The following are excepts from No-nonsense Buddhism for Beginners by Noah Rasheta
Buddha is a title that was given to a man named Siddhartha Gautama. It literally means awakened. He lived around 500 BCE in Northern India, now Nepal. His teachings centered on two main themes: the problem of human suffering and the methods that can bring about the cessation of suffering. The Buddha taught a method of living to be practiced, rather than a set of ideas his followers were asked to believe. His teachings, known collectively as the dharma, invite us to look inward and study our own minds to gain a clearer understanding of ourselves and the nature of reality.
The Buddha was a teacher, not a god. When you see Buddhist bowing to statues or images of the Buddha, they are not necessarily worshipping him but rather making a physical expression of their humble intent to follow the Buddha's teachings to overcome an ego-centered life. Over time, though, the various schools of Buddhism have come to view the Buddha in a different way; some seem to deify and worship him, while others simply hold him in the highest esteem. There is no doctrine about Buddha being anything other than a man and a teacher.
When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he realized that to fully understand it, a person had to experience certain aspects of it directly. No words or concepts can adequately express what enlightenment is. This means enlightenment can't be explained; it has to be experienced. So instead of teaching a set of beliefs, the Buddha taught a set of practices, a method to help people realize enlightenment for themselves.
The Buddha's teachings are meant to be put into practice, and the resulting experiences must then be verified by each individual practitioner. Instead of determining whether these teachings are true or not, we are encouraged to verify if they work or not. In other words, do these teachings truly lead to a reduction, and ultimately the cessation, of suffering?
The aim of Buddhism is to help us understand the nature of reality and suffering.This process starts with taking a critical look at how we see the world. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, says that "the secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself."
The Buddha taught that we are essentially prisioners of our own minds, bound by our belief, perceptions and ideas. We see an inaccurate version of reality - a version, not coincidentally, that causes us unnecessary suffering. We tend to go through life thinking that external circumstances are to blame for our suffering and our lack of contentment. The Buddha's teachings help us alter that perspective and learn that the unnecessary suffering we experience has more to do with how we see things than with what we see. It's an internal change, not an external change, that will bring about the joy and contentment we seek.
Perhaps the best answer is "all of the above." If you search any list of major wold religions, you'll certainly find Buddhism on the list, but Buddhism is different from most religions in that it's a non-theistic tradition; it doesn't espouse a belief in a supreme creator God as the source of existence. Buddhism isn't concerned with many of the big questions asked by other religions, like: Is there a God? Is the universe finite or infinite?
In the Buddhist parable of the poison arrow, a monk is so troubled that the Buddha hasn't addressed these types of existential questions that he threatens to abandon his monastic vows unless he can get satisfactory answers. The Buddha responded by comparing the monk to a man wounded with a poinsoned arrow who, absurdly, wouldn't accept treatment until he knows who shot him, what clan the archer was from, what the archer looked like, what materials the arrow was made of, and so on. "The man would die," the Buddha concluded, "and those things would still remain unknown to him."
This story nicely illustrates how Buddhism takes a pragmatic approach to tackling the challenge immediately at hand: that in life, difficulties arise and we experience suffering, much as we would if shot by a poison arrow. The Buddha taught that the wise thing to do is not to spend time and energy focusing on irrelevant details, but to remove the arrow. Rather than try to answer these existential questions, Buddhism urges us to look inward and ask ourselves, "Why do I feel the need to know these things?"
Because Buddhism is less concerned with big, unknowable, supernatural questions, we can comfortably say that Buddhism, in addition to being a religion, is a way of life or a philosophy: a set of practices that don't depend on any dogmatic beliefs, a way to live that maximizes our chances for peace and contentment in the present moment - which is, after all, the only moment that matters. The Buddha encouraged his followers to test his teachings for themselves in their own lives.