What is a Buddhist ?

Buddhism is not a belief system. There is no belief, no worship, no higher power, no salvation.

Buddhism is a system of self-training that helps you see how it is that YOU create your unhappiness, and in the seeing of it, you start to change how you operate and gradually stop making yourself unhappy.

You become a Buddhist by DOING Buddhism. And you learn HOW to do Buddhism by learning from one who has been trained and has gained skill at it (almost always, this will be an older Buddhist monk)

The problem with understanding Buddhism is that you cannot understand it through words. No amount of reading or listening will show you how you operate inside yourself Understanding Buddhism comes through YEARS of practicing it, from the experience of it. And it takes 3-8 years to even begin to understand, to grasp, what Buddha was talking about.

Experience is never grasped through words. For instance, how can you understand what an orgasm is like if you have never had one, and have only read about it?

The experience of Buddhism is NOT some metaphysical magical think ... but it changes you profoundly.

SHORT EXPLANATION:

The Buddhist “learns to watch changes occurring in all physical experiences, in feelings and in perceptions. He learns to study his own mental activities and the fluctuations in the character of consciousness itself. All of these changes are occurring perpetually and are present in every moment of our experiences. Meditation is a living activity, an inherently experiential activity. It cannot be taught as a purely scholastic subject.” (“Mindfulness in Plain English” by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahayhera, a Theravadan Buddhist teacher)

LONG EXPLANATION:

“Vipassana meditation teaches us how to scrutinize our own perceptual processes with great precision. We learn to watch the arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene detachment. We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with calm and clarity. We begin to see ourselves reacting without getting caught up in the reactions themselves. The obsessive nature of thought slowly dies. We can still get married. We can still step out of path of the truck. But we don’t need to go through hell over either one.

This escape from the obsessive nature of thought produces a whole new view of reality. It is a complete paradigm shift, a total change in the perceptual mechanism. It brings with it the feeling of peace and rightness, a new zest for living, and a sense of completeness to every activity. Because of these advantages, Buddhism views this way of looking at things as a correct view of life and Buddhist texts call it seeing things as they really are.

Vipassana meditation is a set of training procedures which open us gradually to this new view of reality as it truly is. Along with this new view of reality goes a new view of that most central aspect of reality: ‘me’. A close inspection reveals that we have done the same thing to ‘me’ that we have done to all other perceptions. We have taken a flowing vortex of thought, feeling and sensation and we have solidified that into a mental construct. Then we have stuck a label onto it, ‘me’. And forever after we treat it as if it were a static and enduring entity. We view it as a thing separate from all other things. We pinch ourselves off from the rest of that process of eternal change which is the universe. And then we grieve over how lonely we feel. We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other beings and we decide that ‘I’ have to get more for “me”; then we marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are. And on it goes. Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems directly from this false sense of ‘me’ as distinct from all else that is out there.

Explode the illusion of that one concept and your whole universe changes. Don’t expect to do this overnight though. You spent your whole life building up that concept, reinforcing it with every thought, word, and deed over all those years. It is not going to evaporate instantly. But it will pass if you give it enough time and enough attention. Vipassana meditation is a process by which it is dissolved. Little by little you chip away at it just by watching it.”

(“Mindfulness in Plain English” by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahayhera ... Theravadan Buddhism)

My qualifications to answer this question:

15 years of weekly in-person lessons in Tibetan Buddhism from one of the Dalai Lama's senior monks. Plus instruction from other Tibetan monks and nuns, and from a couple of Therevadan bhantes (monks). 15 years of DOING Buddhism daily and learning from the doing of it.

I was just reading about this. I'm not an expert, but I believe he was, like you said, born into a noble family. He wasn't let out of the house, as his parents tried to hide him from the real world. When he finally left, he thought it was terrible. He was raised a privileged Hindu, but, following this realization, he renounced his wealth and privilege and went on journeys to see what people were doing wrong. He realized that life is full of suffering and that you must reject all things that cause suffering to have a good life. Being consumed with emotion is bad, and so is wanting what you don't have. While you're busy wanting, you're missing out on appreciating what you do have. He rejected the Caste system.

And... there's more, but there's a nice intro!

Google "Buddhism", it's not hard and there are sites that have a lot of decent information on them.

Teaching of Buddha is first find true teacher (succesful one) then find god within u by getting his enlightened.