What's Buddhism? Is this anything I want?
Yes. Definitely. Why? For one thing it isn't a religion, and it has nothing to do with faith. Getting interested? What if I told you that it's more a thinking man's approach to everything from psychology (Freud considered the Buddha to be the greatest psychologist of all time), to critical analysis (as Gandhi said, "Buddha taught us to defy appearances and trust in the final triumph of truth") to the Path of Enlightenment? And add to that the fact that the Buddha himself said "Don't believe any of this stuff I'm saying just because I'm saying it, go find it out for yourself!" A truly dynamic approach.
The most basic doctrine of Buddhist belief is that "Life involves suffering". This includes any and all forms of suffering: physical pain, mental anguish, guilt, loneliness, humiliation, frustration, longing, all of the feelings that no one should ever have to experience, yet everyone always does. From this observation, Buddhism proceeds to find the best and most direct method of relieving mankind from this distasteful circumstance, again with the same analytical, detached, wholly un-religious approach.
We are told that suffering is caused by Ignorance of the Eightfold Path, the way which leads out of Samsara (the world of suffering) and eventually into Nirvana (Enlightenment).
The whole of Buddhism can be broken down thus:
I. Life involves suffering
II. Suffering is caused by ignorance
III. Destroy your ignorance and you stop suffering
IV. The way to do this is to follow the Eightfold Path which includes:
1) Right Views
2) Right Resolve
3) Right Speech
4) Right Action
5) Right Living
6) Right Effort
7) Right Attention
8) Right Meditation
I-IV comprises what are traditionally known as the Four Noble Truths. The fourth Noble Truth is also known as the Way of Deliverance or Eightfold Path.
As you can see, the crux of the matter seems to be this problem of ignorance. Ignorance in this sense is meant as a sort of universal not-knowing-what's-going-on (very big in human circles). To paraphrase: "If you really knew what was going on you wouldn't get attached to things in this temporal world because everything in this temporal world is, well, temporal, and is bound to go away sooner or later and when it does you're going to suffer."
That's why materialism is a mistake. There's nothing moralistic about it, it's just common sense: you can't hold on to anything, really, and if you try you're going to get burned.