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What's the deal?
Hello everybody.
I am a (almost) sixteen year old high school student and I have a few questions about Buddhism. First of all, is Buddhism really a religion? It seems to be more of a philosophy or a way of life to me. Can one practice another religion and still be a Buddhist? Does Buddhism conflict with Christianity and/or monotheism?
What is Karma? Is it just if you do good things, you will be rewarded and if you do bad things you will be punished? Or is it that when you do good things with good intentions, you will be more likely to do good things in the future and end up more likely to reach enlightenment? Is the concept of Karma a mixture of these two understandings?
What is meditation and what is its purpose? How does mediation fit into Buddhism? Can anybody point me to a good online guide for meditation?
I've heard of these things called Koans. What are they, where do they come from and what is their place in Buddhism?
From what I understand, the main purpose of Buddhism is to end suffering. What are some other basic principles or points of Buddhism?
Is there anywhere online where I can find Buddhist texts and the teachings of the Buddha?
Thanks.
I am a (almost) sixteen year old high school student and I have a few questions about Buddhism. First of all, is Buddhism really a religion? It seems to be more of a philosophy or a way of life to me. Can one practice another religion and still be a Buddhist? Does Buddhism conflict with Christianity and/or monotheism?
What is Karma? Is it just if you do good things, you will be rewarded and if you do bad things you will be punished? Or is it that when you do good things with good intentions, you will be more likely to do good things in the future and end up more likely to reach enlightenment? Is the concept of Karma a mixture of these two understandings?
What is meditation and what is its purpose? How does mediation fit into Buddhism? Can anybody point me to a good online guide for meditation?
I've heard of these things called Koans. What are they, where do they come from and what is their place in Buddhism?
From what I understand, the main purpose of Buddhism is to end suffering. What are some other basic principles or points of Buddhism?
Is there anywhere online where I can find Buddhist texts and the teachings of the Buddha?
Thanks.
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Comments
It's both. It deals heavily with philosophy and has no worship, but it has the devotional aspects of a religion, it provides an ethical standard, and is a way of life.
You can practice another religion and still practice Buddhist meditation, yes. But you can't necessarily be a Buddhist and practice another religion. The existential philosophies would certainly clash.
Yes. It prohibits the worship of gods and considers monotheism to be a Wrong View. (before anyone yells at me for saying this, it says so in the Digha Nikaya :] )
Buddha simply described Karma as "deeds and effects of deeds." It's nothing mystical, but rather a reminder that actions have a consequence. It doesn't mean that if you kill, you will be killed back. That's not what is asserted. Simply that negative actions have negative consequences.
Meditation is a concentration method, practice to calm the mind, and to gain insights.
Koans are a Zen practice. They are paradoxical or witty statements that are used to be meditated upon to break free from dualistic thinking.
From what I understand, the main purpose of Buddhism is to end suffering. What are some other basic principles or points of Buddhism?
Here is the Tipitaka: http://awake.kiev.ua/dhamma/tipitaka/index.html
And here's the Mahayana Sutras: http://www4.bayarea.net/~mtlee/
I hope you find reading these texts an Enlightening experience!
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I'll just point out some sources, explore them as you see fit (although the first two are focused on Theravada and the last two on Tibetan Buddhism, no Zen :-\):
http://www.what-buddha-taught.net/
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/
http://www.thubtenchodron.org/
http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/index.html
http://www.archive.org/details/tse_chen_ling - This is one gem I found. Over 600 dharma talks given in a FPMT center. Really good and really well hidden. You guys can thank my massive amount of good karma for this one. *wink wink* (joking, don't need to throw me in the fire :-x)
Hello, Hobbit Snatcher, and welcome.
That's always a difficult question for me to answer as I think Buddhism could easily be labelled both, although out of the two I'd say it's closer to a philosophy in the sense of being a way of life or something you do.
But to be even more precise, I think Buddhism has always been what we call psychology today, and it's only been relatively recently (at least in the West) that its more technical terms have been understood and translated in ways that make this clear. I think this shift is due in no small part to the decades of excellent scholarship that has been brought to bear on the texts and the religious-historical context in which they took shape.
