i want to convert to buddhism, in a sense

As i said, when the Buddha preaches to his listeners(depending upon the capacity or level of understanding of his audience), he did not totally repudiate the Upanishadic philosophy, which at that time was the dominant religious thought of India, but made use widely accepted ideas of Upanishads in expounding his doctrine. He wished to guide people into practice of Buddhism by presenting his teachings in as clear and resonable a fashion as possible and one that would have the greatest general appeal. There were, however, occasions when it became necessary for him to make clear the fundamental doctrinal differences that existed between his Law and the Upanishadic philosophy.

The Buddha, or enlightened one, is said to possess four virtues: true self, eternity, happiness and purity. The original concept of these four virtues, however, predates Buddhism. Early Brahmanism, the prevailing religion in Shakyamuni’s India, taught that the human being has an enduring soul or essence called atman–“the breath of life.” Atman, often translated as “self,” was viewed as eternal, happy and pure. Espoused by the Brahmans, then India’s highest, priestly caste, Brahmanism explained that the supreme purpose of atman was to acquire wealth and honor. So, by making offerings to the deities, people sought worldly gains. Atman, in this sense, may be viewed as self in pursuit of selfish desire.

In his early teachings, Shakyamuni refuted the Brahmanic view of self and in his later teachings revealed his enlightened perspective on the matter. When people are consumed with egotism, no matter how much they seek wealth and honor, the pain of their hunger will not be eased. So from this standpoint, Shakyamuni taught that the self is impure and transient and causes suffering. In the earlier sutras, he explains that nothing remains constant, there is no such thing as eternal self. Because the self was transient and not enduring, the Buddha taught, attachment to it or anything in this impure and fleeting world was the cause of suffering. In his later teachings, which came to be classified as Mahayana, or “Greater Vehicle” teachings, especially in the Lotus and Nirvana sutras, Shakyamuni expounds an entirely new view of self. He explains that one’s true self, that is, one’s Buddha nature, is eternal, transcending the cycle of birth and death; it is essentially pure and endowed with happiness. From the viewpoint of Mahayana Buddhism, therefore, true self, eternity, happiness and purity are called the four virtues of the Buddha. In this regard, one Mahayana scripture explains: “The deluded beings are attached to their lesser self and thus suffer. Buddhas and bodhisattvas discard the lesser self. As a result, their self is pure and thus called the greater self. Because they think of all living beings as ‘self,’ theirs is called the greater self.”

While Brahmanism justifies attachment to self, Mahayana Buddhism advocates the inner reform to discard one’s lesser self and develop the greater self rooted in compassion. The Nirvana Sutra clarifies this point, saying: “The deluded beings view that in this world, self is eternal, happy and pure, but this is topsy-turvy. The Buddha also views that in this world, self is eternal, happy and pure, and this is the truth.” Buddhas are those who are awakened to the greater self of compassion. In this expanded vision of self, they see that their lives are connected to others and the world around them. So Buddhas have genuine appreciation for others and are driven by their desire to contribute to the world around them.

I believe that Brahmanism(Known today as Hindusim), India's traditional religion, made used by the buddha to start Buddhism in spreading the new found truth(Dharma) while the two sharing each one another in the course of time. Later, when Buddhism was firmly established; Hinduism, in turn, were influenced by Buddhist teachings. In India itself, Buddhism was gradually absorbed into Hinduism, virtually ceasing to exist as an independent faith.

 

I have to agree with this post as well as your other. I believe the only main differences are cultural, perhaps. I don't believe that the Buddha's teachings contridict the Upanishads. Some ideas could have possibly been distorted upon making the Buddha into a God, which I don't think he wanted. I just believe he taught an extension of Hinduism, just his own way perhaps. In Hinduism there is reference to a Budha(manifestation of wisdom and study), representing the planet Mercury...sort of like Greek mythology. I think that their realization of this aspect being personified is more than coinsidence, if you will.

Ben.

 

"As i said, when the Buddha preaches to his listeners(depending upon the capacity or level of understanding of his audience), he did not totally repudiate the Upanishadic philosophy, which at that time was the dominant religious thought of India, but made use widely accepted ideas of Upanishads in expounding his doctrine."

