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New Buddhist with questions
NextElement
Explorer
Hello all! I'm really glad to have found these forums: I'm a new Buddhist who has a lot of questions about the philosophy and lifestyle. Long story short, I am a young man from the United States. I've lived as a Catholic for the last 18 years, but never really believing what I was practicing and always being caught in that ring of desire that is too common. Then recently, I found myself on the Wikipedia page about Siddartha Gautama Buddha. I honestly have no recollection of how I got there, and I don't remember ever even searching it! But his life really radiated with me, and I've been learning as much as I can the last two weeks about his teachings. I have a few questions:
I've been trying desperately to meditate. Since I've started I've been doing it twice a day for 15 minutes each time, sometimes longer, using the method where you focus on breathing. So far it has really calmed my mind..... But is it okay to think about things while meditating? It's really hard for me to just have a completely blank mind, and instead I'll think on the universe and Buddhas teaching. Is it bad to use meditation as a thinking time as well? Or should your mind be completely clear?
What is really required to become Enlightened? Does one have to give up ALL worldly possessions like the Buddha did? I have a great girlfriend and a nice life..... should I really start separating from them gradually?
What is the official Buddhist "holy text"? Or at least a good book to read in English about the Buddhas teachings? I'm going to Barnes and Noble tomorrow to look around, but recommendations would be great! Thanks for the help and again, I'm glad to be here and so thankful I've found Buddhism. It's already done wonders in my life.
I've been trying desperately to meditate. Since I've started I've been doing it twice a day for 15 minutes each time, sometimes longer, using the method where you focus on breathing. So far it has really calmed my mind..... But is it okay to think about things while meditating? It's really hard for me to just have a completely blank mind, and instead I'll think on the universe and Buddhas teaching. Is it bad to use meditation as a thinking time as well? Or should your mind be completely clear?
What is really required to become Enlightened? Does one have to give up ALL worldly possessions like the Buddha did? I have a great girlfriend and a nice life..... should I really start separating from them gradually?
What is the official Buddhist "holy text"? Or at least a good book to read in English about the Buddhas teachings? I'm going to Barnes and Noble tomorrow to look around, but recommendations would be great! Thanks for the help and again, I'm glad to be here and so thankful I've found Buddhism. It's already done wonders in my life.
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Comments
There is no need to have a blank mind. Our minds think. Your mind should be more like a sieve than a pot. When a thought happens, note it and let it go. If we have a thought like "Oh, I forgot to bring that book to the library." Just let it go, let it dissolve. If you start to follow the thought and note yourself going further along in your story such as "Ugh, I'm so dumb, now I'll have a late fee and I'm always getting late fees!" and the thought keeps going and going. You'll have that happen, too. Just note it, let it go and focus on the breath again. It's a technique you do over and over and over again. Some days you feel like all you do is remind yourself to go back to your breath. Some days you might even be thinking terrific things about Buddha. Still just thoughts, let them dissolve and disappear. If you feel 15 minutes is a punishment of some sort (I did at first, LOL), or you catch yourself always wondering if the time is up yet, start lower. When I started meditating, i started with 5 minutes and added a few minutes every few days.
There is no official Buddhist text, really. Nothing like the bible has. There are 10s of thousands of suttas/sutras, which are the teachings Buddha gave, basically. They can be difficult to read for a beginner (or even more advanced students sometimes). Also, you will find different sects of Buddhism use different words to say the same thing, because of language translations. Because I am a Tibetan Buddhist, we call them Sutras while others call them Suttas. Same things, though
I would start with more beginner based books, and plan to spend a little time reading different teachers to get an idea of what fits with you the best. The nuances can be quite different, even though the core teaching is all the same. Thich Nhat Hanh is a good resource, easy to read and understand, he is a Zen monk but his teachings are pretty basic and can be useful for anyone, including non-Buddhists. Pema Chodron is another, along with the Dalai Lama and Ajahn Chah (I may have spelled that wrong). In that case, there are so many to flip through you might try the library first
Also, if you are lucky to live in an area with Buddhist centers, check them out! It is a wonderful blessing to find a teacher to work with in person, if you can. They help refine the questions that come up, the problems you run into, and so on. When you get to that point, of course. I didn't mean to suggest you should hop along and find a teacher tomorrow. But it would be worth it, I think, to check out Buddhist centers if you have them in your area.
