Download Buddhism part1 March edits

1) BUDDHISM:
WHAT IS ESSENTIAL?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE
HUMAN?
WEEK 4
ARHU 302: WORLD RELIGIONS
TODAY’S SLIDE SHOW
• Life of Buddha
• Core of Buddha’s thought
• Results of Buddha’s impact: Big Raft and Little Raft
BEGINNINGS
• 5th century (400s) BCE . . . “Founder”: Siddhartha Gautama
• “The Buddha” on Amazon Prime – great biography
• Short, great book
BUDDHA BIO
• Born: Northern India, near Tibet
• Social Class: Wealthy Kshatriya family
• Religious Context: Vedic - Brahmanical Hinduism where there was
• Varnashrama Dharma
• Sacrificial Worship
• All these ideas of samsara, moksha, karma, meditation, yoga, asceticism
SIDDHARTHA’S AWAKENING TO REALITY
• Protected little Siddhartha could not see reality for what it
truly was
• He disobeyed his father and went out to see the world outside
of his “comfort zone” and had 4 Passing Sights
• Old man: reality of age
• Sick man: reality of disease
• Corpse: reality of death
• Sanyasin: renunciation as a path to peace
He asked himself: “Life is subject to age and death.
Where is the realm of life that is not subject to age and death?”
• Siddhartha leaves his home, renouncing
privilege and possessions, wife & son
• 6 years of questioning
• Seeks spiritual teachers
(common path – many many teachers)
Asceticism: the use of physical techniques
and constraints such as vigils, fasting,
intentional poverty, sexual restraint, and
other austerities in order to cultivate
inner, spiritual and/or mental self-control,
enlightenment, and/or freedom from
anxiety.
HIS MAJOR QS:
• Why is there suffering?
• Why do humans die?
• Do the Gods exist?
• Is there a soul, and if so, what is its nature?
• How can we avoid suffering?
THE MIDDLE WAY  AWAKENING
• Neither indulgence nor denial
• Meditation under the Bodhi Tree: I
won’t get up until I know
• Then rooted there for 6 days
Many tried to turn HIM into a God
PERCEPTION OF THE “GRAND DESIGN”
OF THE SYSTEM OF RULES GOVERNING REALITY.
• Karma
• Anitya - Change
• Anatman – “No-Self”
• Duhkha – Suffering
• All compounded things decay.
• Work out your own salvation with diligence.
BUDDHA’S “RELIGION”
• No authority
• Devoid of ritual
• Skirted speculation
• Devoid of tradition
• Intense self effort
• Devoid of the supernatural
BUDDHIST THEORY BASICS
PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA: DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
HTTP://WWW.BUDDHISM-GUIDE.COM/BUDDHISM/PRATITYA-SAMUTPADA.HTM
empirical rather than faith-based: It is a practice.
“Arising on the ground of the preceding cause”: All events, objects, ideas
depend for their existence on the conditions which preceded them.
This principle of “how everything works” provides the basis for
Buddhist thought on the nature and origin of Suffering .
This is the fundamental precept of Buddhism. ALL rests on this!
A CAUSAL THEORY
How things happen; conditions lead to
other conditions
How to be free from suffering; “What is it
that brings about the cessation of death?
The cessation of birth?”
Also a psychological mapping of the
working of the human mind
Pragmatic
Psychological
Egalitarian
Directed at individuals
1. Ignorance
2. Karmic activities
THE 12 LINKS OF
THE CHAIN OF
DEPENDENT
ORIGINATION
PAST
3. Consciousness
4. Mind and matter
5. Six senses-doors
6. Contact
7. Sensation
PRESENT
8. Craving
9. Attachment
10. Becoming
11. Birth; rebirth
12. Old age, death
FUTURE
• Ignorance depends on Karma.
• Karma depends on consciousness.
• Consciousness depends on name and form.
• On name and form depend the 5 organs of sense.
• On the 5 organs of sense depends contact.
• On contact depends sensation.
• On sensation depends desire.
• On desire depends clutching.
• On clutching depends existence
• On existence depends birth.
• On birth depends old age and death, sorrow, and despair.
VIEWS OF THE SELF: ATMAN VS. ANATMAN
• ATMAN (Vedic and Puranic texts) – The permanent, unchanging,
immortal component of human personality which leaves body at death
• ANATMAN (Buddhism) – “Non-Self”
• ALL THINGS are conditioned, constructed, subject to impermanence,
including “the self”
• Humans seem stable/consistent on the surface of things, but this
is only a sense-based construction of our imagination
• REBIRTH: NOT “transmigration” of an eternal soul, but merely a
“reconstituting” of your previous elements – the continued “working
out” of the karmic forces that produced “you” through time
THE BUDDHIST COMMUNITY
• Buddha – an ideal human being
whom others should emulate; a
great teacher.
• Sangha – an order of monks and
nuns wandering, begging,
teaching. community
THE HUMAN CONDITION: SAMSARA & ANITYA
• Samsara – “Wandering”
• Anitya – “Change”
• All beings are wandering through cycles of death & rebirth
• We are constituted and reconstituted as a collection of
aggregates (Skandhas) during our lifetimes, produced
by the chain of Dependent Origination (Pratityasamutpada)
• This cycle is characterized chiefly by the experience of
Duhkha – “Suffering”
DUKHA – SUFFERING CAUSED BY CRAVING
• Existence in Time leads to suffering
• The essence of time is change
• We become attached to things that change, hoping
they will be permanent; we believe
• Sensual pleasures will bring lasting happiness.
• We attach to the illusion of our own permanence,
and so we fear death.
• Avoid change & suffering; desire to end the suffering we
experience.
Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother series. Woman [Florence Thomson] with children in a tent. Nipomo, California. 1936.
