ABSTRACT
The Buddha did not reach his Enlightenment until he was 40, and, contrary to what some people seem to believe about him, he was not then swept off into the heavens and did not just disappear in a radiant cloud. He continued to live the life of a wandering mendicant, but his main aim was to convey the essence of what he now knew to any who wanted to come and learn from him. He gathered round him a group of people whom he ordained as the first monastic order, and it was they primarily who received his teaching, though anyone could come and listen; and it was they, or people whom they in turn had taught, who wrote down soon after his death a lot of what he had said. Nevertheless, there is also a long unbroken oral tradition said to stretch from the Buddha himself through many generations of the Theravada monastic order, branches of which we have in Britain today. This now covers a period of almost exactly 2,000 years. The Buddha had a memorable style, he told a lot of stories that show us what an astute psychologist he was, and he also had a knack of grouping things so that they hung together; one could rapidly learn the essentials of what he taught, and then take them away and start trying to absorb them. Thus 126he taught what have come to be known as the Three Signs of Being, the Four Noble Truths, the Five Hindrances, the Six Attributes of Personality, the Eightfold Noble Path, and the Twelve Steps of the Wheel of Life. If you memorize these, you've really got Buddhism at your finger-tips, all you have to do is live it! For our purposes, I shall outline the Three Signs of Being and the Four Noble Truths, and I shall touch on the hindrances, because through all these, keeping one's mind flexibly open, one can draw continuous close parallels with what psychoanalysis is about.
