Four hundred million people call themselves Buddhists today. Yet most Westerners know little about this powerful, Eastern-spawned faith. How did it begin? What do its adherents believe? Why are so many Westerners drawn to it? Essential Buddhism responds to these questions and many more, offering an accessible, global perspective on the religion's past, present, and future. It identifies how the principal concepts and practices originated and evolved through diverse cultural adaptations into three basic formats: * Theraveda (including Vipassana, brought from Vietnam in the 1960s and including such practitioners as Jack Kornfield and Jon Kapat-Zinn) * Mahayana (including Zen Buddhism, originally brought to America by Japanese teachers after World War II and popularized by Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton) * Vajrayana (including Tibetan Buddhism, from the teachers who fled the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s as well as the Dalai Lama, and embraced by Allen Ginsberg, Richard Gere, and countless others) Essential Buddhism is the single best resource for the novice and the expert alike, exploring the depths of Buddhism's popularity and illuminating its tenets and sensible approach to living. Written in the lucid prose of a longtime professional storyteller, and full of Buddhist tales, scriptural quotes, ancient stories, and contemporary insights, Essential Buddhism is the first complete guide to the faith and the phenomenon. Jack Hosho Maguire took his Buddhist vows in 1996 at the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Mountain Monastery, one of America's leading Buddhist institutions. He has been a professional storyteller, specializing in Buddhist tales, for the past fifteen years. He has written many books, including The Power of Personal Storytelling, and he is a frequent contributor to the Buddhist journal Mountain Record, among others. Chapter One: The Great Awakening: The Buddha and His Legacy You are your only master. Who else? Subdue yourself, And discover your master. ?the Buddha One evening, soon after the Buddha's enlightenment, a man named Dona was walking down a rural road in northern India when he saw the Buddha walking toward him. Dona knew nothing about the Buddha but was nevertheless struck by the radiance surrounding this individual. I've never seen a mortal being look so joyful and serene, he thought, so when the Buddha came close enough to converse, Dona couldn't resist asking, "Are you, by chance, a spirit?" "No," said the Buddha. "Then are you an angel?" asked Dona. "No," said the Buddha. "Are you, perhaps, a god?" asked Dona. "No," said the Buddha. "Well, what are you?" asked Dona. The Buddha replied, "I am awake." A fundamental part of Buddhism's appeal to billions of people over the past two and half millennia is the fact that its central figure, commonly referred to by the title "Buddha," was not a god, or a special kind of spiritual being, or even a prophet or an emissary of one. On the contrary, he was a human being like the rest of us who quite simply woke up to full aliveness. The Sanskrit word buddha means "the awakened one" and derives etymologically from the same Indo-European root that gives us the English word bud. In a sense, the Buddha was a sentient being who managed to bud and then bloom into total consciousness of his nature, or, to use a more traditional expression, into enlightenment. The amazing truth of the matter is that we are all potential buddhas, perfect and complete right at this moment, but very few of us realize it. The historical Buddha's awakening may have been a simple accomplishment, but it wasn't an easy one. It took him many years -- and, according to strict Buddhist belief, countless lifetimes -- of single-minded endeavor before he finally achieved it. Nevertheless, once he did, he claimed that any individual could do the same thing: that is, realize his or her own "buddha nature," as it came to be called in the Mahayana tradition. He devoted the rest of his life to teaching the way. Buddhism is therefore a religion centered around a teacher instead of a divine being. As such, it can be said to feature lessons rather than creeds, precepts rather than commandments, and reverence rather than worship. These distinctions are examined and clarified later in the book. First, let's take a closer look at the historical Buddha's existence, for it continues to explain many features of the Buddhist religion and to serve as an inspiring prototype for the Buddhist way of life. Throughout the twenty-four centuries since the Buddha's death, the basic design of his biography has been embroidered over and over again to suit different purposes. As a result, we now have many versions to consider, and woven into any one of them are likely to be various ideological biases, liturgical details, cultural references, mythical touches, and psychological shadings -- all embellished with a certain amount of plain old yarn-spinni