Harold Ramis and the Five-Minute Buddhist

It boils down to a single word: “Kindness.”

Recently, I’ve been on a kick of reading about the 1970s comedy revolution and the people (mostly men, unfortunately) who fought in it. It started as research for a post I’m working on about Caddyshack, but then I just started getting sucked in. (It’s so much less depressing than reading about the 2020s.)

One thing I’ve learned about the people I grew up idolizing: Harold Ramis— who died of complications from autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis in 2014 at the age of 69 — was a practitioner of Buddhism. It bled into his work. Groundhog Day, now that I think about it, is essentially a Buddhist parable. And the river of angry Psychomagnotheric Slime that flowed beneath New York City in Ghostbusters 2 came from him: “My idea was that negative human energy collects under big cities and has explosive potential on a psychic level. So people would have to be nice to each other,” he told GQ.

Although he could condense the main tenets of the philosophy into a single word — “Kindness” — he also had a longer distillation: just 336 words more. He printed it on a trifold, laminated it, and handed it out to anyone interested. He called it The 5-Minute Buddhist. “The idea was to present a simple Buddhist primer on something the size of a Chinese takeout menu,” he said of the document.

I did some digging online and found a replica. If you’ve got five minutes to spare, now you too can be a Buddhist!

The 5-Minute Buddhist

• Man is supreme and responsible for his own thoughts, ideas, beliefs and actions.
• All existence is conditioned, relative, interdependent, and based on cause and effect.
• The self, the soul, the ego are mental projections, false beliefs — Anatta (no-self, no-soul). They exist as conventional truth, but not as ultimate truth.

The Five Aggregates

“Being” is experienced as:

1. Matter
2. Sensation
3. Perception
4. Mental Formation
5. Consciousness

The Four Noble Truths

1. Life is characterized by impermanence and suffering, or Dukkha (insatiable thirst).
2. The Origin of Dukkha (suffering) is attachment or desire.
3. The Cessation of Dukkha is achieved, not by belief, but by the contemplation, understanding, and elimination of desire and attachment.
4. The Noble Eight-Fold Path is the way to achieve the cessation of Dukkha.

The Noble Eight-Fold Path

1. Right Understanding
2. Right Thought
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

Resulting in:

Ethical Conduct — speech, action, livelihood
Mental Discipline — effort, mindfulness, concentration
Wisdom — understanding and thought

To create:

The Seven Factors Of Enlightenment

1. Mindfulness
2. Investigation and research
3. Energy
4. Joy
5. Relaxation
6. Concentration
7. Equanimity

Which result in:

The Four Sublime States

1. Unlimited universal love and good will
2. Compassion for all suffering beings
3. Sympathetic joy for the success and well-being of others
4. Equanimity

The Five Hindrances

1. Sensual lust
2. Ill-will
3. Physical and mental languor and torpor
4. Restlessness and worry
5. Doubt and skepticism

The Five Precepts

The moral obligations of a lay Buddhist:

1. Not to destroy life
2. Not to steal
3. Not to commit adultery
4. Not to lie
5. Not to take intoxicating drink

• Don’t know.
• Only go straight for 10,000 years.
• Save all sentient beings from suffering.

“The Miracle is not to walk on water. The Miracle is to walk on the green Earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment, feeling truly alive.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Thought Magnet | Dennis DiClaudio | Substack