Glad to hear you are going to Barnes and Nobles. Do you have vacation or weekend time to go on a meditation learning retreat?
Buddhist gals make cheap dates, they expect Nothing (according to Mr Cushion - beginning to suspect he is a closet sexist)
Good luck and Be kind.
I can also say to possible Buddhist beginners who are not sure: Try it out for yourself. For me, I never realized how loud my mind was until I meditated and got rid of the things that were making it so loud. Now I'll be driving through the woods, and I'll think "Wow, my mind is so quiet!" It's remarkable.
Most westerners practice Buddhism in the context of modern life. A tiny percent go all the way and do it full time. The point about being a monk is to simplify your life to make it easier to achieve Buddhist goals. I would get clear what Buddhist goals are before doing anything drastic to achieve them.
Enlightenment is... a metaphysical realization with ethical and lifestyle consequences. Now what the metaphysical realization is... that's is the kicker. The assumption is that a life of simple ethical living, meditation and study leads to enlightenment. The Pali canon, the Tibetan Canon, the Chinese Canon. 3 **Huge** sets of books, each with different texts. I don't recommend reading these texts first, read pop-Buddhism books-- unless you really, really enjoyed college reading.
Martine Batchelor "The Spirit of the Buddha" got very good review in my book club. It is non-denominational & does a good job of intro & advice. It's profound without being over simplistic or overly academic either.
Supposing, when you were meditating, you heard noisy traffic continually passing by on a nearby street. Would you try to stop the traffic so that it would not disturb your meditation? I think not. Thoughts are the same. It is a function of the mind to produce thoughts, and to try to make it stop doing so by an act of will is not practical. Instead, the meditator may choose simply to take no interest in anything she may be thinking. "Not my business," she may think, as Ajahn Chah has recommended. This method may eventually lead to a reduction or a subsidence of thoughts, or it may lead to the mental faculty that takes interest in thoughts "going to sleep", so to speak. To pay attention to external noise, or internal thoughts, requires an observing part of the mind to be awake and active. If it is not active, no noise or thoughts are perceived. The mind simply ceases to pay attention to them. You may recall a time when you were bothered by noise and later realised that you had ceased to pay attention to the noise and that some time had passed without you being consciously aware of the noise. I think this happens to all of us. That is why Ajahn Chah reportedly said to his monks: "The noise is not disturbing you ... you are disturbing the noise."
It helps to visualize the breath, give it a color: silver, gold, yellow like the sunlight, lavender, whatever color soothes you, and watch it entering your nostrils, slowly going down your windpipe toward your belly. Imagine it filling up your belly, pushing down with your diaphragm. Then let it slowly rise, watch it going back up and then back out through your mouth or nose, forming a little cloud that dissipates.
Repeat. See if that helps. The key is to make this a very slow process. You should be able to slow your breath to 3 or even two breaths per minute, eventually. This also increases your ability to stay focussed, because it calms your nervous system, and turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, turning on the calming neurotransmitters.
Meditation is no big deal. It is just time for yourself to notice your mind. If it is busy mind then it is busy. If it is quiet mind then it is quiet. If your breath is bothering you with a trance state via deep breathing you can correct that by just noticing you are just sitting on a cushion. Say to yourself that you are not meditating you are just sitting on your butt.
But that's just my teachers instruction. You can find out for yourself. We all get to our different teachers via our own karma.
She said her companion had terrible flu and was just miserable the whole time. After the silent vigil ended my Lama expressed how sorry she was for the woman's sickness. The woman replied with (some amount) of cheeriness "I got rid of a lot of bad karma"
But I think we should see this view for ourselves and not thrust it on others. So if I am in the hospital and the staff makes an error I know it is my karma because I made a mistake as a hospital employee.
But if someone in my family is sick I don't tell them that it is karma.
The belief in karma should always empower you to have control in your life via mind training. Karma isn't to pass out blame.
Part of karma is in the present. So if you have bad past karma dividing you from Buddhism you can just practice extra hard. Try to notice your addictions and neurosis. Eventually the right conditions will come together. I have been meditating since 2000 and I have had very few special states. But I have gotten tough skin and a tender heart (I hope).
