Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Wrathful compassion
Dear sangha,
I'm studying Tibetan Buddhism and I think it is a rich, colorful and peaceful tradition; values of compassion, loving-kindness and love are heartedly cultivated, and afflictive emotions seems to be a rare thing around tibetans.
But I am confronted with the idea of wrathful deities, and the ideia that tibetans parents spank children that behave in a naughty way. Even His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his childhood studied under the threat of whip, with long switches hung Potala's study room to remind him of the consequences for a lazy student. And he is the great and compassive master he is today!
I really try to understand how wrath can be good; I always thought that compassion, loving-kindness and love alone would be enough to heal our problems and to discipline ourselves.
Setting motivation on the basis of fear (using a whip in a child) doesn't make much sense to me. There are a lot of Western investigations on the negative consequences of spanking, but I don't know if the it applies to the tibetan culture, where the physical discipline has a different role and their minds are trained since infancy.
So I really am confronted with this thing of "wrath". Can it really make positive changes if properly applied?
For me is something very strange, I really want to understand because it is a very beautiful culture.
Metta,
Vinícius
I'm studying Tibetan Buddhism and I think it is a rich, colorful and peaceful tradition; values of compassion, loving-kindness and love are heartedly cultivated, and afflictive emotions seems to be a rare thing around tibetans.
But I am confronted with the idea of wrathful deities, and the ideia that tibetans parents spank children that behave in a naughty way. Even His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his childhood studied under the threat of whip, with long switches hung Potala's study room to remind him of the consequences for a lazy student. And he is the great and compassive master he is today!
I really try to understand how wrath can be good; I always thought that compassion, loving-kindness and love alone would be enough to heal our problems and to discipline ourselves.
Setting motivation on the basis of fear (using a whip in a child) doesn't make much sense to me. There are a lot of Western investigations on the negative consequences of spanking, but I don't know if the it applies to the tibetan culture, where the physical discipline has a different role and their minds are trained since infancy.
So I really am confronted with this thing of "wrath". Can it really make positive changes if properly applied?
For me is something very strange, I really want to understand because it is a very beautiful culture.
Metta,
Vinícius
0
Comments
The use of affliction in this case wouldn't be rooted in the basis of vengefulness and aggression, but in my parents' case, a form of display of love and affection.
To guide one's child towards a morally upright path through the use of physical means is in a way just another method of upbringing a child. It all differs in one's culture.
When we look at wrath, we look at pain and suffering carried out by the person carrying hatred. In a vengeful thirst, a person may accidentally kill another. In an aggressive note, a person would bruise his own fist by inflicting harm on the other. In a spiteful note, a person could harm another through the use of his poisonous tongue. I do believe in karma, and that such actions just aren't the way.
But if it is for love and care for a person, it can be justified.
We devoted an entire quarter in my developmental psychology class in college to the topic. It's fascinating. Actually, the research is highly mixed, and studies even show that teenagers who report being spanked at least once as young children did better in school. Every study I know of at least can find no long term affects.
So spanking or not spanking (or other forms of corporal punishment like a switch) is a cultural and class thing. Properly applied, it does have advantages. Children are not simply adult minds in small bodies. They have to learn that actions have consequences, and discipline is a learned behavior. But wrath has nothing to do with properly applied punishment.
As for the wrathful deities of Tibetan Buddhism, I am not a Tibetan Buddhist but what I read told me their wrath is directed at evil demons and enemies of Buddhism, and that elevating them to Bodhisattva status is relative recent thing, like 8th century. The scholars here can certainly clarify the actual history and purpose.
Korean temples have similar scary figures at the entrance to the temple, although they are not worshipped in ceremony far as I know. They are again supposed to guard the temple from evil. I think of them as symbolic guard dogs, dangerous to enemies but friendly to everyone else.
Compassionate attention will often release karma, but heavily entrenched karma sometimes needs to be cut forcefully. The force itself will trigger other karma, though, so it's not something to be done lightly.
I don't agree with spanking though except for young kids who put themselves in danger, like I think it's ok to spank a kid who tries to run out into the road or touch an open fire, they need to equate those things with danger and with little kids the easiest way is a little slap on the bum. Once they're old enough to have an awareness of their surroundings and can better think for themselves then other forms of discipline are better, IMO.
YouTube - Wrath of the Time Lord
http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/about/glossary/glossary.html#xforceful_20deity
Spanking children is unacceptable whatever the culture. I was spanked by my parents as a child and it just bred brooding resentment in my mind . The punishment was always applied with anger.
As for young boys being spanked within a monastic environment in Tibetan Buddhism, well that's ridiculous and inexcusable just because its being done by monks. It's a mistake to get too starry-eyed and idealistic about Tibetan culture, because Tibetans get it wrong sometimes just like the rest of us.
I once knew a Tibetan couple who took their son out of a monastery because he was being regularly spanked by a senior monk.
In my career as a schoolteacher I've never once thought "That kid could do with a 'properly applied' spanking to sort them out!"...and of course its quite rightly illegal to do that in this country.
.