Love
JaySon
Florida Veteran
Some quotes on cultivating Love across some religions, spiritual systems, and traditions...
"Cherish others as you do yourself." -Je Tsongkhapa
"Cherishing others is the source of all happiness." -Lama Zopa Rinpoche
"Love others as I have loved you." -Jesus
"My religion is kindness to all." -The Dalai Lama
"Now do not think of anything other than the welfare of all beings." -Shantideva
"In a world of endless questions, love is the only answer." -Matt Kahn
"Love until it hurts." -Mother Teresa
Thoughts and opinions...
I believe Buddhism has some of the best methods for cultivating Love, like Serlingpa's 7 Cause and Effect Trainings and Shantideva's Exchanging Self With Others and Theravada Loving-Kindness meditation, but other religions have their ways of cultivating Love too.
Emptiness makes Buddhism uniquely Buddhist. Other religions are useful for cultivating Method for people of various capacities. Their obscurations are so great that they can't begin to understand Emptiness. My wife, for example, doesn't "get" it at all. She's a Christian and is one of the most loving and ethical people I've ever met. For her and her capacity, her religion is a perfect fit, and maybe in a future life she will have the capacity to practice Buddhism.
(I'm not saying "capacity" with any sense of belittling. I'm stating it as a fact. You can increase your capacity to understand Emptiness with a lot of effort. We are all compounded entities capable of increasing spiritual capacity through right effort. It took me 16 years to understand the Gelug view of Emptiness.)
Comments
"Do as you would be done by" aka the Golden Rule
You were lucky ?
I don't even understand an empty tin of sardines or fish ?
However Love Forms. It is Empty! Ay carumba.
Let me put it another way. Intensity is a Concentrate but Love is a Meditation. How else might we say it?
Shine on
Being Kind is a decision.
Being unkind is ALSO a decision.
@federica, Yes it's a decision, but one influenced by the thousands of karmic influences of your friends, family, teachers, their ancestors and all the things that have conditioned them down the ages, including all the decisions both skillful and unskillful they and you have made, plus all your previous lives if your into the whole rebirth thing.
I've got a couple of friends from my old drinking and smoking weed days, one a functioning alcoholic who holds down a job and thinks he is an upstanding member of society because he pays his taxes despite the fact that he's a racist, drink and drug addicted shoplifter who fiddles his prescription fees by claiming to be unemployed. The other is an asylum seeker who smokes the odd bit of weed who fled Iran after a fatwa was placed on him for denouncing Islamic fundamentalism, he lives off next to nothing and will go two or three days without food rather than steal, because he was brought up in a moral family.
I don't believe in complete free will or complete determinism but a middle way in between.
HHDL said not to practise Buddhism to become a better Buddhist, but rather to become a better whatever you are. I have found in several situations, Buddhism has helped me to become a "better" (I prefer "more skillful") Jew than I might have otherwise have been.
My personal experience with Buddhism and the Dharma is that I have been able to appraise Jewish teachings with more neutrality than I previously had a few years ago. It's quite liberating to be able to observe a "squabble" between some Jews and Christians I know, view the teachings from both paths (having been first raised Catholic and embracing Judaism as an adult) and think "You're both wrong" but have a cup of tea rather than intervene.
Just my 0.02
???
You might in future have the capacity to practice that type of Christianity ...
Here is my lost page on Christianity
https://tinyurl.com/y3dllqgd
Bodhi Christ Be With Us
Definitely. She suffers a lot from attachment and wrong views though. So that's something to consider. From a Method perspective, she's a perfect Buddhist. From a Wisdom perspective, I pity her.
Since you dropped that link about Christianity (you started it lol), what follows are my totally offensive beliefs I've gathered about Jesus which are sure to get scorned by both Christians and Buddhists:
His Holiness The Dalai Lama has said about Jesus: "So, you see, he reached a high state, either as a Bodhisattva, or an enlightened person, through Buddhist practice or something like that."
Je Tsongkhapa said: "Cherish others as you do yourself." Jesus said: "Love your neighbor as you do yourself."
Jesus gives a parable of the mustard seed, which he says is like a mustard seed that sprouts into the Kingdom of God. Instead of Faith, I believe he's talking about the Buddha nature in the heart, the actual part that Mahamudra meditators focus on in the heart that becomes an actual body of a Buddha. I believe he basically came along and hijacked a religion and used all their teachings as metaphors to teach those of small spiritual capacity.
Jesus took suffering on the cross and cleansed the sins of man means he was practicing Tonglen. This is what Buddhas do. They dive into hells and take on the suffering of all beings. This is something you can't just teach a small capacity practitioner flat out or else they won't follow the beginning stages of the path. If they knew this is where they were heading, to take on the suffering of limitless beings, they wouldn't continue the path (probably).
The government of India released this documentary about Jesus in India, which makes a case for Jesus having practiced various spiritual systems in India.
