Buddhism - Plain and Simple

Have you ever felt like something essential is missing—even when life seems full? In Buddhism Plain and Simple, Zen teacher Steve Hagen challenges our assumption that lasting peace lies in possessions, success, or belief systems. He argues that our unease comes not from what we lack, but from the way we see—or fail to see—the world as it really is.

Hagen contends that human suffering—what the Buddha called duhkha—arises because we grasp at illusions of permanence and self. We think happiness depends on control and meaning, yet reality itself is flux. The Buddha’s teaching, Hagen explains, isn’t about faith or ritual but about awareness: seeing existence directly, before thoughts and labels distort it. Enlightenment isn’t supernatural; it’s simply being awake to the truth of thusness—the seamless wholeness of reality in the present moment.

Modern Confusion and the Need for Clarity

Hagen opens with humanity’s existential crisis: in an age of science and skepticism, many feel the world is vast, impersonal, and meaningless. Deprived of comforting myths, we seek refuge in pleasure, success, or spirituality—but these paths only deepen our discontent. We live, as ancient philosopher Yang Chu described, “chained by ignorance,” passing by the joys of life without tasting freedom.

This confusion isn’t new. Twenty-five hundred years ago, a man named Gautama faced it and awakened. His insight—that suffering ends through direct awareness—spread as Buddhism. Yet as Hagen notes, centuries of cultural accretions have obscured the Buddha’s clear simplicity beneath robes, rituals, and metaphysics. Hagen’s goal is to strip Buddhism back to its heart: a practical, moment-to-moment seeing of reality.

Seeing Rather Than Believing

Instead of belief, the Buddha proposed observation. Seeing is believing—but belief is not seeing. Hagen illustrates this with a striking exercise: imagine a blurred picture that at first looks meaningless. Only when you truly see the hidden image does confusion vanish. Awakening, he says, is like recognizing what was always there. In that moment, doubt disappears. This experiential understanding, not abstract thought, is what Buddhism means by wisdom.

Truth is immediate and self-evident.

You don’t need scriptures, spirits, or special robes to find it—you only need to pay attention to what’s actually happening in this moment.

The Journey Into Now

Hagen retells the Buddha’s own awakening story as a journey that leads nowhere but here. Gautama, born into privilege, saw that all worldly attainments end in sorrow. Neither pleasure nor asceticism could free him. Sitting under a tree, he observed his experience so deeply that illusion fell away. He became “awake”—not divine or mystical, simply clear-eyed. This moment of awakening revealed that reality has no beginning or end; it only comes to be—right now.

In our own lives, Hagen suggests, we too can awaken by letting go of interpretations and seeing directly. This requires courage, because clarity means meeting impermanence head-on. Everything changes: weather, emotions, relationships, bodies, even thoughts. Yet impermanence, he insists, isn’t a curse—it’s what makes life precious. The rose you love has beauty because it fades. Trying to make it eternal only creates plastic imitations that never truly live.

A Religion of Middles, Not Extremes

Unlike religions that promise salvation in a future world, Buddhism centers on the present. It is what the Buddha called the middle way—a path between denial and indulgence, belief and nihilism. The awakened don’t speculate about origins or afterlife. Such questions, Hagen writes, are distractions like asking about the bow and arrow that wounded you instead of removing the arrow itself. What matters is healing—the immediate realization that suffering ends when we stop resisting reality.

Through this book, Hagen challenges you to turn inward—not in isolation, but in awareness. You already have the authority, he says. The Buddha’s final words were, “Be a light unto yourself.” That light is attention. It dissolves ignorance and reveals the natural wholeness underlying all chaos. Freedom of mind isn’t acquired; it’s uncovered. And it’s available right now, in the simple act of seeing what is.

At the core of Hagen’s teaching lie the Buddha’s four truths of existence—a clear, practical map for understanding human experience. These truths aren’t abstract doctrines but observations anyone can verify directly. They reveal not only why we suffer but how to be free from confusion.