If you have doubt you can read the last section of the Avatamsaka sutra. It says that there are an infinite number of Buddhas on the tip of a hair. It is a composition to set in motion the eager mind for the dharma such that wherever you are and whatever lifetime you are in you will have faith and a connection to the dharma.
It's hard for everyone to have a completely blank and tranquil mind. The way I like to look at it, the conscious mind is like a monkey or a committee. When thinking, the monkey-mind swings from branch to branch, and the various factors of mind are akin to committee members with different desires trying to be heard. The unconscious mind is like a bubbling cauldron, with all sorts of things from both past and present brewing. When not thinking, thoughts often just pop up anyway, being the results of past actions and experiences (engaging them being present kamma).
There are a number of things that condition our thoughts described in the suttas. Even just sitting, we're being bombarded with sounds, smells, thoughts, etc., and thoughts can bubble up from the depths of our subconscious based on this or from things arising from the past. It's normal and nothing to get discouraged about.
When it comes to what to do with thoughts that arise or are thought, the Buddha suggests a variety of approaches. In MN 19, for example, he suggests dividing them into two categories: thinking imbued with sensuality, thinking imbued with ill will, & thinking imbued with harmfulness and thinking imbued with renunciation, thinking imbued with non-ill will, & thinking imbued with harmlessness. And in MN 20, he suggests five methods for dealing with unskillful thoughts in the course of meditation so that once the mind is calm, clear, focused, concentrated, and temporarily free of the five hindrances, it's then better able to perform the next mode of training—cultivating discernment.
My advice at the beginning, is to simply practice staying with the breathe and seeing what you can learn about it. And if you need some more guidance, I suggest checking out "A Guided Meditation" and "Basic Breath Meditation Instructions." No. Perhaps you'll benefit from reading these three excerpts from the Pali Canon, which are directed more towards lay-followers:
The Sigalovada Sutta
The Adiya Sutta
The Dighajanu Sutta
It should be noted that nowhere does the Buddha ever tell his lay-followers not to wish for success or happiness. What he does do, however, is give the lay-person a set of guidelines for living in a morally skillful and prosperous way. Not all desires are bad. Certain desires, like that of wanting to follow the noble eightfold path, for example, are actually part of the path itself.
The advice the Buddha gives is to try to not be attached to these worldly gains, not forsake them altogether; and there are numerous techniques and practices throughout the Canon designed to help one develop non-attachment while still living a 'worldly' life.
Many people mistake the Buddha's teachings as meaning they must give up everything they own, all their personal relationships, refrain from being successful, etc. This isn't true, however. While monastics are required to relinquish their possessions and renounce worldly life, lay-followers aren't. They're simply taught specific conducts that are in line with the Dhamma. If the accumulation of wealth, for example, is used and accumulated in the right way, it can be meritous. As he advised the wealthy lay-devotee Anathapindika: Relationships can be skillful too. There's no official Buddhist holy text akin tot eh Bible per se. Each tradition has its own collection of discourses and teachings that they take as guides. The Theravada tradition, for example, which I'm the most familiar with, relies on the Pali Canon, a collection of discourses preserved in Pali, an early form of Prakrit related to Hindi and Sanskrit. If you're interested in checking out those, I'd suggest Bhikkhu Bodhi'sIn the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Rupert Gethin's Sayings of the Buddha, Thanissaro Bhikkhu's Handful of Leaves series, and/or Access to Insight.
One is Huston Smith, who wrote The Religions of Man. This was a masterpiece overview of world religions, and it was one of the textbooks in a religion course I took in college. It was my introduction to Buddhism (and the other religions it describes). It has since been updated and renamed The World's Religions, and I think it is still the most important book in this field. It doesn't really have the tone of a textbook; it's quite readable. Huston Smith has also written a separate book specifically about Buddhism which is more detailed. He has a coauthor on that book but I can't recall the name.
The other author I really like is Steve Hagen. His best-selling introduction to Buddhism was titled Buddhism Plain and Simple. You might get more enjoyment out of a more recent of his works called Meditation Now or Never.
The Dharma is free and so is a lot of information about it.
Buddhanet's Theravadin free ebook archive is here: http://www.buddhanet.net/ftp12.htm
...and their Mahayana library is here: http://www.buddhanet.net/ebooks_ms.htm
All are DRM free, and it looks like all are available to read in .pdf format. Almost every computer has a pdf reader, so a person could even read these books on their local library's computer if they don't own a computer themselves.
