a new car, a
holiday. Buddhism teaches that this is not the
way to happiness. Happiness can be achieved
directly, in any circumstances, right now. It is not
an objective that you reach after long
endurance, but rather a process that you
participate in here and now.
Right Mindfulness
Mindfulness is....
”....paying attention on purpose,
in the present moment,
non-judgementally....”
Jon Kabat Zinn
Awareness as a starting point
William James:
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a
wandering attention over and over again, is the
very root of judgment, character, and will. . . . An
education which should improve this faculty
would be the education par excellence. But it is
easier to define this ideal than to give practical
instructions for bringing it about.”
Mindful breathing
When you practice mindful breathing,
“Breathing in, I’m aware of my in-breath,” you
practice in such a way that you are no longer an
observer. You practice in such a way that you
become your in-breath. You become a
participant, no longer an outside observer.
Focused Attention
• Single-pointed concentration.
– Breath
– Natural object [e.g. a flower]
– Thought
– Images
• Purpose is to break reactive, associative
thinking, and to bring clarity, freedom,
sustained focus to observation and thought.
Focused attention
meditation
Focused attention meditation entails voluntarily
focusing attention on a chosen object in a
sustained fashion.
Open monitoring
meditation
Open monitoring meditation involves nonreactively
monitoring the content of experience
from moment to moment, primarily as a means
to recognize the nature of emotional and
cognitive patterns.
Open attention
Focused Attention Open Attention
From focused attention
to open monitoring
Open monitoring meditation initially involves
the use of focused attention training to calm the
mind and reduce distractions, but as focused
attention advances, the cultivation of the
monitoring skill per se becomes the main focus
of practice. The aim is to reach a state in which
no explicit focus on a specific object is retained;
instead, one remains only in the monitoring
state, attentive moment by moment to anything
that occurs in experience.
Open attention
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait
without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is
yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in
the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for
thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness
the dancing.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Open attention
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter
where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace
itself which makes this void.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Tugenhadt House
……large spaces provide freedom. Space has in
its rhythm a completely special calm which
cannot be provided by a closed room.
Romano Guardini
Mindfulness of Breathing
• Bring your attention to your breathing
• Count each out breath from one to ten
• If your mind wanders off, bring your attention
back to your breathing and start counting
again
Living in the present moment
Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is
in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.
The activity of the mind
Judgements = liking or disliking
Associations = memories, stories, comparisons
Emotional inter-relationship with thoughts
Thoughts don’t occur singularly or without some
emotional “flavour”.
Commentary = our thoughts comment on all our
experiences.
“The systematic training of the mind — the
cultivation of happiness, the genuine inner
transformation by deliberately selecting and
focusing on positive mental states and
challenging negative mental states — is possible
because of the very structure and function of the
brain…But the wiring in our brains is not static,
not irrevocably fixed. Our brains are also
adaptable” (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Art
of Happiness, pp. 44-45).
Mindfulness-based stress reduction
(MBSR)
A mindfulness-based program designed initially to assist
people with pain and a range of conditions and life issues
that were difficult to treat in a hospital setting.
Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center.
Uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body
awareness, and yoga to help people become more
mindful.
In recent years, MBSR has been the subject of controlled
clinical research. This suggests it may have beneficial
effects, including stress reduction, relaxation, and
improvements to quality of life.
Research: Basic Science
On a basic science level, we are:
• Working to elucidate neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness
through the study of brain activity and connectivity using fMRI
• Conducting neurophenomenological studies to link the subjective
experience of mindfulness with specific brain activity using realtime
fMRI and EEG neurofeedback.
Catherine Kerr:
The neuroscience of somatic attention
“When you pay mindful attention to a sensory
stimulus like the breath, you are exercising the
lateral prefrontal attentional circuit in the brain.”
Anxious rumination
• Repetitive negative cognitions about the self,
e.g. “I’m not good enough.” “I shouldn’t have
done that.”
• Situated in the medial front cortex network.
• Known as the “default network” – it is where
we go to when we are not doing anything else.
Focusing on present moment
sensations
• Situated in the lateral pre-frontal cortex.
The 2 networks are anti-correlated
• When one goes up, the other goes down.
• Medial – self-related rumination about past
and future
• Lateral – focus on sensations in the present
moment
• Subtle awareness of body sensations takes
you out of the “rumination” network
Meditators in MRI’s
• The Dalai Lama has helped recruit Tibetan
Buddhist monks for research on the brain and
meditation in the Waisman Laboratory for
Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the University
of Wisconsin- Madison.
• The findings from these studies, as well as
related research efforts, suggest that over the
course of meditating for tens of thousands of
hours, the long-term practitioners had actually
altered the structure and function of their
brains.
