Kulananda Kulananda - 20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM

To understand the fundamentals of Buddhism, therefore, it is necessary to get back as close as we can to the Buddha himself. We can do this by looking into the earliest texts and seeing what they have to say for us today. This is not to reject later developments. Buddhists in the West today stand as heirs to the whole Buddhist tradition. We can admire, respect and make practical use of elements of Japanese Soto Zen as much as we can elements of Tibetan Vajrayana or Thai Theravada. But to understand the tradition as a whole we need to go back to its roots.

Most of the basic teachings in this book go back to early Indian Buddhism. I therefore hope that there is little here that Buddhists of different traditional allegiance would take issue with. For the same reason, I have generally confined myself to the early Indian canonical languages in the few cases where I need to describe Buddhist technical terms, using either Pali or Sanskrit as seems most appropriate in context. (This not being a scholarly work, I have omitted diacritical marks.)

The principal intention of this book is to introduce the general reader to the broad range of the Buddhist tradition by bringing out some of its most essential (and therefore most common) elements, and to show how the fundamental teachings of Buddhism have a significance which transcends their historical origins. Above all I hope it encourages some readers to try these out for themselves. Books are very useful, but if one really wants to know what Buddhism is about, one must try it out in practice. Even the most gifted writer cannot describe the flavour of an orange, and in the same way no book can ever capture the essence of Buddhist practice.

‘Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt,’ the Buddha said, ‘so my teaching has one flavour – the flavour of liberation.’

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