Stripped to its philosophical bones, Buddhism makes three claims that have weathered 2,500 years of refinement. First: the unified, persisting "self" we casually assume we have is a construction — what's actually there is a stream of experiences, mistakenly bundled. Second: most suffering comes from clinging to things (including the constructed self) as if they were stable when they aren't. Third: there's a discipline of attention that loosens the clinging.
This isn't escapism. Serious Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna on emptiness, Dharmakirti on perception, Dogen on time — is some of the most subtle metaphysics ever written. The arguments rival anything in the Western analytic tradition for rigor. They just start from different premises about what's worth analyzing.
The practical core: there's a difference between pain (unavoidable, the cost of being alive) and suffering (avoidable, the result of resisting pain). Mindfulness practice trains the gap between stimulus and response, where you can notice the resistance rather than being it. Modern Western psychology has absorbed enormous amounts of this without always crediting the source. Whether you treat Buddhism as religion, philosophy, or practical psychology, its claims about how minds actually work hold up under inspection.