Have you ever been stuck in a video game? Found yourself on a level you just couldn’t beat? You keep throwing yourself at it over and over, only to die and respawn each time.
Until, finally, something clicks. When you respawn this time, you get a little further. And then a little further still.
Until, finally, everything falls into place, you find the exit, and the screen fades to black. You’re free. It’s game over.
[THEME MUSIC] Well, that feeling of being stuck, seeking an end to the cycle of suffering, is sort of like the concept of Samsara: the cycle of life, death, and rebirth that all living things are trapped in. But Buddhists believe there’s a way out— a path to enlightenment. Sometimes we find it on our own… and sometimes, we need a little help from a friend who’s already beaten the game.
At its core, Buddhism focuses on the elimination of dukkha, or suffering, achieved through following Buddhist teachings, called the Dharma. The Dharma lays out the path to nirvana, or enlightenment, literally meaning “blowing out” like a candle. Those who achieve nirvana are free from the ceaseless flickering of suffering.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions, which was filmed here at our studio in – wait a second! That can’t be it. Can I see the script, Katie?
Oh yeah, there’s like four more pages here. There’s a bunch of other stuff. It was never going to be that easy to get out of the cycle of Samsara.
Right, so Buddhism has three central ideas, known as the Three Jewels or Treasures, which can help us seek that path to enlightenment. These are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Three Jewels are central to a lot of Buddhist practices.
In fact, many people begin their daily rituals with the vow “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.
” It’s like starting your day with a good cup of coffee. A way to get focused on the day ahead. So, let’s start with The Buddha, the first jewel.
While the title of Buddha can, and has, been given to several people who have achieved enlightenment, when we talk about The Buddha, we’re talking about Siddhartha Gautama, who lived during the 5th or 6th century BCE. It’s believed that he was born at a place called Lumbini in Nepal, a popular site with Buddhists. As many as 400,000 of them make the pilgrimage there each year.
Before he became the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama was a prince, enjoying a luxurious life free from worries. But, like Margo Roth Spiegelman in the classic American novel *Paper Towns*, Gautama was eventually struck by wanderlust. He wanted to see the world outside his palace and find answers to questions like, “Why am I here?
” and “What does it all mean? ” You know, the easy stuff. So he left home and went into the world, where he witnessed what Buddhists call the Four Sights: old age, sickness, death, and asceticism.
That last one really stuck with him. Ascetics were spiritual teachers who practiced severe self-discipline and denial of comforts in order to escape that cycle of Samsara. After witnessing the Four Sights, Gautama committed himself to asceticism: he studied with others who taught him techniques for meditation and material deprivation.
At one point, he even tried surviving on a single spoonful of bean soup per day! Which didn’t quite fill the health bar. It’s a video game joke, because we referenced video games earlier.
You liked it. But all this work still didn’t answer his questions. He wasn’t satisfied with a life of luxury or a life of simplicity.
So after six years on the road, he did what anyone would do—sat under a tree to think. He sat beneath what would come to be known as the Bodhi Tree, a massive ficus with heart-shaped leaves, and vowed not to stand back up until he had achieved enlightenment. He meditated for seven weeks, until, on the final night, he reached a mental state so deep that he began to uncover the secrets of the universe.
He was able to look back through his own previous lives and look into everyone else’s life cycles, too. This insight helped him to uncover the final boss of suffering: the three poisons: greed, hatred, and ignorance. Letting go of these three poisons allowed him to beat the game – it brought him enlightenment.
By dawn he had achieved nirvana — he was free from suffering and fully understood the impermanence of all things. As the sun rose, he was no longer Siddhartha Gautama, but the Awakened One – The Buddha. From that day on, the Buddha dedicated his life to creating a strategy guide to help others down this path between lavishness and asceticism, which he called the Middle Way.
Today, Buddhists around the world follow the Middle Way by practicing the second treasure in the Three Jewels, the Dharma. Made up of Four Noble Truths, the Dharma comes from the Buddha’s first formal sermon after his enlightenment. The first truth?
“There is suffering. ” Which is just a banger. This is the concept of dukkha that I mentioned earlier.
But when Buddhists talk about suffering, they aren’t just talking about physical or emotional pain. And The Buddha wasn’t a pessimist, despite how this may sound. Dukkha can also be translated more mildly as “dissatisfaction,” particularly about the state of the universe.
