How to Become a Buddhist

how do you become a Buddhist it's one of the questions that I'm asked most often in the comments to my videos now try to give you an answer coming right up I'm Doug Smith of the online Dharma Institute that's online Dharma org where I try to teach courses on early Buddhist Dharma from a contemporary perspective to help you understand what the Buddha taught if you're new to this channel and interested in living a wiser and a kinder and a calmer life consider subscribing to the channel and click the bell down below if you want to receive notifications when I come out with new videos how do you become a Buddhist now there are various ways to answer this question depending on which school of Buddhism most interests cyou there are different kinds of perhaps ceremonies or things involved in various schools and it also depends on whether one wants to be simply a lay follower as many of us are or if one wishes to become a monastic which is of course a much more serious and life-changing kind of decision now my own background my own if you like affiliation is as a secular practitioner and so my own answer that is to say the answer from my own approach is going to be somewhat different from the answers to other schools but I'm going to try to give you a general answer because I know some of you are interested in being secular and some of you or not now to begin with certainly laypeople of whatever background are free to attend virtually any Buddhist meditation or service or chant or whatever that you find in your local temple and now of course if you have a question you can always ask sometimes there are let's say initiation periods or like a little class that they'll give you for an hour for newbies who don't really know what let's say how to behave properly within the Zen dough if it happens that you're interested in Zen because there are certain kinds of of ways you're supposed to behave once you enter the the the actual meditation room you're supposed to hold your hands in certain ways you're supposed to bow before you enter and those kinds of things and simple things like that they'll generally give to to new practitioners but again this depends upon the school now when you go to a a meditation or an event like this as I say any layperson is welcome to be there and in general they're going to involve things like chance again depending on the particular school that you're in a chance such as the three jewels a chance such as the Five Precepts or chance such as the four Bodhisattva vows now these are these are typical chants of the kinds that you might find in many Buddhist centers that they will invite everybody there to to chant in unison and they'll give you usually a little paper thing with chant written out on it in case you don't know it now what are these chants the three jewels are the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha and traditionally Buddhists are said to take refuge in these three jewels you take refuge in the Buddha you take refuge in the Dharma that is to say the Buddha's teaching and you take refuge in the Sangha the Sangha being the group of monastics or the order or the group of people who are awakened whatever now the five precepts on the other hand are the five ethical strictures and now I've done a video on the five precepts I'll put a link to it down actually down in the show notes probably easier that way but basically the five precepts are not to kill not to steal not to lie not to commit sexual misconduct and not to abuse intoxicants and many Buddhist orders will chant these five precepts at the beginning or at some point in their service as simply a reminder of what these precepts are and finally there are the the bodhisattva vows which are chanted in many mahayana kinds of buddhist centers such as zen centers and these are it's translated variously depending on the center you're at but one common translation that i found on the internet recently is creations are numberless I vow to freedom delusions are inexhaustible I vow to transform them reality is boundless I vow to perceive it and the awakened way is unsurpassable and I vow to and and I think it's pretty clear that this these four Bodhisattva vows have a certain paradoxical flavor to them in the sense that they seem like things that are impossible to achieve and yet you're vowing to achieve them and in all of these cases the cases of the three jewels and the Five Precepts and these vows there's going to be a range of interpretations of how we are to take to them what do we think about them what does it mean for example to to take refuge in the Dharma or the Buddha with the Sangha what does it mean not to steal or not to kill or not to abuse intoxicants what does it mean to vow these kinds of things and this is where I think personal our own personal background and our own personal interpretation comes in that the various teachers will have their own interpretations that they will generally give if you want them to but in my experience most Buddhist teachers allow a broad range of potential interpretations it's basically up to you to try to find some kind of inspiration in the end the various chance that you're giving and if you find them inspirational then you'll find it inspirational and however you happen to do now as I say these are chance that you will generally do in a group they're done every time that they get together or at least very very often so there's nothing specific about you perhaps being a new member you're going to just join in if they do these kinds of chants they don't always not every kind of Center does these kinds of chants in for instance insider Vipassana centers they do much less of this kind of thing than they do in other kinds of centers but there may be other things involved as well