Buddhism in a Nutshell

There was a specific moment when my life was divided into a before and an after.

It was early 2020, and Covid had just erupted. I had moved to the Netherlands just a month earlier: a new land, with pale colors, constantly buffeted by the north wind. Those gusts, suddenly, seemed frozen in the dark and confusing limbo of the pandemic. Shut in my house, miles away from my family and friends, I felt densely lost, like heavy clay.

I remember one night in particular, spent crying until my eyes went blank. At the first light of dawn, a strange, unscented smell shook me. I thought, “Am I dreaming? What is this ethnic shop perfume? ” It was incense.

Following that trail, I found Chetya, one of my roommates. He was sitting on the floor, a candle lit in front of him, his eyes closed. In the surreal silence of that Nordic morning, I asked him, almost point-blank, "What are you doing?" He wasn't the least bit bothered by my having interrupted his peace; he looked at me, gave me a calm smile, and simply motioned for me to sit there, next to him.

It all started like this. Completely confused, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Day after day, over coffee, Chetya began to tell me his philosophy and his way of looking at the world. When one evening I mentioned, almost casually, that I was trying to become a vegetarian, he stared at me and said it was "a sign." At first, I thought it was all bullshit, but then again, what did I have to lose by listening to him?

Over time, I stopped questioning the past or the future; I understood that the only real urgency was the present. In that moment, in Holland, the only truth was that I was suffering. And if healing the world from pain is an illusion, learning to dance with the shadow of suffering was the only possible way to breathe again.

It was then that I opened the door to Buddhist philosophy.

The Great Western Paradox

If you mention "Buddhism" in Europe today, people immediately think of a statue of a pot-bellied man, a New Age trend, or an Instagram hashtag related to "mindfulness." We live in a great paradox: it's talked about everywhere, but real information about it is almost nonexistent. We reduce it to a fascinating exoticism to be consumed in moments of stress.

Consider that even during my academic career, when I studied the History of Philosophy, Eastern thought was dismissed in a few introductory lines, almost relegated to what we might call the "prehistory of philosophy." As if the ability to love wisdom originated exclusively in Greece and everything else was merely myth or prehistory. Clearly, this is not the case.

In this article, I will humbly attempt to strip this philosophy of its clichés and explain it in simple terms, through my own lens. In a nutshell.

The Roots: The Hindu Substrate

To understand the Buddha's revolution, we must understand that his philosophy did not arise from nowhere in a cosmic void: it has deep Hindu roots. Siddhartha Gautama grew up immersed in the rich spiritual tradition of ancient India.

From that world he inherited a precise conceptual map, which he then radically reworked:

Samsara: The idea that existence is a turning wheel, a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

· Karma: The profound law of cause and effect, by which our every action and intention shapes our future reality.

· The search for liberation: The visceral desire to escape this wheel and find definitive peace.

But while Hinduism at the time risked getting lost in rigid dogmatic rituals and the caste system, Siddhartha brought about an unprecedented reform: he did away with the altars, simplified the map and put the experience and responsibility of the human being right at the centre.

The existential crisis and the 6 years of research

The story of Buddhism begins precisely like this: with a common existential crisis. A crisis similar to mine in Holland, but experienced about 2,500 years ago by a twenty-nine-year-old man.

Siddhartha was an Indian prince growing up in unbridled luxury. His father, desperate to shield him from the pain of the world, had forbidden him to leave the palace walls. For nearly thirty years, Siddhartha had seen nothing but youth, wealth, and beauty, convincing himself that that golden bubble was the only possible reality.

Then, driven by curiosity, he ran away. And outside those walls, he encountered real life for the first time, through four encounters that would change his destiny forever: a frail old man, a sick man consumed by grief, a corpse, and, finally, an ascetic with a serene face, at peace with himself.

