Earlier this week, eminent golfer Tiger Woods attributed his recent marital mishaps to deviations from his Buddhist faith. In reply, the Dalai Lama confessed that he has no idea who Mr. Woods is.

Similarly, though, I expect that most people reading this don’t have a substantial idea of who the Dalai Lama himself is, except perhaps via disappointing descriptions like ‘that political monk from Tibet’. I believe, also, that most don’t have clear or even murky thoughts about the more important man that the Dalai Lama indirectly represents.

Siddartha Gautama, or Buddha, is seriously undervalued and misunderstood, especially in Europe, and very specially in our little town-cum-university. Here people tend to care and talk almost always about Christianity, Islam, and atheism, if anything.

Defending Buddha is not a very controversial task. It admittedly involves dispelling some ill-formed thoughts, like the misconception that he is some crazy philosopher concerned only with obscure metaphysical issues of karma and reincarnation, or the hazy intuition that he is an ascetic. Still, collapsing distorted visions of Buddha as advocating a semi-hippy, exclusively ‘lifestyle’ ideal is pretty straightforward. I can’t emphasize enoughthat Buddha wasn’t merely a permanently spaced out mystic, smitten with a neat sitting position, a suggestive stoner face, or false irrelevant ideals.

Rather, Buddha was the first major religious figure to develop a practical and accessible psychological practice that leads to mental stability: meditation. Some will immediately dismiss meditation as belonging to new-age acolytes or yoga devotees, or maybe even Sufi mystics; but in my experience meditation stands to the mind as exercise does to the body, as a perfectly natural and obvious form of training. Notably, some contemporary therapeutic and medical practitioners also recommend it.

If you aren’t convinced, you should probably try it out yourself. That’s another point borrowed from Buddha: he always emphasized that experience was the ultimate judge of truth, and that authority, revelation, or tradition could never rightly replace experiential knowledge and personal perception. A final excellent aspect of Buddha is his modesty. He always claims that he is only human. I’ve heard it said that Buddhists think that Buddha created the universe. Ironically enough, this is genuinely offensive. Buddha as ‘the Creator’ is the last description that most Buddhists would offer, simply because Buddha is concerned mainly with humanity as a psychological species, and less with the universe as a whole. I hope, overall, for a little more illumination with respect to this excellent and incomparable teacher. Bertrand Russell once thought that, along with Socrates, Buddha might well be the best of all men, ever. I agree, but wish more people understood both who, and what, Buddha was.