But yeah, there is suffering. The second banger line: “There is a cause to suffering,” and that cause is craving, or desire. This is a little different from a casual want, and more like a clinging, twisted version of desire, where you’re holding on too tightly, like with your college girlfriend, how you were so clingy that you crushed the thing you were trying to hold onto, and also conceived of that person as a thing, which was its own problem, or maybe that’s just me… but anyway there is suffering and suffering is caused by desire.
The third noble truth: “There is an end to suffering. ” That end is nirvana, a state of being free from desire. And the fourth, “There is a path that leads to the end of suffering.
” That path is The Middle Way – neither extreme asceticism nor indulgence, but something in between. And if you're wondering how you follow the Middle Way, there’s a list for that too. To recap, we’ve collected two of the three jewels, four noble truths, and we’re about to start on the Eightfold Path, which includes eight behaviors for morality, meditation, and wisdom that will guide you toward nirvana.
Right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. I know that’s a lot, but what this all boils down to is that if we let go of that ravenous, clinging desire, and conceive of other humans as truly and fully human, we’ll cease to experience suffering and achieve nirvana. Now while most Buddhists follow the Dharma, it might not look like what you’d expect.
Like with any situation, not everyone’s version of “right” is going to look the same. Take meditation. While some modern Buddhists, particularly converts in the US and Europe, do use it as part of their path, meditation generally wasn’t something regular folks did for most of Buddhist history.
It’s usually been reserved for monks and nuns. Instead of meditation, a lot of lay Buddhists work on merit-making. This could look like donating money, or clothes, or other necessities to nuns and monks, since they often live almost entirely without worldly possessions.
Or it might include chanting mantras, spinning a prayer wheel, lighting a lamp in a temple, or making offerings to the Buddha. Direct actions like this are seen as one’s Karma, and no matter what Taylor Swift says, karma cannot be your boyfriend. I mean I guess unless you fall in love with someone named Karma in which case Karma can be your boyfriend.
But to Buddhists, karma connects your actions to a system of cause-and-effect that ultimately impacts your place in the next cycle of Samsara. Some Buddhists even perform merit transfers, believing that the good karma they create in life can be passed on to their dead relatives in order to help them inch closer to enlightenment. Finally, the third jewel of Buddhism is the Sangha, which refers to the monks and nuns who continue to spread the Buddha’s teachings.
In a wider sense, the Sangha can also refer to the larger community of all people who take refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma. And that can include a lot of different branches of practice and belief. As the Buddha’s teachings spread to other parts of the world, lots of small differences emerged.
And eventually, more stark ones, leading to two of the major branches we have today: Theravada Buddhism and Mah ayana Buddhism. Theravada refers to the way of, or the lineage of, the Elders, and it’s the largest branch in Southeast Asia. Theravada is based on the Pali Canon, a collection of texts in the Pali language considered to be the earliest records of the Buddha’s teachings.
Meanwhile, Mahayana Buddhism recognizes a variety of texts not found in the Pali Canon, written in a number of languages including Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. The different sub-branches of Mahayana Buddhism value a variety of bodhisattvas, beings who are able to achieve nirvana but intentionally delay it, sticking it out on Earth to help alleviate suffering for others —much like the Buddha himself. And within Mahayana Buddhism we find another branch: Tibetan Buddhism, one of the most well-known, thanks to the Dalai Lama, a globally recognized figure who Buddhists and non-Buddhists all over the world value for his wisdom.
But the Dalai Lama doesn’t preside over all Buddhists the way, like, the Pope presides over all Catholics. His leadership is specific to the Gelug or “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism, while many other schools of thought have their own leadership, and sacred texts, and traditions. So, while it definitely gets more representation in pop culture, Tibetan Buddhism is just one part of the canopy of various Buddhist branches, twisting and blooming like the limbs of the Bodhi Tree itself.
And all of them, together, make up the Sangha. So the path to enlightenment isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Ways of doing Buddhism and following the Middle Way are varied.
From spinning the prayer wheel at a temple, to living a life of chosen simplicity as a monk or nun, to saying a mantra to focus the mind, and so much more. And there’s something very moving to me about the fact that the same root story can create branching paths that are as diverse as we are, though they all seek the same goal: an end to human suffering. Make sure you check out our next episode where we’ll ask an important question: “can a river be a person?
” I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
