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> Is buddihsm real? Does it have any basis in scientific and objective reality? Or is it fiction?

These are Buddhist questions. :)

The Buddha famously told his followers not to accept his teaching merely because he said it, instead he told them to "go and see for yourself." The point is that if you want to know if buddhism is real, try out the practices and see if they make sense to you and make a difference. If the practices work, adopt them, if you find them worthless, abandon them.

You get free will and karma in Buddhism. Great 2-for-1 special.

Another way to come at it is to consider the good old Four Noble Truths. There are different ways to say them but this is how I learned them:

* Life is full of suffering

* Suffering is caused by attachment to desire

* There is a way beyond attachment

* Meditation and Buddhism is the way beyond attachment (or to Enlightenment, if you prefer)

2 comments

+1 on most of this. A small note: I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress. I take the Buddha to have said roughly, “I teach the origin of unhappiness and how to liberate yourself from it.”

I think when you marry life is suffering, and resistance is suffering, you get to the root of it. Ego is ultimately the root of suffering, resisting what is. Our cravings and aversions result in us not being able to be meet the present as it is, and accept it. It causes us to artificially label experience with qualifiers such as good/bad etc

As we root out our cravings and aversions, our egoic programming, fear stops running the show, and gratitude and contentment takes it's place. We're able to meet every moment as it is and appreciate the perfection.

> I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress.

Agree. Suffering doesn't send the right message in terms of what the word is trying to signal. The best version I've heard is likening life to a carriage ride, and the wheel is just never quite right, so it's always just a little bit uncomfortable. Nothing's just ever quite right.

It's a mouthful to verbalize, but I like "unsatisfactoriness".

The noble truth of 'Dukha' doesn't translate to 'life is full of suffering', but rather that life contains suffering, which may sound obvious but there is a subtler meaning here.

The subtler meaning is that nothing in existence will truly and permanently satisfy you, because that is the nature of the mind. Many people obviously don't realize this as they run around chasing their first million, billion or trillion.