You are confusing Brahmanism (the common religion at the time) and the Upanishads. You talk about the Upanishads but then quote a passage about Brahmanism vis-à-vis Buddhism. The fact that you say:

"So, by making offerings to the deities, people sought worldly gains."

Shows that you are clearly not talking about the Upanishads. The ultimate purpose of the Self in the Upanishad is to be realized and become one with the Eternal Absolute.

Here is an anti-ritualistic quote from the Katha Upanishad:

"This Atman cannot be attained by the study of the Vedas, or by intelligence, or by much hearing of sacred books."

Interestingly, the Upanishad, just like the Shakyamuni, to an extent dismisses Brahmanistic devotional practices...

" I believe that Brahmanism(Known today as Hindusim), India's traditional religion, made used by the buddha to start Buddhism in spreading the new found truth(Dharma)"

Brahmanism is not the same as Hinduism. Brahmanists acted mostly according to the later Veda, the Atharva Veda. They of course agree that the Rig Veda is the supreme text but most of their practices are from the later Veda. While, they acknowledged the Upanishads they certainly didn't really believe in it. "Hinduism", among other texts, includes the Bhagavadgita and the Puranas, both of which are extremely influential today; more than the Vedas and much more than the Upanishads. I am not talking about "Hinduism", or "Brahmanism" but the Upanishads.

The point I am putting forward is that Early Buddhism is just a restatement of the Upanishads outside the Vedic context, with a shift in emphasis, with some practicality added in.

"while the two sharing each one another in the course of time. Later, when Buddhism was firmly established; Hinduism, in turn, were influenced by Buddhist teachings. In India itself, Buddhism was gradually absorbed into Hinduism, virtually ceasing to exist as an independent faith."

I agree that the Buddha was one of the thinkers with the greatest impact on traditional Indian religion.

"“The deluded beings view that in this world, self is eternal, happy and pure, but this is topsy-turvy. The Buddha also views that in this world, self is eternal, happy and pure, and this is the truth.”"

Btw this distinction between the Atman (Self) and the individual is also made in the Upanishad. The Atman's equivalent in Buddhism would be the greater Self.

" He explains that one’s true self, that is, one’s Buddha nature, is eternal, transcending the cycle of birth and death; it is essentially pure and endowed with happiness."

That description is exactly equal to Atman in the Upanishad...

 

You two guys have given much time to setting forth your ideas, and now there's too many views to reconcile for me to paste quotes from you. So I will just launch entirely into my Middle Way exposition, the essence of which you both seem to have forgotten.


It's not necessarily important where in the Abidharma God stands. Nor is it important to recreate mentally an abstraction called an eternal God. Eschewing mental fabrications is the Middle Way. The Middle Way specifically demands that one perceives the suchness or clear light awareness of life, rather than developing some new mental construct to worship, called reification. Buddhists seek not to reify Gods or ideas into new oscurations.

So many people never seek God because mental constructs prevent their doing so. Buddhism seeks to remove mental obscuration first, and thereby reveal whatever is underneath. To clean out the room one removes the rug before scrubbing the floor, then cleans the rug, and then one can place it back. One needs to remove the rug though. Many religions merely try to sweep the dirt under the rug and call the cleaning finished. Especially Western religions which talk so much about a soul and then never seek to locate it. This lack of caring for detail is why many religions are faith based instead of experience based.

Hinduism also is a faith based religion. Yes, it is very well thought out as well. But Buddhism is the most explicit and well thought out non faith based religion in the world. Directly experiencing liberation from samsara is the ground, path, and goal. And it is possible when one becomes free from the mental obscurations which prevent the dharmakaya from shining in its own true light. Nirvana is tasted from the first day of meditation on the dharmakaya until the last day of meditation into parinirvana. Should God come to one in full personal aspect it could give no benefit greater than nirvana. Because anything else is a compounded aspect of mind, whereas the nirvana is the most simple and uncompounded aspect of mind. This also is why a Creator is unnecessary in Buddhism. One is striving for the least compounded state of life.

