The objective of Buddhism is to put an end to suffering. The means to this end is through training in three dimensions of life.

One is our ability to act in a wholesome and ethical way towards ourselves and others. In Buddhist terms this is training in Sila. We can accept the idea that it takes training, first to get the knowledge of what to do and what to avoid, and then to develop the strength and presence of mind to actually live up to our moral ideals.

The second is to develop a calm, clear mind.   It is easy for many of us to see the benefit of having a calm, clear mind. We want an antidote to our hyper-stimulated cultural environment and to our turbulent inner environment, in which our mind, reeling from engagement with media and hurry, churns with thoughts and feelings and desires and gives us too little peace.  Training the mind to settle down and develop the ability to focus on one thing clearly and with stability for an extended period of time, is the training in Samadhi, or meditation.

The third is the training in wisdom, or Prajna. It is intelligence, the opposite of ignorance, or you might say it is the insight that dispels ignorance.  A good thing, since ignorance is the cause of suffering, and an end to ignorance is the end of suffering.  

Training in wisdom means understanding the way things actually exist. And that is where you lose a lot of people, because we all think we understand the way things actually exist. ‘It’s not the way things exist,’ we think, ‘that is the problem.  It is the fact that nice things that I cannot have exist, and crappy things I have to put up with exist, too. I know how they exist.’

But it is the problem. It is the fundamental problem of our lives. We do not notice the degree to which our minds fabricate our reality and cause us to suffer — because we act on the basis of beliefs about reality that do not correspond to the way things actually exist. And this is what the training of Prajna addresses.

Here is an example:  People say China invaded Tibet. That the Chinese killed many Tibetans and suppressed Tibetan culture. Therefore the Chinese are bad or misguided. People say that Mao’s agricultural policies led to the mass starvation of 50 million Chinese. These policies were implemented by Chinese people. And they were also resisted by Chinese people. And they harmed Chinese people. And of course the hundreds of millions of Chinese alive and prospering now may feel benefitted, in the long run, by these policies. The fact that you can redefine Chinese to be good and evil, harmed and helped, and so on infinitely, tells you that when you talk about the Chinese, you are referring to something that is made up. It is a label placed on a concept that has nothing to correspond to it in reality. We are projecting a convenient fiction onto an imaginary object and changing the definition and the object as our mind shifts. We do this not just with the idea of the Chinese people but with every object our mind touches. This is not to say that objects do not exist. They do. It is not to say that objects do not have qualities, or that all existence is subject to our fantasies or whims. No way. And Buddhism does not say so. Buddhism teaches us that to see things as they are, not as we project and define them, we need to be kind and decent toward ourselves and others, so that our minds can settle down sufficiently to allow us to see the process by which we filter and process our experience and impose our beliefs, assumptions and mental habits upon our perceptions, unintentionally.

Only in this way can we see reality as it actually exists, only then can we come face to face with our own mind and with the infinite body and mind of the Buddha: our own nature.

For now, when you hear people talking about America, Democrats, Republicans, rich people, trailer parks, urban youth, cars or money, or infinite other things, you will know there is more to the story.