Regardless of how it's been popularized, at its core, Buddhism deals exclusively with one subject, that of human mental suffering. The Buddha himself made it clear that:
That's not to say there aren't "supernatural" concepts in Buddhism, or that local customs, deities and religious practices haven't found their way into Buddhism wherever it's been established. But rather than a pure system of thought or a strictly faith-based worship of the supernatural, a critical analysis of the earliest texts reveals a much more pragmatic and specialized method of mental training than most traditional Buddhists and Western converts realize—one that seeks to diminish and even eliminate suffering by radically changing the way the mind relates to experience.
The basic premise behind kamma is that there's a cause and effect relationship between our actions and how they're experienced. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu puts it, "It's simply the fact of action—you do something unskillful, it's going to come back in an unpleasant way." In the same way, if you do something skillful, it's going to come back in a pleasant way.
The Buddha defined kamma as intentional actions of body, speech and mind (AN 6.63) that have the potential to produce certain results, which, in turn, have the potential to produce pleasant, painful or neutral feelings (AN 4.235). The word itself simply means "action."
Intentional actions rooted in greed, hatred or delusion produce painful feelings, while intentional actions rooted in non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion produce the opposite. And then there are acts rooted in both that bring mixed results (AN 4.235). By bringing kamma to an end, however, the mind is said to become free and undisturbed.
Intention (cetana) is a product of the aggregate of mental formations (sankharakhandha). The cause by which kamma comes into play is contact (phassa). Furthermore, according to Nyanatiloka's Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, vipaka is "any ... mental phenomenon (e.g. bodily agreeable or painful feeling, sense-consciousness, etc.), which is the result of wholesome or unwholesome volitional action (karma, q.v.) through body, speech or mind, done either in this or some previous life."
Essentially, intentional actions of body, speech, and mind produce results that are said to have the potential to ripen during this life-time, in the next birth or in later births. This can be taken literally (i.e., ripening in the form of a pleasant or unpleasant rebirth in an external realm of existence), or metaphorically (i.e., ripening in the form of various pleasant or unpleasant mental states). In the words of S. Dhammika:
Therefore, I think that in certain contexts, it would be appropriate to think of kamma as "habit energy" in the sense that the potential effects of an action can be to condition and even strengthen certain physical and psychological reactions. This is especially true in regard to psychological reactions considering that vipaka is limited specifically to "mental phenomena."
In Buddhism, meditation is seen as excellent methods for developing insight into the mental process of taking on a particular kind of identity that arises out of clinging (upadana), which the Buddha described as a process of "I-making and my-making." From the Buddhist point of view, we're basically slaves to our craving (tahna, literally "thirst") — a very subtle but powerful aspect of our psychology — and mindfulness is our best weapon.
Constant attention and awareness of these things is said to help shed light into the dark corners of our mind. Meditation allows us to see these mental processes in action, and once we begin to see the potential stress and danger that's hidden within the process of clinging, we become less passionate about it. We remove its appeal and cease to be blind to our predicament. Dispassion is then said to lead to relinquishment — to letting go of our craving fully — thereby ending our mental addictions and enabling us to enjoy life with a truly free heart.
Here's a short guided meditation.
Koans are a part of Chan/Zen Buddhism, which I'm not very familiar with, but I understand them to be paradoxical statements or questions that are used to jolt the student's mind into awakening by forcing them out of their habitual, unenlightened state of mind, or to realize their already enlightened state of mind, or something like that.
I'd say that ending suffering is the only real purpose of Buddhism.
Access to Insight is a great place to start.
This is a really amazing link, NR. I repeat it here to call attention to it.
Just to clarify this particular point. Koan are not paradoxical or witty.
They are question-and-answer at once. To "answer" a koan requires directly seeing both the question and answer at once. In so doing, yes you do step out of dualistic thinking, but more importantly there is an experiential opening of awareness. Different koans facilitate different openings.