Hello,
My name is Sean Rapson and welcome to this short lecture on the essence of Buddhism and what Buddha discovered.
Within Buddhism there are three schools of thought.
The first one is Mahayana,
Which is practiced in East Asia.
The second one is Theravada,
Which is done in Southeast Asia.
And the third one is Vajrayana,
Which was done in Tibet till their country was attacked by China and is now commonly done in the Himalayan regions and northern India.
Vajrayana is also a subset of the Mahayana school.
In Theravada Buddhism,
The essence of Buddha's teachings is said to be no self.
What is commonly taught is that as everything is impermanent,
So are we.
As the mind and the physical body are constantly changing,
How can there be a true self?
In Mahayana Buddhism,
The essence is the idea of a Buddha nature.
This means that everybody has the seed of Buddha within them by which they can also become an enlightened being.
Actually,
These two teachings are two sides of the same coin.
The coin itself is what Buddha discovered.
What Buddha discovered was that at its essence,
The mind is nothing more than awareness.
To understand this,
We can think of the mind as a blank piece of white paper without any writing on it.
The mind is a blank piece of white paper until you start writing on it.
That writing can be thought of as memory silos.
Memory silos,
Of course,
Are created through your life experiences and what you've been taught.
These memory silos are of course stored in the awareness of the mind,
Just as the blank piece of paper stores the ink upon it.
The mind is actually divided into four different parts.
The identity,
The intellect,
The memory and the awareness.
As the mind starts to form different memory silos throughout one's life and particularly in the early life of children,
The intellect is born.
The intellect is nothing more than a part of the mind that goes into the memory silos and then takes the information there and regurgitates it.
So if somebody is sitting at a party and wants to say something clever,
They are using the intellect to go into the memory silos and then say whatever they think is clever.
It's the same for exams.
This is the same for sitting here and doing a talk on Buddhism.
It is the intellect going to the memory silos.
The memory silos,
Combined with the intellect,
Therefore form what is known as the identity.
The identity is the false self because at your essence you are nothing more than awareness.
It is the identity that gives you your name,
Anne,
Charles,
Richard,
Oh look over there,
There's Paul.
So people form their identity themselves from the combination of the intellect and the memory silos.
We also form an identity of someone else through that person's memories,
Silos and intellect because these are the things that seem to represent them.
So the reason why Theravada said the essence of Buddhist teachings is no self is because if we all have pure awareness at our essence,
Then there is no self.
Buddha nature also comes from the awareness idea with the fact that we all have the ability to be Buddha because we all have the same pure awareness at our essence that he had.
The Buddhist path to enlightenment is actually very very simple.
You become a moralistic,
Upright human being so that your mind has a foundation by which it is able to do deep meditation.
Deep meditation is done to create a state of mind that is habitually in pure awareness and is able to use the intellect and the memory silos at its choosing.
When the mind is in a habitual state of pure awareness,
One is therefore able to see reality for what it truly is without any form of added bias upon to the thing that is being observed.
When one can look at reality in a state of mind that is pure awareness,
A state of mind that attaches no bias to anything,
It is this mind that is an enlightened mind and it is this mind that is extremely wise and knowledgeable because it sees everything for what it really is.
