Essence of Buddhism
Budh simply means knowledge, that what Budhism is all about. Life is full of suffering. Even a person who takes in drugs say a gram each one day gets fed up with it and wants it to increase it to two soon (unfortunately it may lead to his death), our brains are not constant and so is this universe hence Nothing is constant ( and everything is meaningless ). If ones brain is constant the drug taker would have always been high by just taking a gram of drug a day for ever.
So why do we need Budh or knowledge? The answer is quiet simple, to get us out of suffering. Thats all Buddhism is all about. There is nothing supernatural or there should be nothing supernatural bout it.
Contrary to popular myths, Buddha or Gutama Siddhartha was a man. Some thing happened to him, and all of a sudden he wanted to find out why we all suffer? Can suffering be avoided? S he embarked on a mission to gain enough knowledge about suffering. This is what he came up with
To avoid desire is a Himalayan task. Its a paradox too. We want to avoid desire because we destroy not to suffer. Over ages practitioners of Buddhism came up with many techniques like meditation, Verman arts to keep check of thoughts and body to avoid suffering as much as possible. Others corrupted Buddhism by adding many blind faiths to it.
One is called Enlightened if one is able to handle both occations of joy and sorry without truly exibting too much emotions that a normal human exhibits, at the same time maintaining internal joy. Which is ofcose extremely difficult and is impossibility to many. One may be capable of destroying this entire planet but isn’t a fraction capable of winning over himself and becoming enlightened.
Finally there are no rules to Buddhism. Buddha himself said that he has embarked on an experiment to avoid suffering from his life and it has worked for him. He adds that, just because the techniques he followed worked for him doesn’t mean that it will work for others too. One is encouraged to find ones own way to get enlightened and not stick with things that are impractical to you.
Once one feels he has eliminated suffering from his life to desirable limits, it better one embark on a journey that eliminates suffering from lifes around thyself. Here lifes mean not only that of human, but also life that can endure suffering.