So arguing Brahma and such is very unnecessary. The Middle Way refutes both the object of God itself, and the object of needing to know of a God. Hinduism constantly seeks to reify God/s in every form including the formless. But one cannot merge inseparately into a Brahman without also loosing the discursive details of the experience. One could posit that true self identification with Brahman would come across much more like Buddha than some more devotional avatar.

Belonging to many Hindu groups, (Because many Hindu deities are my friends, and protectors) I find so much tail chasing when Hindus start discusing the sex, behavior, aspects, and hierarchy of their deities. None of these things are the least bit important. One needs to clean the floors and walls and get down on the knees and scrub away the obscurations of mind before even cleaning the rug of perception. The basic space of awareness must be made known. Then one can look around inside. If one doesn't penetrate the mysteries in this way then one will always reify their own mental obscurations until it will be hard to know what is the truth from what is the fabrication.

This is the Middle Way.

 

Chodpa,
We are not simplistic people, my dear. You seem to be making a choreographed counter-argument to the wrong argument. I suggest you quote because I do not wish to defend that which I haven't said.

Your Hindu groups have no relevance whatsoever to what I am saying; I am merely saying that all the Shakyamuni did was interpret the Upanishads and add some moral guidlines. Hindus rarely understand the Upanishads... The Shakyamuni did and he preached it.

 

Buddhism, the religious, monastic system, founded c. 500 B.C. on the basis of pantheistic Brahminism . The speculations of the Vedanta school of religious thought, in the eighth and following centuries, B.C., gave rise to several rival schemes of salvation . These movements started with the same morbid view that conscious life is a burden and not worth the living, and that true happiness is to be had only in a state like dreamless sleep free from all desires, free from conscious action. They took for granted the Upanishad doctrine of the endless chain of births, but they differed from pantheistic Brahminism both in their attitude towards the Vedas and in their plan for securing freedom from rebirth and from conscious existence. In their absolute rejection of Vedic rites, they stamped themselves as heresies. Of these the one destined to win greatest renown was Buddhism.

From the seventh to the fifth centuries BC, India witnessed its most creative intellectual period in its history. It was a time of immense innovation and intellectual ferment equal to similar periods in Greece from the sixth to the fifth centuries BC in China from the sixth to the second centuries BC. However, Indian philosophers and religious sages were reacting to the increasingly restrictive and empty formalism of Vedic sacrifices and rituals. The priestly classes had become the most powerful class in ancient India, theoretically placed above kings and nobles. For the priests controlled the forces of the universe through the power inherent in their hymns, charms, and elaborate rituals.

Against this ritualistic focus and concentration of social power, a small revolution occurred in the development of intellectual Hinduism. Admitting that the rituals might have some relative value, these thinkers focussed instead on the inspiration contained in the hymns that formed the backbone of Hinduism. Their teachings, called the Upanishadic after the central form of their dissemination, the Upanishads, were largely secret teachings and their religious focus was on the ability of human beings to understand the mysteries of the universe and their own relationship to the divine. They introduced several new elements into Vedic thought: the doctrine of transmigration, that is, that the soul goes from life to life; the unity of the human soul with the universal soul, or Atman; the doctrine that self-discovery is also the discovery of the one god; and finally, a focus on spirituality rather than material reality. The most important of these innovations, however, was the doctrine of transmigration. Attached to endless return of the soul was a moral order of the universe, rita; the type of life and the type of moral disposition each soul is born into is determined by the nature and quality of its actions in previous lives. Moral actions take on a larger pattern in the infinite life of the soul. Not only did the Upanishadic thinkers introduce the notion of samsara , but they also began to discuss how the soul might be released from this cycle: this is called moksha, or "liberation."

