Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy or a psychology? Can I take only the psychological practices?

All three words are European categories, and none of them covers the subject. The Buddha calls his teaching the Dhamma and the Vinaya, the teaching and the discipline: a path with a practice, a community and a goal.

Structurally it is closest to a religion. There is refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Saṅgha, a monastic community with a code, a cosmology with worlds and rebirth, veneration and offerings, and a final goal - nibbāna, the fading of greed, hatred and delusion, the complete ending of suffering. None of that comes off as a cultural shell: MN 117 places the denial of the fruit of action, of another world and of spontaneously reborn beings squarely under wrong view.

There is plenty of philosophy too: the suttas argue, take apart other positions, and warn that faith, tradition and reasoning are not on their own sufficient grounds for categorical certainty (MN 95). But speculation is subordinate to the goal. In MN 63 the monk Māluṅkyaputta threatens to leave unless the Buddha answers ten questions: whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the same as the body, and four options about the existence of the Tathāgata after death. The Buddha compares him to a wounded man who will not let the surgeon pull out the poisoned arrow until he knows the caste, name, clan and height of the archer and how the weapon and the arrow were made: he will die without finding out. These questions the Buddha leaves undeclared - he does not call them meaningless, he says they do not lead to dispassion, peace, cessation, direct knowledge, awakening, nibbāna. What he does declare is the four noble truths: suffering, its origin, its ending and the path.

A detailed treatment of experience and of training the mind is there as well. MN 19 describes how the bodhisatta before his awakening divided thoughts into two classes - thoughts of sensuality, ill will and cruelty against thoughts of renunciation, goodwill and harmlessness - and drew the rule that whatever a person thinks about often is what the mind inclines towards. MN 20 gives five means against unwholesome thoughts: switch to a wholesome object, examine their danger, pay them no attention, still the very forming of thoughts, and, as a last resort, beat down the mind by force of will. That last one is a last resort, not an all-purpose self-help technique. Identifying any of this with modern psychology is anachronistic, though the overlaps are obvious.

You can borrow particular exercises, as long as you do not present them as the whole Buddhist path. What they do for you depends on the person and the circumstances, and in the suttas virtue, concentration and wisdom (sīla, samādhi, paññā) are three parts of one training. Dropping kamma and rebirth does not empty the word “liberation”: the suttas describe the fading of greed, hatred and delusion here and now as well. But the scale changes. The goal of the canonical path is not that things get easier but the ending of suffering, which includes birth, ageing and death. How the four truths, the eightfold path, not-self and dependent origination work is covered in separate answers in this FAQ.

The Dhamma does call itself a means, plainly. In MN 22 the Buddha likens it to a raft: you build it in order to cross, and having crossed you leave it behind rather than carry it with you. No licence to pick the convenient parts of the teaching follows from that - the same sutta holds a second image: a teaching grasped wrongly wounds you like a snake seized by the wrong end.

Our club reads the suttas without demanding faith at the door, and does not pass them off as a psychology textbook.

Where to read: MN 63, MN 22, MN 117; on working with thoughts, MN 19 and MN 20; on the grounds of certainty, MN 95.