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Re: Mahayana vs Theravada Buddhism
I mean, we don’t really know what the universe looks like to an enlightened one. We don’t know if such a thing as the bodhisattva vow actually makes sense to such a being.
I have heard it said that to an enlightened being because everything is one when they become enlightened it is as if the whole universe becomes enlightened too. If that’s the case they might hold the bodhisattva vow as immediately fulfilled.
Jeroen
Re: Audio Book
You might use something like voice recorder pro to generate the audio …
Looking forward to any results
lobster
Great Western Vehicle
Have people come across this site on western buddhism before? They seem to have some interesting articles.
Jeroen
Re: Mahayana vs Theravada Buddhism
IMO, if we don't take the accounts in records like the Pāli texts (etc.) of numbers like "500 Arhats" as only pseudo-historical, the yes, the Buddhadharma has severely declined. There are likely not as much as 500 Arhats alive today, even with our much-augmented human population.
However, personally, I take these numbers such as "500 Athats compiled the sūtras with Vens Mahākāśyapa, Ānanda, and Upāli" as mytho-historical numbers. The cultures that redacted the earliest Buddhist texts believed that there were 500+ Arhats present. Were they exactly right on the number? Who knows? It would surely be a shame if there were no Arhats present. It's possible though.
Re: Healthy Habits
I agree with marcitko about lifestyle choices being as important as blood pressure medicines.
Is higher or lower blood pressure a symptom or a cause of poor health?
The more you study blood pressure, the less agreement you may find between the leading scientists specializing in this particular field of inquiry. It would seem that not only is there great variations in what will affect each person's blood pressure treatment but there are also great differences in who is medically impacted by blood pressure variations and who does not seem to be.
While scientists would very much like to find a reliable correlation of a human's health according to their blood pressure readings because of the ease by which it can be measured, most of it is at best, is just a hopeful generality.
I am not advocating here that one shouldn't try to either lower or raise one's blood pressure levels where ever they are detrimentally affecting one's health, just that this is one medical puzzle that still has too many missing pieces to blindly follow without asking a lot of hard questions about our assumptions about it all.
how
Re: Healthy Habits
@lobster said:
Today found out I am nearly dead. High blood pressure.
I had high blood pressure.
This is what I found: medication helps, but only to an extent. It lowers it (ball-park figure) by 10-20.
To significantly lower it, medication plus lifestyle changes work best. Do not underrestimate lifesyle changes, combined they will lower it more than just medication.
Get thin (1kg = 1 lower)
No salt
Exercise
No/limit coffee, alchohol, black tea,smoking
It is possible to drastically lower blood pressure just with medication and lifestyle changes. Good luck!
marcitko
Re: Mahayana vs Theravada Buddhism
The whole discourse between Mahayana and Theravada is very old. But if you take a step back and you look at enlightenment as the concept originally came out of India, there were many who tried to teach it but with only miserly success. If you look at the teachers who taught Gautama the Buddha meditation, he was a stellar student but there were not many like him.
So there is a question, can enlightenment be taught at all, or is it just luck when someone who is ready meets up with a teacher? There are cases in the literature, like Milarepa with Marpa, or more recently Papaji with Ramana, but these may be rare and gifted individuals. The Buddha is said to have had many arhat students, but that’s not something that has been said of anyone since then.
Jeroen