Although the teachers of the Upanishads were heterodox thinkers, they still at some level admitted that Hindu tradition and rituals had some effectiveness. But the reaction against orthodox Hinduism would breed even more radical rebellions, particularly in northern India in the states of Brihar and Uttar Pradesh. We don't know precisely why this region spawned such dynamic intellectual revolt against the prevailing religion. Perhaps it was because these regions had only recently been settled by the Aryans, those Indo-Europeans that brought Vedic religion and rituals to India. Perhaps it was because the class system so vital to Vedism and to the Aryans was only loosely structured. Perhaps it was because the political system involved only a very loose confederacy. From an intellectual standpoint, the doctrine of transmigration, which was introduced by the Upanishadic teachers, was the focal point of the heterodox, in fact, heretical religious movements of northern India. For the two most radical challenges to Vedism, Buddhism and Jainism, centered their entire philosophy around this single doctrine. The heretical schools of Vedism, Buddhists and Jainists, all had as the central goal the release of the soul from this infinite cycle of birth and rebirth, or samsara. So the idea that the soul passes from life to life infinitely was the intellectual crucible in which Buddhism was forged. The mainstream reaction to these new ways of thinking were to classify them as "non-Vedic" or heresies; the formal term was nastika darsanas, or "atheists" (as opposed to "Vedic" philosophies, astika darsanas, or "believers").

Buddhism and Jainism, however, did not appear overnight; there was a natural evolution leading up to them. The Buddhists acknowledge that there were six heretical schools that preceded them. Like Buddhism and Jainism, these heretical schools focussed entirely on the problem of transmigration. The most important of these heretics was Ajita Kesakambala who founded the "materialist" school, or Cakvara. He believed that the soul was only a material phenomenon, an temporary colocation of matter in a living body. When the body died, the temporary collection of matter dissolved and with it dissolved the soul. This meant that the soul was never punished for evil nor was it ever rewarded for good.

Aside from Buddhism, the most important school to arise in this period was Jainism. Unlike the other heretical schools, Jainism has survived to the present day as a major religion in India; unlike Buddhism, however, it has not spread outside of India. The great teacher of Jainism, Vardhamana Mahavira, lived at the same time as Siddhartha Guatama, the founder of Buddhism. It appears to Western historians that Jainism actually begins with Vardhamana, although the Jains believe that the religion is far older, extending in fact to the remotest antiquity. Mahavira, they believe, was the twenty-fourth and last of the teachers. He was born in 599 BC, the son of a daughter of the king of Vaisali. At the age of thirty, he learned the ephemerality of the world and devoted himself to an ascetic lifestyle. Over a period of twelve years, he suffered the most self-denying hardships until he finally reached enlightenment and began to teach others.

Jainism is based on a single idea, that the transmigration of souls is caused by the union of the living with the non-living which then sets up energies, or tapas , which then drive the cycle of birth and rebirth. This endless process can be stopped if the energies are used up in a life of discipline. At the end of the process, the soul, freed from the cycle of birth and rebirth, then exists in a state of infinite bliss, knowledge, power, and perception—the soul which has achieved this state is siddha-paramesthin . There is a slightly lower stage of the soul, called the arhat-paramesthin , and the arhat is the one who teaches the rest of humanity. This teacher is called the tirthankara , or "ford crosser," and serves as a vehicle of revelation for the rest of humanity. Like the Islamic rasul , each tirthankara is more or less a founder of a new religion.

The Jains believe that the world was uncreated and lasts for eternity; the only quality that reality has is the fact of change. Things are born, they decay, the pass away. Each physical object is held together by its own internal forces. In the face of this constant change only a few things remain permanent; of these, the most important is jiva , or the soul. The jiva can do two things: it can perceive and it can know. It also controls its own actions when it is part of a concrete body; so also it enjoys all the rewards and punishments of its own actions. There are four categories of souls: gods, humans, demons, and animals; each soul in the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth can enter any of these categories. Moksha occurs only when the soul becomes freed from the cycle of birth and rebirth.

The path to moksha, moksha-marga , is the central teaching of Jainism. This path has three "jewels": right belief, right knowledge, and right conduct. This path involves a high degree of ascetism; quite literally the best lived life is one of total ascetism: no food or material involvement at all. Since this is an impossible idea, Mahavira developed a second path for normal human beings to follow. This involved five abstinences: ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (abstinence from stealing), brahmacarya (chaste living), and aparigraha (abstinence from greed). This, perhaps, is the most important aspect of Jainism. It is overwhelmingly a moral religion. It promises an eventual release if an individual begins now, in this life, to live under a high moral code. These are then two of the major nastika darsanas , the materialism of the Ajita Kesakambalin and the moral religion of Vardhamana Mahavira. The third, and the most influential,was founded by a prince of the Shakyas at the foot of the Himalayans-- Buddhism[posted below].