At that precise moment, the veil fell. Siddhartha realized that privilege and wealth were merely an anesthetic: nothing could protect him from the vulnerability of existence. So, he decided to leave everything behind. For six long years, he desperately searched for an answer to human pain. He studied with the greatest masters and pushed his body to the most extreme asceticism, fasting until he was reduced to a living skeleton. But one day, on the brink of death, the insight came: tormenting the flesh did not heal the spirit. The truth lay not in the extremes, but in the middle.

What happened under that tree?

At 35, Siddhartha decided to sit at the foot of a fig tree in Bodh Gaya. There, through deep, still, and uninhibited meditation, he tore away the veil of his own illusions. He became the Buddha, which literally means "He Who Has Awakened."

What did he understand that night? He had no mystical or magical visions. He simply saw reality for what it is, summarizing it in three inevitable characteristics of existence (the three seals):

1. Anicca (Impermanence): Everything changes. Nothing remains still. Seasons pass, cells die, thoughts arise and vanish. The universe is a raging river, not a rock.

2. Anatta (Non-Self): Perhaps the hardest philosophical pill to swallow. There is no solid, fixed, and immutable "I." We are a continuous flow of sensations and experiences. Like a river, which always seems the same, but whose water changes every millisecond.

3. Dukkha (Suffering or Friction): Since everything changes ( Anicca ) and there is nothing solid to hold on to ( Anatta ), life inevitably generates friction, dissatisfaction.

The Buddha's starting point is a disarming pragmatism, the same one that touched some of us during that lockdown: life involves suffering. It's a fact. But his is not a pessimistic philosophy.

His approach is therapeutic: "Okay, since suffering exists and is part of the game, let's at least try to understand how it works in order to reduce it as much as possible in this life, here and now."

After realizing this, the Buddha set out on his journey to Sarnath, a few kilometers from Varanasi, India. There, in a quiet park filled with deer, he delivered his first historic philosophical discourse, explaining how to heal the mind.

Why (in my opinion) Buddhism is NOT a religion

In the West, we tend to lump everything that touches the spirit under the rubric of “religion,” but in my opinion, Buddhism operates on a completely different spectrum.

There is no God: The Buddha never pretended to be a god, nor did he ever speak of a creator of the universe. He was a human being who mapped the human mind.

· No dogma or blind faith: The Buddha always said: "Don't believe something just because I said so. Experiment with it, and if it works for you, write it down." This is an invitation to empiricism, not blind devotion.

It's an epistemology of the mind: More than a religion, it's a philosophical inquiry into how we understand the world and how our attachments distort reality. It's a toolbox for stopping self-deception.

The Diagnosis: The Four Noble Truths

To put his insights into practice, the Buddha formulated a true four-step diagnosis:

1. Suffering exists (Dukkha): The structural dissatisfaction of life.

2. Suffering has a cause (Tanha): We suffer because we resist Anicca (impermanence). We desperately want good things to last forever and bad things to never come. We cling to things, pretending they are static in a dynamic universe.

3. Suffering can cease: Deep peace ( Nirvana ) can be found by accepting the flow of reality as it is, ceasing to resist change.

4. There is a way to achieve this: The Eightfold Path , a practical eight-step guide to training your ethics, concentration, and daily wisdom.

In conclusion

Buddhism doesn't ask you to escape the world, wear orange, or believe in abstract dogmas. On the contrary, it challenges you to perform the most revolutionary act of all: to face reality, accept that everything flows—just like in Heraclitus's Panta Rhei —and understand that happiness doesn't depend on what you accumulate on the outside, but on how you train your mind on the inside, deeply embracing the idea of belonging to nothing and, precisely because of this, of being part of everything.

In a Western world that pushes us to run, consume, and numb ourselves to ignore pain, this ancient philosophy reminds us that the only way to overcome suffering is to stop running away. To begin to look at it, one breath at a time, in the lost silence of any dawn; while a wisp of smoke rises in the darkness and the mind gently surrenders to the "I don't know."

Pure art of being.

Has there ever been a moment in your life when suffering forced you to stop and look for answers that were different from usual?