Hello, you are listening to the secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 10. I am your host Noah Rosheta and today I'm talking about selflessness.

Hey guys, I'm excited to talk about the topic of selflessness today. Before jumping into the topic I wanted to take a minute and first and foremost to thank you for listening to this podcast.

This is kind of a fun milestone for me to be able to announce it. As of today we have over 25,000 downloads of the podcast and this isn't a relatively short amount of time because this podcast has only been around two months now.

This is really exciting for me. My intention when I started the podcast was really just to share the knowledge that I had been studying and learning as I was on this path studying Buddhism myself.

I'm in a Buddhist lay ministry program right now and in the summer of 2017 when I graduate I will be an actual lay minister teaching this regularly and in the process of studying it's been very important for me to learn how to teach the Dharma effectively.

In other words, I had to teach Buddhism and I of course have chosen to teach this through a secular lens and I know sometimes that can be a little disconcerting for orthodox or traditional Buddhists who see the word secular Buddhism and think what is that? What are you taking away from with the Buddha taught?

I kind of wanted to clarify that for a minute and be clear that I only see the teachings of the Buddha as there's just one set of teachings, there's what the Buddha taught.

And then to interpret that and to express the Dharma I think there are various ways to be able to do that.

I read a book a couple years ago called The Five Love Languages and the premise I'm sure many of you have heard of this is that we communicate love through different languages.

For some it's touch, for some it's affection, for some it's receiving gifts, there are different ways to communicate affection and love.

And these are kind of known as the Five Love Languages. Well I think that way of thinking extends to almost everything and when you take something as broad as what the Buddha taught I think it can be distilled down to a couple of key points.

The world is impermanent, that all things are interdependent, but the way that you learn and express what is collectively known as the Dharma or the Buddha taught I think there are like love languages that are more effective.

So you know we talk about the love languages in terms of how we communicate with each other in relationships. I think the love languages that would apply to teaching kindness and compassion or wisdom and compassion.

There are the language of Zen, there's the language of Tibetan Buddhism, there's the language of the Japanese schools of Buddhism, Jodo Shin etc.

And I think there's a valid argument that one of these languages would be secular Buddhism which is a language that's communicated clearly to people who are secular minded.

And in the West I think there is a tendency to understand things more through a secular lens.

But what's being communicated throughout any of these schools of thought is really the same thing. I think all of it boils down to trying to communicate in the best language possible what the Buddha taught which for me for my personal understanding is that all things are interdependent and all things are impermanent.

And then along with that there are several other key teachings on the four noble truths, the eightfold path, how all this relates to us in our day to day life I think can be communicated effectively in a language that makes sense to you.

And for some people and their personality that might be Zen and for some people and their personality it might be Jodo Shin and on and on.

And for me as I was learning all this it made a lot of sense to learn this through a secular understanding and that's why I teach secular Buddhism that's why I'm interested in explaining the Dharma in the secular vernacular because that's how it makes sense to me.

And I know that there are other secular minded people who are interested in learning about Buddhist philosophy and that's why I explain it through this very same lens.

So I wanted to communicate that mostly to be clear that I don't believe that there's such a thing as Zen Buddhism and that that's any different than secular Buddhism or that that's any different than Jodo Shin Buddhism.

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