Source: The Historical Siddhartha, The Buddha

 

That is partly true. Perhaps, the starting point of the appearance of Shakyamuni was to challenged in the midst of India's traditional religion and who openly broke with the old Vedic tradition and challenged Brahman authority in the Indian social order. Because of that, the teachings of Buddhism was born. Among with his contemporaries were the so-called Six Non-Buddhist Teachers. They were:

(1) Purana Kassapa, who denied causality and did not acknowledge that one receives any reward for his deeds, whether good or evil. Therefore he rejected all concepts of morality. (2) Makkhali Gosala, who asserted that all events are predetermined by fate and that no amount of devotional effort or religious practice can alter them. He therefore advised people to resign themselves to the process of samsara (transmigration). (3) Sanjaya Belatthiputta, who was a skeptic and gave no definite answers to metaphysical questions. For example, when asked whether life continues after death, he is said to have replied that it might and yet again it might not, denying the possibility of certain knowledge in such areas. (4) Ajita Kesakambala, who maintained a simple materialism according to which all things in the universe are formed of earth, water, fire and wind. Since the world is composed of these elements alone, he said, life ends when the body dies, and it is therefore of no consequence whether one does evil or good in his life. For this reason Ajita supported hedonism. He is regarded as the forerunner of the Lokayata school. (5) Pakudha Kacchayana, who asserted that man is composed of seven unchangeable elements: earth, water, fire, wind, suffering, pleasure and soul. (6) Nigantha Nataputta, founder of Jainism, who sought liberation through rigorous asceticism and absolutely forbade the taking of life.

The Buddha rejected the extremes of both asceticism and attachment which was prevalent in religious practice of India at his time, instead, expound the Middle Way- the Buddhist truth that will lead all people the way to true enlightenment(Buddhahood, Nirvana, the cessation of suffering).

 

Buddhism is a process, not religion. Zen is about finding the way to enlightenment, a.k.a. "salvation". The way for each soul is unique, and we all must find our own. That is an individual revelation, under your jurisdiction only. Removing the obstacles which stand between you and your understanding is the process of Buddhism. It is more of a question of 'will it convert you' rather than 'should you convert'.

THE WAY​

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Remove your blinders, walk with Dharma
Consider your deeds, sleep with Karma​

Shed your possessions. Learn to let go
Release opinions. Let the truth flow
Care for each other; we exist as one
Defeat hate with love, war will be done
The path is open for decision:
Make loving-kindness your religion.​

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copyright 2004 by me!​

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Absolutely!,Amen to that and the rhyme is very cool, too.

Ben.

 

Thanks, Ben!

 

Yeah Queenannie. that's a great poem!

 

Interesting that we never see the Dharma-Karma rhyme in traditional texts. I was curious to know in what way you pronounce Dharma and Karma? Most people in the west say Dh?rm? and K?rm?.

 

thanks for all the interesting reads.........

 

I guess it's pronounced like arm-a? That's how I say it. Is that the proper pronunciation?

Here's another poem on those same lines (yeah, I know this isn't the poetry forum, but my poems aren't about poetry )


Jesus and the Buddha

Jesus and the Buddha standing hand in hand

Both bringing rays of hope to each foreign land

Humbly teaching truth, charity, and wisdom

Meant for each of us, regardless where we're from

So why can't the leaders of our confused world

See there is no need for the stones we all hurl?

 

I don't really understand arm-a. I geuss you mean arm, like the body part and a as the indefinite article? Arm isn't quite right, as the first a is also short so its the same a as the indefinite article, a. Also keep in mind that it is easier and more correct to use a Latin r and not an English one. It doesn't really matter though; I was just wondering.

 

you mean its not pronuonced darma? that is how I have always pronounced it.