What is Buddhism (to me)
To me Buddhism is a system of guided introspection, closest to either psychology or self-help, but of course different people take it different ways.
The consensus here in Thailand is that it's a formal religion, so all about rituals. For New Agers it's mystical explanation of metaphysics, how external reality is. In philosophy classes they bend and stretch it to get logic and arguments and their own metaphysics out of it (realism versus idealism or nominalism, for example), but they have to start with some limited forms of Buddhism to get there. Only late forms mixed with other sets of ideas comes close enough, like Tibetan Buddhism (12th century and on), or maybe later Indian thinking. I've nothing against New Age mindsets, and I sort of do related to analytic philosophy, but to each their own.
The Buddha's messages can't really be summarized because he said lots of different things for lots of different audiences, even aside from later ideas almost certainly mixing in. The tradition was oral for hundreds of years, based on chants of teachings. They say that preserved the original versions as well as writing but of course you can't know. Even writing doesn't work as well as one might think; the New Testatment (Bible) changed a lot in just 70 years or so.
One core teaching is that there is no real and permanent self, likely pointed at old versions of philosophy, but also a practical teaching. To me it's not a description of reality but a tool to examine what self really is, supported by other related things he said and other introspection practices (meditation, etc.). I think the moral teachings were also not designed as rules but instead meant as a practical guide for how to relate to others, going along with the other teachings. In some reported content the Buddha rejected a lot of philosophical / metaphysical / religious speculation as irrelevant, to me clearly identifying his teachings as practical in nature, and personal, related to individual experience only, not abstract theory.
Of course the Buddha was also responding to the ideas of his time, which we've sort of lost track of since 2500 years ago is a long time. Hinduism is still around but it's hard to say how the forms or conventional acceptance is different, and it's not really a narrow set of ideas today. A lot of what he said makes sense in relation to the class-restriction ideas of his day, and a lot of the monk's rules are about that. It's hard to separate those two sets of ideas; what he taught for people in general, and what he said for monks to do, or even if there was a significant difference. His teachings come to us filtered through the old monastic tradition, just as the early Catholic church essentially filtered and warped what Jesus taught (my take at least, but then I did study Christianity and Islam as well, so a bit informed).
Next one might ask what the Buddha said one should do to "discover self," (not the best way to put that) or what rules to follow. that really takes some looking into. I'll say more about all that but it gets to be a long story.
My path in Buddhism (they love the word path)
To go back to context, I got interested in philosophy and religion and a few other subjects when my first career in engineering ended due to changes in the defense industry (where I'd been working; where the demand for industrial engineers was then).
I studied on my own for about 10 years and eventually went back to school, getting a bachelors and masters in philosophy, with a focus on Buddhism. The first degree also covered religion but the second was straight analytical philosophy, which is quite awful. To them personal experience had nothing to do with philosophy, and if you were working with that then you were really discussing "wisdom," and not philosophy. So by definition it was pointless, just about logic puzzles and formal arguments.
As I meant to say in that first summary to me Buddhism is really a methodology, a way to help someone review their own experience, so if you learn about it without doing it then it's also nothing. In the end you really can define or describe what the perspective change itself actually is because it's just a perspective change. It works better to do so in negative terms, like saying you would attach less to preconceptions like self image, but that's still not saying what it positively is.
In the end the result is what's left when you take away those forms of error; more pure and direct experience. It's nothing to talk about, just something to do. Rejecting self sounds a lot more negative than it actually is because that's taking a method to be a description, which it isn't. To say there is no permanent enduring self you've not really said anything. It's not a rejection of a soul; that's something else entirely. It's about how someone would model their reality, or even more specific how they would examine the current assumptions that amount to a model.
For most this must ring a bell. The question must be if it adds anything, or is just repetition, or if it seems off a bit. The Japanese tea ceremony is supposed to be about this, sort of, but as I've been exposed to that it's quite different. Emptying self to perform an activity can be informative and instructive but as I see it not so useful on it's own. Taken with other ideas, maybe. But then again as I mentioned to another friend not so long ago immediate experience does tend to regularly get overlooked, so maybe something so basic could really be helpful. Buddhism teaches there is nothing for us but immediate experience and the rest is as much illusion and abstract ideas as anything, even if quite useful when applied properly.
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