Credits: Dorothea Lange; The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
LIFE AS IT IS TYPICALLY LIVED IS UNFULFILLING
AND FILLED WITH INSECURITIES
The trauma of birth
The pathology of sickness
The morbidity of decrepitude
The phobia of death
Being tied to what one dislikes
To be separated from what one loves
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
1.All Life is Suffering (Duhkha)
2.Suffering comes from
Desire/Attachment
3.The way to end suffering is to
cease desiring
4.The Eightfold Path is the means
to cease desiring
THE 8-FOLD PATH
Right Concentration
Right Intent
Right Effort
Right Views
Right Mindfulness
Right Speech
Right Conduct
Right Livelihood
• Buddha wrote nothing
• He retired 3 times a day
and for 3 months annually to “noble silence”
• Gifted with a preternatural insight into characters
• Felt he had a cosmic mission to perform
• Nirvana means “to blow out” “to extinguish” … Deprived of
fuel, the fire goes out. This is Nirvana. What is extinguished? THE
BOUNDARIES OF THE FINITE SELF.
• What remains? Incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable,
unutterable
• IS NIRVANA GOD?
• Some conclude: since Buddhism professes no God, it cannot be a
religion
• Others conclude: since Buddhism is obviously a religion, religion does not
require God
WILL REMAINS FREE
• Throughout the causal sequence the WILL remains free
• To Buddha, the mind is more basic than matter
Regard this phantom world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp—a phantom—and a dream (p. 117)
LIFE AFTER DEATH OF THE BODY?
• P. 118
• Some problems are posed so clumsily by our language
as to preclude solution by their very formulation.
• Extinguish a fire – did it go north, south, east, or west?
• “Extinguishment” / “To Put Out”/ “Blow Out”/ “Cool Down”
• Release from
thirst of
unquenchable
desires and pain
of cycle of
Samsara
(birth and rebirth)
• The Extinction of
everything that defines
the person as subject
to birth, death, and
suffering (skandhas)
• The elimination of
“thirst” upon Bodhi
(“awakening”)
• Thus the cause for
future rebirth is
destroyed
THE GOAL OF BUDDHISM: NIRVANA
Nirvana is “Total Death” – Release from the cycle; one achieves Nirvana in life
and then departs from the cycle at the moment of death
OVERNIGHT SENSATION (NOT LIKE HINDUISM)
• He died at 80: 45 years of teaching
• Overnight the religion of Buddhism arrives
• Pretty much the Removal of the 6 aspects of the “typical” religion:
• Authority
• Ritual
• Speculation
• Tradition
• Grace – as if some “reality” is “on your side.” No.
• Mystery
TABOR says: Hinduism more oriented to the glory of Brahman;
Buddhism more oriented to the accepting then erasing the stupidity that is being human
BUDDHA WAS ASKED: WHO – WHAT - ARE YOU?
• Are you a God? No
• Are you an angel? No
• Are you a human? No
• … then who are you?
I am awake
SIMPLICITY OF BUDDHA  IT ALL GOT COMPLICATED
Buddhist community emerged out
of the Buddha’s collection of
followers; councils and collections
of commentaries developed the
Buddha’s ideas into a complex
tradition, which fragmented with
opinions about interpretation and
ritual practice
“BREAK OFFS” – WITHIN 100 YRS– ALL RELIGIONS “SPLIT”
• ALSO different individual types: independent or interdependent
• Some of us believe “it’s up to us” – “I did it” – despite this and that
• Others among us believe in “the collective” “No (hu)man is an island”
• Belief systems about “the universe”
• Is the universe “friendly”
• Is the universe “indifferent” … or even “hostile”
• What is the ‘best part’ of the human being?
• Head
• Heart
• Finally some thought Buddhism was
• A full-time job
• Just part of life
THIS ALL LED TO TWO “SECTS”  ”
• Mahayana – the Big Raft, the Great Souled. Buddha was a supreme sage
and then ELABORATE cosmologies replete with many-leveled heavens and hells.
Korea, Japan, Tibet
• Hinayana – the little raft. The way of the Elders.
Buddhism as taught by Buddha
• AND many Hinayans prefer to call it “Theravada”
– progress is up to the individual, his or her understanding and application.
Humanity is “on its own”: no Gods to help.
Self-reliance
Wisdom is profound insight into the nature of reality.
It is the very humanness of Buddha that is the foundation.
SOUTH ASIAN COUNTIRES (Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia)
Theravada – Little Raft
• HBs are emancipated by self-effort, w/o supernatural aid
• VIRTUE: Wisdom
• Attainment requires constant commitment
and is mostly for monks and nuns
• Buddha a supreme teacher
Mahayana – Big Raft
• Minimizes metaphysics
• Human inspirations are supported by divine powers and
the grace they bestow
• Minimizes ritual
• VIRTUE: Compassion
• Practice centers on meditation
• Religious practice is relevant to life in the world
• Ideal: the Bodhisattva
• Buddha a savior
• Elaborates metaphysics, ritual, petitionary prayer
MOST IMPORTANT
• Find/discover it in you; it is already in you
NOT
• Create it, build it, “bring it in”, add it from somewhere
My guy: Mooji https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU8fUeydGW4 or www.mooji.org
CURRENTLY 9pm Saturday
THE END: NEXT WEEK IS
zen
THE SKANDHAS/KANDHAS – “AGGREGATES”
Skandha
Effect
Forms
Material Substance
Feeling
Sensual Experience of the World &
Emotional Attachments
Perception
Ideas, Desires, Sights & Sounds of
the World
Will
Our Intentions (Result: Karma)
Consciousness
States of Mind
END PRODUCT: YOU!