Discovering the Heart of Buddhism is designed to help you discover the truths of Buddhism through your own experience, not through adopting a set of blind beliefs.

It presents the underlying principles of Buddhism in familiar English words and enables you to connect to the heart of Buddhism without the confusion often caused by Eastern cultural trappings.

The traditional formulae for presenting Buddhism were evolved to help people in Buddhist cultures, where people were brought up to have a strong conviction in Buddhist ideas about the world. But in the West we do not share many of these ideas, and so we need to be introduced to Buddhism more carefully.

We have to begin with what we can know for sure-our direct experience-and from there we can allow a sense of the vaster and profounder vision that Buddhism offers to dawn within us.

Read more about how the training is tailored for Westerners below.

How much personal contact is there?

 Buddhism and Westerners

The themes of the course represent the underlying principles of Buddhism, which have been built and elaborated upon down the ages according to the tastes and requirements of different cultural settings. They are often implicit in traditional Buddhist teachings, endorsed by the whole culture of a Buddhist country, not needing explicit formulation when Eastern Buddhists are being taught.

If you are already familiar with how Buddhism is traditionally taught, you may feel that in this course we depart rather radically from a traditional approach. To think this would be to take too narrow a view of how the tradition works. The tradition has always adapted its teaching methods to the requirements of the students. This is traditional.

All of these underlying principles have always been present in Buddhism right from the Buddha’s first teachings: it is just that in this course they have been gathered together explicitly and presented in a way accessible to Westerners not brought up in a Buddhist culture.

Having grasped the underlying principles of Buddhism presented in this course, students should be able to approach and relate to more traditional teachings (such as the Four Noble Truths, not-self and karma) in the spirit in which they are intended, rather than distorted by a veil of cultural misunderstandings.

The traditional methods of presenting Buddhism in the East were developed against a particular cultural background, one that we in the West do not share.

In Buddhist countries, children pick up from those around them that the Buddha represents all things good, that he represents wisdom, compassion, peace, joy and gentleness, and that what he teaches is true for all time. They believe implicitly that there is such a thing as liberation, Awakening, release from suffering, countless past lives and future lives, yet all are like dreams and illusions. They have complete confidence that liberation is a matter of the heart and that this is intimately connected with the whole enlightenment process.

This is the conceptual framework that they already have when they start training intensively with Buddhist teachers. The problem is not that they need convincing of all these things – they just need to be reminded and encouraged.

Westerners need to be introduced to Buddhist thinking more carefully than by simply applying formulae that are suited to people brought up in Buddhist cultures. We have to arrive by careful stages at a dawning sense of the possibility of the vaster and profounder vision that Buddhism offers. We have to begin with what we know because we cannot begin anywhere else. We certainly cannot begin on the assumption that we believe what Eastern Buddhists believe, or that we ever will.

An open mind is what really matters. Indeed most Westerners are attracted to Buddhism by the fact that it does not demand blind faith and belief, but appeals to the evidence of our own direct experience – this is what the Buddha meant when he said his teachings were “Come and see”.

We have to start with our own language and culture and with our own experience of our hearts and minds. This is where Discovering the Heart of Buddhism begins and by beginning in this way we find ourselves already participating in the process of Awakening - not through blind belief, but through experience and a sense of inspiration.