1. Life as Duhkha

The first truth, duhkha, refers to the wobbling wheel of human life—an axle out of kilter. We chase pleasure, avoid pain, and yet neither stays. Hagen describes three forms of duhkha: the pain of life itself (sickness, loss), the pain of change, and the subtle pain of simply existing, aware of mortality. Like riding a cart with a bent wheel, we’re jolted constantly. Buddhism begins by acknowledging this instability, not by denying it.

2. The Origin of Duhkha

Suffering arises from craving—our thirst to get, keep, or reject. Hagen calls this leaning of mind. We lean toward what we want and away from what we fear. This inclination keeps us restless. He compares it to a monk in a Zen story asking how to escape heat and cold. The master replies: “When cold, let cold kill you; when hot, let hot kill you.” The lesson is acceptance. When we stop fighting reality, suffering eases.

3. The Cessation of Duhkha

The third truth offers hope: since suffering arises, it can also cease. This cessation is nirvana, not a blissful void but seeing change as change. Hagen’s story of a friend dying of cancer captures this insight. Facing impermanence directly, the man finally understood “thus”—that there’s no separate place to go, only this moment unfolding. Knowing change doesn’t end but is life, one finds peace.

4. The Path of Freedom

The fourth truth points to practice—the eightfold path: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and meditation. Each aspect is an expression of seeing clearly. Together, they form a way of living that brings awareness into speech, work, and thought. Hagen terms it not a path to somewhere else but a way to be awake here.

Throughout the book Hagen contrasts seeing with thinking. We confuse ideas about life with life itself. Enlightenment comes when we shift from concept to perception—experiencing reality before interpretation.

Seeing Before Thought

He illustrates this with the picture puzzle: at first you see meaningless blobs, until suddenly the image—a cow—appears. Nothing new is added; you simply see what was always there. Similarly, truth is immediate. It’s hidden not because it’s distant but because we overlook it. When you finally see, belief becomes unnecessary.

Awareness Versus Idea

Belief systems, Hagen warns, act like filters. They turn living experience into doctrine. Religion, science, and even personal identities are ways of naming rather than seeing. True knowing doesn’t depend on memory or proof—it’s self-validating because it arises from direct perception. As the Buddha said, “knowledge is not other-dependent.”

The Practice of Attention

To cultivate seeing, you only need to attend. Hagen encourages simple mindfulness—feeling the breath, observing sensations, noticing how the mind leans. Reality, he insists, isn’t locked inside thought. It’s the texture of this moment, and you can touch it anytime you stop ignoring what’s already here.

Hagen’s recurring metaphor for freedom is the leaning mind. We exhaust ourselves leaning toward pleasure, success, and certainty, or away from pain and impermanence. Awakening happens when we notice this leaning and stop feeding it.

Recognizing the Lean

You don’t straighten a leaning mind by force—that’s more leaning. Hagen compares it to a leaf falling naturally from a tree. It doesn’t “try” to land; it accords with gravity and wind. Likewise, when you see your mind’s inclinations, balance returns by itself. Effort here means awareness, not control.

Dependent Arising and Wholeness

In chapters like “Interdependence,” Hagen explains the Buddhist concept of dependent arising—“when this arises, that becomes.” Nothing exists separately. Spring flowers bloom because days lengthen; autumn colors fall because light fades. When you see this seamless web of cause and effect, the illusion of separateness dissolves. Our suffering, then, isn’t imposed on us—we create it by ignoring this whole.

Freedom as Natural Mind

When the mind no longer leans, Hagen says, it aligns with the Whole Mind. Actions flow naturally rather than willfully. The awakened don’t reject activity—they act out of clarity, not craving. As Huang Po taught, “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think. The wise reject what they think, not what they see.” Seeing, in itself, is liberation.

Hagen unpacks the Buddha’s eightfold path as a complete framework for living consciously. It’s not a moral checklist but eight aspects of awareness unfolding simultaneously.

Right View and Intention

Right view means seeing the world as fluid, not frozen into “good” or “evil.” Right intention is simply the decision to awaken. In a Zen tale, a seeker asks how to find liberation. The master replies, “Who binds you?” When the seeker admits no one does, the master ends, “Then why seek liberation?” This joke captures Hagen’s point: the path starts and ends in this moment.