there may be other ceremonies that a particular kind of school will would like you to go through if you want to become fully fledged even a lay member and that's something that you would have to research for yourself if there's a particular school they are interested in you might want to research them online or go to the local center and ask about these kinds of things because they'll of course they'll be very happy to tell you what's involved if anything is involved at all and in general for instance in popular sort of Zen centers and so on there there really isn't anything else involved for a lay practitioner most of the time now goes without saying that much more is going to be involved if what you want to do is to be a monastic if you want to ordained as a monastic there is way too much for me to go into here especially because each school has their own idea of what is involved with that I'll put some links down below in the show notes for a couple or three different schools and some beginning anyway a background about what what is involved in those now basically they involve a number of different rituals and taking one of robes but wearing robes perhaps changing your name perhaps shaving your head and undertaking all kinds of additional monastic vows this is not the kind of thing that I think most of us are going to be interested in but it's good to know at least that it exists even if it's simply to know what other people have gone through who are in those robes and with those shaved heads around you but the heart of the matter at least for me is the resonance that we have or don't have with the Dharma that is with the essential teachings of Buddhism that if we have that kind of resonance of the heart with these kinds of teachings that's what really matters for example the teaching that all things change that we ourselves are constructs that are continually in a process of flux that who we were yesterday is different from who we are today and who we will be tomorrow that there is no perfect refuge within daily life that that all parts of the world that surround us are to one degree or another imperfect that they're prone to change their promos decay that good events now will cease to be good in the future and be replaced by other events and so on these kinds of essential teachings in Buddhism are really the heart of the matter if it comes to becoming a Buddhist in some sense the basic causal idea here is that we have cravings we crave for security we crave for permanence we crave for positive kinds of experiences in life and these cravings can never ordinarily be satisfied no matter what we get we're going to crave more and so what we find will become defined by doing Buddhist practices is that there are other practices we can do to try to minimize these cravings over long periods of time that that when we do these kinds of practices our ordinary cravings tend to diminish over time that we become more open to the change of life we become more economists with the vicissitudes of change and indeed one of the primary things that we crave is identity is identification we crave our own identity we crave our own identification with other things so we think about a team a sports team that we identify with that we crave they're winning a certain games or popular games we crave our country we think of ourselves perhaps as Patriots as somebody who is on the side of right in our country and against the side of wrong either within or outside of our country we crave identification with our families that we're the good family as opposed to other people or at least we are our own family which has its own benefits these kinds of cravings are natural in life they're part of what keeps us attached to parts of the world and what eventually can produce sadness and disappointment when things don't go as well as we might want and wanting to become a Buddhist is another form of craving another form of identification subtle identification so I would submit that that's something also that you should investigate that you should look into in your own lives try to think about what is it about being a Buddhist using that title that name that attracts you is there a way to disentangle yourself from these kinds of names from the practices that may make you feel like you're identified as a particular kind of person as a secular practitioner I'm more interested in the the motion of your heart towards the ideals the Dharma rather than towards particular labels because to me it is the heart of the Dharma that makes the that really makes the thing important it makes the most importance in being a Buddhist is understanding the importance of the Dharma and the ways in which it can make our lives better so to me it's the practice that's most important more than anything else and certainly more than labels but I think it's also important to know in case you're interested in this about the various schools of Buddhism to which we might identify or at least where we might go for for help or to try to find more about the Dharma because there are various different approaches around us in the world today and I did an earlier video about the three schools of Buddhism which I'll put a link to up here on the screen I'd recommend taking a look at that I hope it's useful to you thanks so much to all my patrons over on patreon and many of them are named down below and I hope we'll catch you on the next video meanwhile be well

Channel: Doug's Dharma

Views: 85,819

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Keywords: buddhism, buddhist, buddha, secular buddhism, doug's secular dharma, secular dharma, philosophy, secularism, secularbuddhism, onlinedharma.org, early buddhism, online dharma institute

Id: tK_sTcv0dg0

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020