What makes a person a Buddhist?
What makes a person a Buddhist is how they regard the perceived world they live in, including their body: the apperceiving mechanism. If a person believes that the world they live in cannot be other than true reality where things and conditions never changewell, for starters, they are not Buddhists. Theyre just immature idiots! They have a long way to go before they even get close to become Buddhists.
In some Buddhist traditions what distinguishes a Buddhist from a person who is not a Buddhist are what is called The Four Dharma Seals.
The first seal states that all composed things (sarva-samskrita) are impermanent (anitya). The second seal states that everything that deteriorates is suffering (sarvssrava-dhhkha), for example, the Five Aggregates consisting of form, sensation, perception, habitual tendencies, and sensory consciousness. In fact, these aggregates, i.e., the psychophysical organism, are synonymous with suffering or duhkha. The third seal states that nirvana is peace or shnti. The fourth seal states that all things are empty (shunya) and not of the self or tmaka.
All this is easy to grasp if we think of composed things as being like the waves of the ocean, or more accurately, the waves of water. The waves are always changing. They are impermanent, in other words. Only the substance of the waves, namely, the water, is permanent and unchanging. Next, insofar as all things are changing they are deteriorating. They are not like they were when first we attached to them. Because of this degeneration or deterioration we come to suffer. Only nirvana offers us peace from samskrita or composed existence. It is like the water, in other words. Nirvana is, according to the Buddha:
Not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be apparent no escape from this here that is born, become, made, compounded (Udana).
Being in nirvana we see that this wave-like phenomenal wor! ld is em pty and not our self which rests in nirvana being also the Buddha-nature. In fact, our self has never been actually connected with phenomena or the Five Aggregates anymore than sand, itself, is connected with a heap of sand or dirt is bound to a pile of dirt.