Right Speech, Action, and Livelihood

These aren’t commandments but mindfulness in communication and labor. Hagen shows that words shape worlds—gossip, hatred, or manipulation breed confusion. To speak truthfully and kindly is to align with wholeness. Likewise, right livelihood means earning your living in ways that don’t harm others or yourself. There’s no rulebook; only awareness of each moment’s effect.

Right Effort, Mindfulness, and Meditation

Right effort is naturalness—not straining to reach enlightenment but returning to presence. Hagen quotes Dogen’s Fukanzazengi: sit upright, breathe naturally, and let thoughts pass like clouds. Meditation isn’t escape or relaxation; it’s learning to see thoughts as transient. Right mindfulness ties it all together—being fully alive in each movement, like walking on the Earth as if newly returned from the moon.

Ultimately, the path is continuous seeing. There’s no “later” enlightenment—only endless waking up now.

One of Hagen’s most profound sections explores self—the illusion we call “I.” The Buddha rejected both extremes: eternalism (“there is a permanent soul”) and nihilism (“nothing exists”). Instead, he revealed that nothing persists independently; everything is flux.

The Myth of the Permanent Self

We imagine ourselves as corks floating in a stream. In reality, Hagen says, we are the stream: continually changing. He recalls a Buddhist verse—“Just as a man laughs when he sees that the serpent is only a rope.” The terror of death fades when we realize the thing that dies never truly existed as a fixed self. Waking up is that laugh of recognition.

Flux and Fear

Everything we love—music, books, bodies—exists only as motion. We suffer because we crave solidity. But once we see that continuity lies in change itself, fear evaporates. Hagen likens this understanding to seeing your reflection in moving water: unstable yet ever-present. Nirvana is not annihilation but clarity of constant becoming.

The Middle Way of Non-Opposition

Reality isn’t “existence” or “non-existence.” It’s beyond both. As the Buddha taught, those who perceive with right wisdom see arising and ceasing simply as the world’s ongoing flow. Ignorance is ignoring this flow for imagined boundaries. Seeing restores peace—the balance between extremes that Buddhism calls the middle way.

In Hagen’s view, awakening culminates in perceiving interdependence—the utter relativity of everything. No object, thought, or person stands alone. Seeing this firsthand frees us from fear and division.

Relative and Absolute Truth

Drawing on philosopher Nagarjuna, Hagen outlines two truths. Relative truth concerns everyday distinctions—feet, oranges, mountains. These are conceptual, useful yet empty. Absolute truth is direct perception: the recognition that all things arise together. When you see that spring flowers are not separate from longer days, you glimpse the Whole.

Ignorance and Conceptual Division

Ignorance, Hagen explains, isn’t blindness but ignoring what we see. We note the concave but forget the convex. Each separation—self and other, hot and cold—creates its opposite and thus suffering. When we drop oppositions, reality appears seamless. Pain and joy, heat and cold, arise and cease together in one flowing pattern.

Acting from the Whole

When will and leaning cease, action becomes effortless. Nature’s movements—the fall of a leaf, the flow of a stream—are “unwilled.” So too are a buddha’s actions. To live from the Whole is to trust that life itself sustains all. As Hagen concludes, “Forget yourself. See how your mind leans.” This is the practice of freedom.

In his closing chapter and the Buddha’s own final words, Hagen distills all teachings into a single command: Be a light unto yourself. Don’t look for refuge in teachers, texts, or systems. Awareness itself is the lamp.

Self-Reliance and Inner Authority

You are your own final authority. The Buddha, Hagen reminds us, urged his disciples not to follow him blindly but to test everything. Truth must be verified in your own seeing, not borrowed. To “be a light” means living by observation, not belief.

Awakening Now

You can’t practice awakening as a technique or achieve it as a future event. To seek it is to postpone it. Seeing happens now, whenever you notice your mind leaning and choose to look directly. Hagen’s tone is intimate and affirming: everything you need is already here, whole and complete.

Liberation lies in attention.

You don’t have to fix, believe, or achieve anything—only to see.

With that, Hagen returns the responsibility—and the joy—of awakening to you. Awareness itself is the path, the practice, and the destination.