Neuroplasticity
• The term neuroplasticity is used to describe the
brain changes that occur in response to
experience. There are many different
mechanisms of neuroplasticity, ranging from the
growth of new connections to the creation of
new neurons.
• When the framework of neuroplasticity is applied
to meditation, studies suggest that the mental
training of meditation is fundamentally no
different than other forms of skill acquisition that
can induce plastic changes in the brain.
Findings of brain
changes in meditation
Changes include alterations in patterns of brain
function assessed with functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), changes in the
cortical evoked response to visual stimuli that
reflect the impact of meditation on attention,
and alterations in amplitude and synchrony of
high frequency oscillations that probably play an
important role in connectivity among
widespread circuitry in the brain.
These findings support the view that attention is
a trainable skill that can be enhanced through
the mental practice of focused attention
meditation.
The First Noble Truth
• The first Noble Truth is suffering (dukkha).
• The root meaning of the Chinese character for
suffering is bitter. Happiness is sweet;
suffering is bitter.
• We all suffer to some extent – when the
Buddha looked around him he saw poverty,
disease, old age and death.
• “If we can be truly aware of the suffering and
call it by its true name it can be very helpful.”
All is not suffering
• A common misconception is that Buddhism
believes that the world consists only of
suffering.
• “If we say that life is only suffering, it’s not
correct. But if we say that life is only suffering,
it’s also not correct. There are both, and they
each play their role…….We can’t wait to be
happy until we remove 100% of suffering. That
moment will never exist.”
No mud, no lotus
“Imagine there was no suffering. This is like
trying to imagine a lotus growing without the
mud that nurtures it. You can’t plant lotus on
marble. If there’s no mud there’s no
lotus……Lotus flowers are made of non-lotus
elements, including mud. Happiness is made of
non-happiness elements, including suffering.”
Suffering is not just outside us
“We need to abolish poverty and social injustice,
and to deal with the problems of global
warming and economic recession. But we need
to begin with the painful feelings we carry inside
us. We have to deal with these things first. If
they’re not dealt with, we may inadvertently
cause more suffering when we are trying to
relieve it. “
Learning from suffering
“Many of us are afraid of ill-being, and our
natural tendency is to run away from it. This has
become a collective habit. There is an epidemic
of medicating ourselves with alcohol, drugs,
sedatives, and tranquilizers to escape our
suffering. But the First Noble Truth suggests that
we should stay and acknowledge our suffering. If
we don’t understand suffering, we can’t
understand happiness.”
The Second Noble Truth
The Second Noble Truth is the origin, roots, nature,
creation, or arising of suffering.
“Once we have called our suffering by its true
name, we need to look deeply to see where this
suffering comes from…….
Why are we in the midst of economic crisis? Why is
there so much pollution, terrorism, and climate
change? When we ask these questions, we need to
take the time and space to really look deeply to try
to find the answer.”
The Third Noble Truth
The Third Noble Truth is the cessation of
creating suffering by refraining from doing the
things that make us suffer.
“When the roots of suffering are absent, we can
be free and happy, and we can act ethically,
motivated by our understanding and
compassion.”
The Fourth Noble Truth
The Fourth Noble Truth is the path that leads to
refraining from doing the things that cause us to
suffer.
This path is called the Noble Eightfold Path:
• Right View; Right Thinking; Right Speech;
Right Action; Right Livelihood; Right Diligence;
Right Mindfulness; Right Concentration.
The Eightfold Noble Path
Right Diligence
• Water positive seeds
E.g.
– Feelings of well-being
– Kindness
– Compassion
– Generosity
– Altruism
– Co-operation
Right Diligence
• Water positive seeds
• E.g.
– Cultivate attention
– Exercise
– 3 gratitudes
– Generosity and random kindness
– Journal happiness
Right Diligence
• Water positive seeds
• Keep positive seeds manifesting
Right Diligence
• Water positive seeds
• Keep positive seeds manifesting
• Try not to allow seeds of suffering to arise
Right Diligence
• Water positive seeds
• Keep positive seeds manifesting
• Try not to allow seeds of suffering to arise
• Take care of seeds of suffering as soon as they
arise
Right Diligence
• Take care of seeds of suffering as soon as they
arise
– Recognise / name
– Accept
– Embrace with mindfulness
– Look deeply / insight
– Transform
Right View
Right View – Understanding Interbeing
If we look deeply into the nature of our universe we can
see all things as profoundly interdependent. In traditional
Buddhism this was originally called dependent co-arising.
At the heart of this understanding is the realisation that
we have no separate self, that everything is empty of a
separate self in a universe which is in a constant state of
flux and change. The interdependent nature of all
phenomena is central to Buddhist teachings.
Emptiness is always emptiness of something, it is empty
of a separate self – i.e. interbeing, meaning connected to
everything.
Thich Nhat Hanh