Sunday, 27 April 2014

Buddhism

Original description  

Buddhism is often thought of as peaceful, and the Dalai Lama often thought of as an example of a great person, but this is not completely so – e.g., some Buddhist monks have been involved in illegal activities in Thailand, and violence in Sri Lanka; the Dalai Lama has caused a bit of controversy over ‘excommunicating’ one particular sect … and I’ve come across some very non-inclusive views about sexuality in Buddhism. Nevertheless, I consider this religion better than many other religions, some of which have a particularly blood-soaked history.

I no longer consider myself a Buddhist, and I never attained any great level of scholarship when I was a Buddhist (my emphasis was more on living the philosophy, rather than being able to quote books and texts and commentaries), but I will have a go at giving a brief overview of the religion (or is it more of a philosophy?).
Anyway, it all dates back to the time of Siddhartha Gautama, who was considered to have been born in India around 500 years before the Christians’ Jesus (and hence places such as Thailand have a system of numbering years which is about 500 years ahead of that used in Western cultures). Gautama was claimed to have been born into a privileged family, with a father who knew of a prophecy that his son would leave the family and therefore tried everything he could to prevent his son learning of the ‘real world’ and its suffering. That failed, so Gautama took off, and tried to attain enlightenment by austerity (by ‘mortifying the body’), but that didn’t work, so he meditated, and after having started with an extremely hedonistic life, and then experiencing an extremely austere life, came up with what is today called ‘the Middle Way’. Now, I am summarising more than I should here, but the Middle Way is generally considered to be encapsulated in ‘Four Noble Truths’, which are:
1.                   that all life involves suffering;
2.                   that ‘desire’ is the cause of suffering;
3.                   that ending desire will end suffering; and
4.                   that the Eightfold Path is the way to send desire.
(Desire is not quite what people in the west would normally classify as desire: I would tend to describe it as being more about materialism than hedonism … but that is not quite right, either. Oh well, if you’re interested, you can look it up :) )
The Eightfold Path comprises:
1.            Right views
2.            Right thought
3.            Right speech
4.            Right behaviour
5.            Right livelihood
6.            Right effort
7.            Right mindfulness
8.            Right concentration
Interpreting what constitutes ‘right thinking’ is where all the texts come in that I mentioned I didn’t take any notice of …
Still, I have heard people mention the ‘amazing auras’ of Buddhists, and comment on the cheerfulness of some adherents – and I get quite a bit from the Tibetan Buddhist practise of tonglen (oh, Buddhism tends to take on a different flavour in each country it goes to, which means it will be interesting to see what comes of Buddhism’s journey to the West …), but some Western people who take to Buddhism are absolute pains. One, in fact, when I was helping to organise the Victorian Queer Spirituality Conference in 2005 was so clearly not practising the principles of Buddhism in everyday life that I considered the person the equivalent of the ‘Sunday Christians’, and decided to stop including Buddhism in my religious identification.
Rather a pity, actually, as the essence of Buddhism is, in many ways, compassion, which is akin to the Christian essence of unconditional love …

Additional notes
The Four Divine Attributes: 
Metta / Maitrī (loving-kindness) 
Karuṇā (compassion)  
Muditā (appreciative joy)  
Uppekha / Upekṣā (equanimity) 
Metta / Maitrī (loving-kindness)  

Karuṇā (compassion)  

Muditā (appreciative joy)  

Uppekha / Upekṣā (equanimity) 



As of the time the original description was written, I’d touched on this idea in the following posts:
     Fear
     Them and us
     Changing paths
     About me


For my original writing ONLY on this blog: 

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typos may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/   

Links to others works and excerpts from others works are NOT covered by the hereinbefore, and remain subject to the conditions of the original source. 





No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.