MYTH: You can born to being a Buddhist

FACT: Buddhism is not a birthright, but a practice

While you can born in to religion, you can’t born in to practice. For example, you can’t born in to being a chess player. You have to adopt certain ideas and methods and you have to develop certain skills. It is like that with Buddhism. First and foremost you have to meditate, because that was the practice Buddha was focused on. Also it is said that anyone can be a Buddhist, if they see the world in a particular way introduced by Buddha and later formalized the early Indian Masters. There are four points, three of which I will briefly cover below.

All compound things are impermanent All emotions are painful All phenomena is without inherent existence

Can you name something that is compound, but is also permanent? Of course you can’t, because the very fact that it manifest shows how it is a result of other things coming together. Because it is coming together as a result of other things, it will change in relation to those other things.

Are all emotions really painful? Think about it. If you do something painful, the more you will do it, the more you suffer. It does not become happiness at any point. How about things that you find pleasurable, for example sex? It is the same, when you keep doing it more and more, it will become suffering. This you will find is true to everything that you thought is happiness, which actually is just a contrast to the more gross forms of suffering.

Because phenomena, manifest things, are actually made out of causes and conditions, consequently it follows that those causes and conditions also need to be a result of other causes and conditions…ad infinitum.