Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

Whatever we do is meaningful to the extent that it leads to awakening, meaningless to the extent that it leads away from it.

Awakening is the purpose that enfolds all purposes.

The irony of this strategy is that it turns out to be the cause of what it seeks to dispel.

ANGUISH EMERGES FROM craving for life to be other than it

A purpose may be no more than a set of images and words, but we can still be totally committed to it. Such resolve entails aspiration, appreciation, and conviction: I aspire to awaken, I appreciate its value, and I am convinced it is possible.

LIFE IS NEITHER meaningful nor meaningless. Meaning and its absence are given to life by language and imagination. We are linguistic beings who inhabit a reality in which it makes sense to make sense.

Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

The Buddha found the prevailing Indian view of rebirth sufficient as a basis for his ethical and liberating teaching.

(It’s a curious twist that Westerners find the idea of rebirth consoling.)