I recently found a short book called “The Buddha’s Teachings” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. This small 40-page introduction explains Buddhist teachings along with some history about who the Buddha was, what the core Buddhist texts are, and what early practitioners were like. This essay is mostly a summary of what I understood from this book.

Lost in Translation

Buddhism has always been an interesting topic for me. After all, what can be a more profound question than asking: Why does life always feel somewhat unsatisfactory?

But every attempt at understanding Buddhism in the past had always felt difficult for two main reasons:

1. Too Many Metaphors and Analogies

Buddhism is full of metaphors and analogies that I often do not know how to interpret. For example, in the context of the Buddhist path to enlightenment, the Buddha says:

“If the strings of a lute are too tight, they will break. If they are too loose, you cannot play it. They have to be just right to make good music.”

This points toward the idea of the “Middle Way” of avoiding extremes. But at first, I found this confusing because Buddhism seemed more focused on meditation, renunciation, and non-violence than on moderation in the everyday sense.

2. Too Much Unfamiliar Jargon

Buddhism is also full of jargon that is hard to understand. Translations of the Pali Canon often use phrases like “Mental Fabrications” or “Volitional Actions,” words we do not normally use to describe our everyday lives.

Even the central Buddhist idea about the unsatisfactory nature of life is called “Dukkha”, often translated simply as “suffering.” Because of this translation, many Buddhist texts begin with the phrase: “Life is suffering,” which can feel overly pessimistic.

This book avoids both of these pitfalls and is an easy read for a modern audience. Now, let us dive into the main teachings of the Buddha as I understood them from this book.

The Problem of Unsatisfactoriness

We can see a feeling of unsatisfactoriness constantly in our daily lives.

Whether it is our favorite dish, trips to faraway destinations, clearing exams, getting a pay raise, or buying something we really wanted, all of it feels like it will make us happy. But when it finally comes, we feel happy only for a while. Soon, it no longer feels life-changing, and we move on to the next big goal.

In a smaller way, this even happens when we scroll reels on Instagram. The next reel always feels interesting, and we keep scrolling endlessly until eventually we get bored and stop.

Buddhism tries to answer why life feels this way. According to Buddhism, the answer is roughly three-fold:

Everything is constantly changing.
We believe our happiness comes from certain things and become attached to them. But when those things change or disappear, we suffer because we cannot accept the change.
Our attachments are based on stories we tell ourselves about who we are. But in reality, the things that make up our identity are fluid and constantly changing.

Attachment and Identity

We often believe our identities are based on our physical appearance or the mental processes happening inside us. To better understand these mental processes, Buddhism breaks them further into different parts:

Our likes and dislikes.
The labels and categories we give ourselves, such as belonging to a country, tribe, political party, or identifying ourselves through tastes in food, music, or hobbies.
Our everyday habits and routines, which guide our actions based on the kind of person we believe ourselves to be.

Besides these, Buddhism also includes “consciousness”, the observer of all these processes, as part of our identity. But instead of treating it as a permanent soul, Buddhism says consciousness arises only when there is something to be observed. Hence “consciousness” comes and goes just like the other processes it observes.

All these different parts are things we usually identify ourselves with, but they are constantly changing. Claiming any one of them as our fixed identity creates false expectations about reality. According to Buddhism, this is one of the core reasons why we become attached to impermanent things.

How Attachment Creates Dissatisfaction

Our likes and dislikes gradually strengthen into attachments. Buddhism describes different forms of attachment, such as:

Attachment to sensual pleasure
Attachment that motivates us to become a new version of ourselves
Attachment that motivates us to reject or abandon a current identity

These attachments constantly push us toward becoming someone new. A new identity may feel exciting when we first achieve it. But over time, it too becomes ordinary, and we start searching for yet another identity to pursue.

What Buddhism Suggests Instead

This raises an important question: how do we stop constantly chasing new identities?

Buddhism suggests that even abandoning an identity can itself become another form of attachment. According to Buddhism, the solution is to gradually develop a sense of dispassion, a reduced obsession with our likes, dislikes, and self-images.

This does not mean forcing ourselves to hate pleasure or ambition. Rather, it means recognizing that our past pursuits have usually brought only temporary satisfaction. Buddhism encourages us to remember that many of our likes, dislikes, and identities are shaped by limited experiences gathered over time. They are not absolute truths about who we are.

But does this mean we should stop acting altogether or give up all ambition? Not necessarily. We can still be ambitious about learning something, building something, or helping others. But the difference is that these actions no longer need to come from a desperate need to become “the successful person,” “the intelligent person,” or “the important person.” Similarly, we can still work to make the world better for others, but without being driven primarily by greed, hatred, or delusions about reality.

The Practical Side of Buddhism

All of this can sound very theoretical. In practice, Buddhism says that developing this state of dispassion begins with understanding reality as clearly as possible, without constantly filtering it through what we want reality to be.

But knowledge alone is not enough. Buddhism also emphasizes living virtuously by avoiding actions that harm others, such as stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, or intoxication. These virtues are not presented merely as rules for gaining rewards in another world. Instead, they are practical tools for understanding ourselves better.

For example:

Greed becomes less meaningful once we recognize how temporary sensory pleasures are.
Honesty helps us stay closer to reality. Lying often exists to defend identities and stories we keep telling ourselves about who we are.

Finally, Buddhism places enormous importance on awareness and meditation. It encourages people to observe how thoughts arise and disappear inside the mind, and how constantly reacting to those thoughts traps us in a cycle of endlessly seeking one thing after another. Meditation, in this sense, is not about suppressing thoughts. It is about learning to observe thoughts without immediately judging them, feeding them, or acting on them.

Final Thoughts

Buddhism, at least as I currently understand it, feels less about rejecting life and more about understanding why we keep chasing things that never fully satisfy us.

The more interesting part is that Buddhism does not merely describe this dissatisfaction philosophically. It also tries to provide a practical way to observe it directly within our own everyday lives and possibly train ourselves to break out of it.