The Buddha’s Teaching, Its Essential Meaning

In this book, Ramsay G. de Silva Wettimuny takes up the most important and fundamental Buddhist doctrinal concepts and shows that the ‘ease of understanding’ often only means ‘shallowness of understanding’. ‘There are always people for whom the Buddha’s teachings seem easy to understand. However, it only seems easy because they look at it objectively and conceptually and then pass it on. Like a man who picks up a basket of mangoes, opens the lid, looks at the mangoes, closes the lid again and passes the basket on. Looking at the teaching in the style of the scholars, he thinks: What is so difficult about understanding impermanence, not-self and suffering?’ On the basis of the discourses, the essentials of the Buddha’s teachings are presented in short chapters and common errors of understanding are pointed out, which the author has worked out in long discussions with the well-known Buddhist thinker Ñanavira Thera, among others. ‘... if my thinking is not of one piece, it is, to be precise, no thinking at all.’ Only a clear understanding of the origins of suffering and the cessation of suffering enables us to apply this knowledge in a meaningful and persistent practice of all the limbs of the Noble Eightfold Path.