Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Finally, what do the last forty odd posts add up to?
There were forms of theism in India around 500 BCE that Siddhartha had a critical dialogue with during his lifetime of around 80 years. He was a persuasive and wise fellow and his message as it was understood also resonated and was appreciated by many for political and social reasons as well as for purely religious ones (ultimately even beyond India).
The actual message was really down to: everything is suffering but at least it's not permanent so enjoy each moment without clinging to anything and appreciate your lives and develop your communal connectedness and compassion.
That was expressed as four "noble truths" and a "Buddhist path" that had both moral-teaching and self-learning elements was instituted.
After Siddhartha's death this was all finally written down in various forms and argued about at length for centuries. Buddhism (in the various forms that thus emerged) became and remains the religion of around a billion people (essentially throughout much of East and South East Asia (though no longer India) and its peoples' diasporas).
Some forms have inspired the West recently (significantly, for Western and modern (or postmodern) reasons) via people like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.
The problem with all of the above is that this inspiring religion for the West that began to be written about more than two millenia ago may not be what Siddhartha actually taught and this idea is brought out in a fascinating book called "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" written by a former monk. The ex-monk (in both Tibetan and Korean Zen traditions) was born as and now goes again by the name Stephen Batchelor.
I highly recommend the book. It brings out the real story of Siddhartha based on the earliest Pali canon and reveals how this earliest extant evidence shows that he didn't actually believe in either reincarnation or gods (key beliefs of most forms of Buddhism today).
So what then does the extensive development of Buddhism discussed in my posts amount to if it is apparently so clearly contradicted by the clearest of evidence. Simply, it produced a culture valued by almost as many people today as Christianity or Islam so it deserves to be understood. I hope the earlier posts and this post give an understanding of the Buddhism we know today and also how it may develop in the future to become an even more valuable and truly atheist and scientific worldview.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Comparing the Three Men (Revision Again)
All of the men agree on the following ideas that resonate in Buddhism:
1) Non-violence begins with self-awareness of the potential for and truth of the violence within. So self-discipline leads to self-acceptance which leads to other-acceptance. This attitude does not require any overt practice of a religion;
2) More simplicity and less clinging (including to ideas) are important. The first precept of the Order for Interbeing rules devised by Nhat Hanh calls such clinging idolatry. In this connection the Buddhist story of the raft is relevant. In it Buddhism is a raft in a river (samsara). We don’t need the raft where we’re going and may not even require it as we approach shallower waters so we needn’t always cling to it. The Jainist idea of anekavada also means roughly the same thing – no doctrine is final. There is also an old Indian story of the three blind men feeling the elephant (in it we are the blind men and the elephant is something like existence). The man who felt the tail might describe it as soft (his doctrine concerning the universe) but the man feeling the toes might call it hard. The question raised is which is the correct view? Both and neither is the answer. As blind men (and women) none of us are in a position to hold anything with certainly about our elephant as we grope around in existence;
3) Dismantling oppositionism is necessary. You are me and I am you. The idea of “other” is a distortion based on the false ideas of “self” and thus “self-interest”. Compare this with the ideas of evil propounded by both the Bush-Cheney administration and Usama bin Laden. Their ideas of otherness suggest a need to correct or be rid of the other as a problem solution. The Americans tried this in Afghanistan. The evil USSR ‘took charge’ there so the US funded Taliban-like groups to get rid of the Soviet army. Now the ‘evil’ Taliban are there and as far as the Taliban are concerned so are the evil Americans (and Australians). Ridding oneself of ‘evil others’ is patently not generally a permanent solution;
4) Genuine peace is more than the mere absence of violent conflict; and
5) There are karmic consequences (in the non-technical sense of causes and effects). For example 9/11 was arguably a cause of the War in Afghanistan but it was certainly also an effect and specifically probably of global Western colonialism, arrogance and violence among other things. Thus nobody is necessarily blameless in this. We all bear some responsibility for what happens to us. Karma had spoken.
These men are more than hopeless idealists, then (as they may be portrayed). They are accurately taking the social and political pulses of the world, diagnosing the condition and prescribing a cure.
Monday, May 9, 2011
The 14th Dalai Lama
What was once called Lamaism, was viewed as a separate religion from Buddhism and we now know as Tibetan Buddhism exhibits some of the features of a Buddhist theocracy. Recently the Dalai has been willing to reform this and arrogate to himself a more-or-less mere figurehead role but the development of a form of theocracy in the first place is an interesting pre-modern historical example of a very active and engaged Mahayana Buddhism.
He had already received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 (Aung San Suu Kyi did in 1991). Here she is (from Wikipedia):
The Dalai led around 80,000 Tibetans into a more-or-less forced exile in India when Communist China asserted control of Tibet in the late 1950s. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s later changed the face of religion and culture dramatically in all of China including Tibet, the brutal so-called “Four Olds” campaign being one of the driving anti-religious forces at that time. In addition to the general violence, nearly all of the thousands upon thousands of Tibetan Buddhist Temples were completely destroyed along with many of their invaluable and irreplaceable contents. The Dalai was able to save a lot of this material in India, however.
His philosophy of non-violence was supported by his enunciation of three important principles in the context of his pluralist and ecumenical sensibilities and ideas (similar to the ideas of Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh):
1) Compassion – we all share human values;
2) Equality – of everyone; and
“Universal Responsibility” – Why? Because we are all interdependent. This is an ethical duty in a world of dependent arising.