If you people want to have the slightest idea about what the

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If you people want to have the slightest idea about what the hell is what the XVIII-XIX century europeans, and us after them, called Buddhism, forget about contemporary 100-page introductions or people who talk about it in a vacuum as if it were something that came out of nowhere and is applicable as such, with all its little lists and prescriptions, anywhere anytime.

Buddhism is the product of a wide social phenomenon called Sramana in the Indian context. It is the later development of only one of many movements or ways that came out of a reaction against the Vedic tradition when there were important social changes happening, the so called period of 'second urbanization'. When that tradition started to be incapable of facing the new developments, there was a series of people who, educated within that tradition and facing the new world, saw the contradictions and decided or were forced to leave society to try new ways. Out of this came an innumerable amount of individual or small-scale organized ways of life that, instead of trying to change or criticize that tradition, simply went their own way. Out of this pool, bigger organizations started to appear, among which early Buddhism, that are known retrospectively as heterodox views -Nastika-, because of their not taking the Vedas as an explicit reference, even if of course born in the meddle of Vedic culture, as well as next to the other cultures present in the territory before and simultaneously along with it.

So, it started as a small sect, along with others such as the other well known Jainism. But there were also other ones that didnt become popular sects but merely stayed as philosophical schools, and that are in no way less interesting than buddhism -they actually influenced it-, such as the carvakas, ajivikas and ajnanas, just to mention the ones recorded in the philosophical literature.

But his is nothing Indian or merely 'spiritual', it is something that happens in every society when times are changing: it fails to educate people effectively, so some of them go back to direct experience and then give a new picture adapted to the new times. It happened in Greece in the transition between the classic and the Hellenic world, think of pyrrho or diogenes; it happened in China before the Qin empire was established, think of the so called 'hundred schools of thought' or the eremitic tradition, just to name big examples. Other minor scale ones could be found in anthropological texts.

If you ignore this and take it as it is presented to us today you will miss its true value, which is not some god-send people showing us 'the way things really are', but simply an example that any human being is capable of refreshing its own ways when these are no longer effective and lead him into insoluble impasses. But such a thing is not simply done looking for formulas somewhere else but rather appealing to ones own innate capacity, ones own Life, in order to build something new from it.