Jesus taught primarily the path of small capacity practitioners, how to get into a heaven by perfecting ethical discipline and loving others. No one he taught except maybe his close disciples had the capacity to aim for Buddhahood, so he taught them the parable of the mustard seed, Buddha nature (my opinion).
Since he was the only high level Bodhisattva or Buddha around, he taught them to rely solely on him, referred to himself as the Son of God (hijacking the religion of the time and place), and basically taught guru devotion. It's a correct teaching if you consider his audience and their capacity.
Wow. Now I'm sure I'm in for some kind of tongue-lashing. That being said, my certainty about Jesus as a high level bodhisattva or Buddha only increases the more I look into the subject. I tend to believe he became fully-enlightened in India between the ages of 12 and 30, where there's an absence of his presence in Christian scripture, then he returned to his homeland and taught his own spiritual system in metaphor through skillful means.
Perhaps it was so, there are definitely tantalising hints that Jesus travelled to India. I think as a whole the Christian religion has more than a few downsides, and it helps people who are still stuck within the faith bubble of a church to look at these alternative perspectives. After all, there is relatively little that is known for sure about the historical Jesus.
Either way the path of love and kindness is a good one to practice, all we can do to leave the world as a slightly more beautiful place than we found it is worthwhile.
I don’t understand why this is a path for “small capacity” practitioners. It sounds really comprehensive to me.
I agree that the Buddhist teachings on emptiness and not-self are expressed in a unique way, but I do think they have their equivalent in other religions. I’ve heard Christians talk about God’s all-pervading love in a way which totally reminds me of Zen: the universe is one luminous, seemless whole.
As others have mentioned, the fact of our interdependence is the logical basis for compassion and ethical conduct, which comprise the Christian and Buddhist paths.
Emptiness = Love ?
I disagree. That is, I disagree with the possible relevance. None of that matters Now. I can't stop and think about karmic consequences, ancestry, influences and previous happenings. That doesn't matter.
What matters is here, now and every single current instant I experience.
I totally fail to see the relevance to my comment. What's your point?
I choose to adhere to the notion of free Will.
That's my determination.
I neither scorn nor applaud your 'offensive' beliefs. For my part, they're totally irrelevant to me, and I remain indifferent to whether God or Christ (as he has come to be described and visualised) ever existed at all.
I can't be called atheist or even agnostic. The situation doesn't matter to me one way or the other... I really never give it any thought at all.
So don't pre-suppose the reactions of others. That's a presumption which accuses others of subscribing to an attachment....
I'm going to retire from this discussion after this as I didn't mean for my position to wind anyone up, I've been awake for over 22 hours so maybe lack of sleep didn't help me express myself very well but I will leave folks with this little tidbit to ponder - if there is no "I" there who is it that makes the decision?
Now off for some much needed sleep. Take care everyone.
The decision spontaneously arises in your mind depending on the conditions resulting from your past life, you only think that you’ve made it, retroactively. Or that is how I understand it works.
I came across a learned Buddhist the other day whom I asked “how do my thoughts arise”, to which he answered, “how does fire arise”. The answer is due to a trigger and the right conditions being present, and for a thought the right conditions include concepts, memories, and physical capacity — your whole past history that affected your mind.
Actions can arise in the same way.
...This too shall pass...
No tongue lashing here.
As someone who was raised Catholic and embraced my Jewishness and Judaism as an adult I'd like to make a few points that might surprise a few people (hopefully as a pleasant surprise). I apologise in advance if it's tedious, there is a legit point to be made...
Now, we all know the main stickler for the differences between Judaism and Christianity is the position of Jesus as Messiah (Christians say yay and Jews say nay). Now..I tend to agree with the Jewish stance but not for the traditional reasons. I underwent the task of putting the Torah and my old Catholic Bible side by side and read the entire portion of Isaiah - all 66 chapters.
Jesus did not fulfil the criteria - he did not expel the Romans nor rebuild the Temple. Plus...... nowhere in Isaiah does it state that the Messiah will be divine. The Messiah will be a descendent on his father's side of King David. Jesus didn't meet that criteria for two reasons - 1 If he's divine then Joseph's family ties don't count. 2 If he's Joseph's biological son he still has no ties to King David because the family tree stops well short of Joseph.
Personally I believe Jesus was a spiritual seeker who was Jewish and wanted to understand his relationship to God/Divinity/Universe and pissed off the establishment after having a satori moment in the desert and trying to show/teach everyone else how to do this. He also had a real issue with the exclusive nature of the current day religious establishment (something I could get behind).
In conclusion, I am agreeing with @JaySon 's points about Jesus. Especially numbers 4, 6 and 7.
Sorry if I dragged on there but I hope it wasn't a complete waste
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I luvs tea. Tea is Love.
Kindness is water, religion is tea. — Dalai Lama
http://thehubbellpew.com/2019/01/22/kindness-is-water-religion-is-tea/
,,,and god is a teapot
Do you know Bertrand Russell?
Yes
Spaciousness or an empty space in a teapot god, can be filled with qualities or attributes. So for example:
All is Buddha 'Mind' but it has attributes such as: