Dawn Lee wrote: the most fundamental principle of organized religion, be it Catholic, Protestant, or Buddhism is faith or acceptance.

I respectfully demur. Buddhist doctrine (in both Greater and Lesser Vehicles) places faith secondary. Buddha likens the role of faith in enlightenment to the role of a boat crossing a wide river. Once you get to the other side, you need not take the boat with you on your further travels. In fact, if you are a strong enough swimmer, you don’t even need the boat. The point is that faith is a convenient path to enlightenment, but is not an end in itself.

I gather that Christian doctrine is significantly different on this point.

Rambling above leads to no facts, no real argument, but just some phrases for thought…belief in things unseen, God, father, Jesus the son, Holy Spirit, God incarnate in Man…a heaven, a heavenly creator, and from the hymnbooks, CVM, while his eye is on the sparrow, I know he is watching me…I believe. I understand that others don’t. No one is more or less right than the others. Good to question, good to examine pluses and minuses and in the end, no one will know until the final breath exhales from our lips and the life force concludes its residence in this earthly lifeform. We’re taught that matter is neither created nor destroyed…our bodies are full of potential and kinetic energy, the capacity to do work. Is that destroyed when life is over? at the end of this long, arduous, somewhat fantastic and occasionally boring journey we call life, I would like the answer to believe it as I have believed it as a child….”is that all there is?” and the answer is “no”…

Hope to make it to heaven and hope to see everyone there. Might be the only time we get an all-class reunion together again. Hugs and kisses from your entirely less educated, whacked out, faith-holding, Bible carrying gal, smack dab in the heart of Texas…DLW

and. my experience has taught me a very simple rule of thumb: If ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ may be) is based on fear, then I walk away from ‘it’, and turn my attention elsewhere.

Have you encountered Eckhart Tolle yet?

In any case, I’m still hoping for a little clarification: what is the essential content of Buddhism?

Well, there is a famous Zen saying, “The essence of Buddhism is no-essence. The content of Buddhism is no-content.” But you’ve indicated this is unsatisfactory from a didactic point of view. So, let us pretend that language is a suitable means for communicating ideas about the mind.

Most of my commentary that follows is from a Zen viewpoint. Your mileage may vary.

There is a human condition that involves continuous abstraction and evaluation. We look at a sandwich and experience some blur of thoughts ranging from “I’m hungry” to “I need to lose weight” to “oily” to “quick” to “smells good” to “rye bread” to “wry bread”… and so on. We invent doctrines of universals (”this sandwich is a particular instance of the universal class of sandwiches”) and contingency (”if I eat this sandwich, my actions will have caused the death of some poor bologna creature”). We are used to thinking that this flood of consciousness is “experience”, but – as Socrates might have agreed – the flood of consciousness is like shadows on the wall of a cave. The point is that this blur of thoughts crowds out real experience, which is to say, experience is not the flood of words and images. Experience is what we experience, not what we think we experience. Now, Socrates argued that the invented universals are the true “reality”, but the less said about that nonsense, the better. The Shakyamuni Buddha led us to understand that, with practice, we can quiet the “monkey mind” and truly experience that which is real. Try it sometime.

More to the point, and what distinguishes the Buddha from a run-of-the-mill philosopher, such practice leads to a deep understanding of mind and of “non-localism” – also known as the ultimate interconnectedness of all entities within the light cone. You see, Socrates and Confucius developed some epistemology and created ethical systems, which, yes, the Buddha did, but the Buddha went beyond this with prescriptions of practice that lead to actual enlightenment. Side note: the colorful Tibetan Buddhists have a very intricate epistemology of the psyche, not all of which mainstream Buddhists buy into, but it’s food for thought. (Or perhaps, non-thought). Think of it: two thousand years of isolation, left alone to contemplate the structure of the mind and consciousness. What might you figure out? It is said that the Tibetan language contains dozens, if not hundreds, of words for states of mind that cannot be translated into English, simply because English speakers have never thought deeply enough about the mind to find equivalent names.

So perhaps I could summarize the “essential content of Buddhism” as: Buddhism provides an understanding of life and mind that strips away layers and layers of false conceptualizing. Consequent to this are stereotypical Buddhist attitudes about humanity and its role in the universe.

As a non-Buddhist, I would say an (if not the) essential content of Buddhism is that the way to avoid suffering is to detach oneself from desire.

American Buddhists prefer to translate “vairagya” as “non-attachment” instead of “detachment”, although the latter is sometimes used by authors not so familiar with the nuances of English. The non-attachment is to things in the realm of the unreal, i.e. to the concepts we invent, not to desire itself, although desire is a manifestation of attachment (obviously). But you are echoing the third of the “Four Noble Truths” that Buddha is said to have grasped when he became enlightened. So you might say the Four Noble Truths are the essential content; they are certainly prominent. Note there are four truths, dealing with (I) the nature of suffering, (II) the origin of suffering, (III) the cessation of suffering, and (IV) the path to the cessation of suffering. It’s a package deal.

In re Christian esoterica, ma femme indicates that there is a considerable tradition of Christian esotericism, which is one reason she feels Buddhism and Christianity are reasonable close in template, if not in precise content.

In re the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, I have the impression from my experience with folks of both stripe that Catholicism relies heavily on the evolution and maintenance of doctrine by the community of believers, i.e. the Church, while Protestants believe that the Bible is a stand-alone document. Does that accord with your impression?

I’m not sure if there is a single line of scripture that Buddhists would hang in the football stadium, as it were. “Buddha smiled” comes to mind for some reason, perhaps because of the contrast with John 11:35. Another choice might be Chao-Chou’s response, “Mu” – about which considerable commentary has arisen.

I ran across a pretty good summary of Buddhist doctrine at buddhanet. See http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/snapshot01.htm. I’d agree substantially with 1-24, and my only reservations about 25-27 are that these primarily deal with exoteric doctrine.