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Michelle Morbioni
Professor William Colachicco
HUM 2410
October 17, 2016
Buddhism Plain and Simple Paper
Buddhism Plain and Simple is a book about The Buddha and his teachings. It also talks
about the steps that the Buddha took to get enlightenment. This book amazed me from the
beginning till the end. It showed me the ways to get one step closer to enlightenment. At first I
was very bias about Buddhism. I thought it was about meditation, and do good things, but just by
reading the introduction, my idea of Buddhism started to change. For instance, this quote “Many
of us act as though we could find fulfillment if only we possessed enough money, enough security,
enough respect, enough love, enough faith, enough education, enough power, enough peace,
enough knowledge, enough … something”. This quote showed me, that as human beings we want
our lives to be full of what we think is achievement. For example, for me is money, and knowledge.
But not everything in this life is about that. And this book showed me that Buddhism is about
accepting things.
This book talks about Gautama, a young prince who had everything and did not need to
worry about anything. He heard about one of his servant died and impacted in his life a lot. He
asked a lot of question to himself about how and why is life worth living if you are going to die
anyways. He troubled to answer his own question and decided to leave his easy life and find what
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he was looking for. After years of looking for the answer, he had an enlightenment about human
problems and its solution. After his enlightenment he became Buddha or the awaken one.
Everything is changing, including ideals. I would say that understanding this book at first
was hard, but as the book says you have to have an open mind in order to understand this book.
For me the most difficult part to understand about this book was about the eight aspects of the path
to enlightenment. It was difficult at first, because it explains the eight aspects, and as I was reading
it confused me more and more. Especially the speech. It says that we don’t have to say positive
nor negative things, but we can say something that will help them. Since I didn’t understand it at
first I wanted to try it for myself, for at least a day. At the end of the day, I understood more the
concept. The book says “A second factor of right speech is not speaking crudely or rudely. Such