I'm not telling you what to do, but I just wanted to point out that you don't have to shell out lots of cash in order to learn about Buddhism. Buddhism wouldn't be for everyone if having a lot of disposable income was required to learn about the Dharma. Besides, I've worked in bookstores, and it's insane how expensive books are.
I suppose one does not have to give up anything to get enlightened. If you have been to northern India, following the Buddha's trail, you'd find out that he didn't really give up living in a proper house. In Sarvasti and many other places where he had been, the ruins are magnificent. You can marry your great girlfriend and have beautiful children, why not. You are a lupasaka, a layman, not a monk.
If you meant 'holy text' like a bible, I don't think there is one where a Buddhist carry to a temple. But there are the three baskets that probably would take a lifetime to digest. Maybe, you'd love 'What Buddhist believe http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/whatbelieve.pdf
Did the Buddha really believe in these literal gods? Or could they have been used in place of his own thoughts (ex: Mara making him doubt was really himself doubting his path)?
It's true that, in some cases, he's portrayed as an actual being who apparently considers himself the head of the kamavacara (sensuous sphere) world, especially by traditionalists who tend to take a more literalist approach. Nevertheless, looking at the texts more critically, it's evident that, in most contexts, Mara is used in reference to death, the psychological clinging to the aggregates that gives rise to suffering, or to the mental defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion.
In regard to the story of the Buddha being assailed by the hosts of Mara under the Bodhi tree prior to his enlightenment, for example, G. P. Malalasekera's entry in the Dictionary of Pali Names states: Some have suggested that these beings are real and can be 'seen' by skilled meditators, like the Buddha. Others suggest that the Buddha adopted the cosmology of the time for teaching purposes (e.g., I agree with Prof. Gombrich that DN 27 is a lively and ingenious parody that's actually meant to make fun of the very need for a cosmology as a foundation for religious development).
Personally, I'm open to the possibility that more powerful and long-lived beings exist in various realms, and it's often fun to speculate about them (I've heard some entertaining stories about people who could see beings from these other realms). But I also think it's more useful to focus on what we can experience for ourselves in the here and now, and use our practice to try and transcend our mental realms in order to find a true and lasting happiness inside.
2. If you are even trying to do some meditation, that is excellent. One possibility -- one that I favor -- is to mentally count exhalations from one to ten and begin again ... over an over. Numbers offer a focus and support without easily going astray: A 3 is just a 3 and a lot less diverting than, say, something called "enlightenment." If you find yourself going astray while counting -- thinking about your girlfriend or checkbook or a Big Mac -- simply return to one. Always begin again. Fall down seven times, get up eight.
3. Try not to concern yourself too much with "good" karma or "bad." Karma will take care of itself and you would be well-advised to do likewise. Karma is a little like your favorite sports team -- it can be lousy or it can be grand, but there's not really anything you can do about it. Drinking beer and talking about your favorite sports team -- or karma -- may be pleasant, but it's not something to take too seriously. Your life is the farm you are stuck with so ... root for the home team!
4. Read what you like -- literally, anything -- but stick with your meditation. As my sister with two kids once advised me when my first child was in the offing and I was a bit anxious, "Adam, you can either read every book that was ever written about child-rearing or you can read none at all. Either way, you won't know shit."
5. You don't need to give up anything in your Buddhist practice. In fact, if you try to "surrender" or "renounce" or any of the other fine-sounding injunctions, you are highly likely to compound the problem rather than find a solution. No need to go into self-flagellation mode. Remember when you were a kid and had a favorite toy? I mean the really koolest toy in the whole world! You couldn't live without it. Your life was completed and improved by having it. Seriously, remember? Where is that toy and the joy that came with it today? Assuming it didn't break or get lost, the likelihood is that you simply lost interest or found something more interesting. You didn't give it up ... it just walked away all by itself. The same is true in a Buddhist practice ... things walk away without any need to apply virtue or mysticism or morality. It's just what happens.
6. Pay attention, take responsibility and see what actually happens.
I wold add nothing more than has been said already. I would only recommend slowing things down mentally a little - your post reminds me of my introduction to Buddhism, and the excitement that still follows me around like a badly trained dog. Sit! No still doesn't always obey... But it gets better with time.
Bon voyage!
Mettha
http://www.thewaytoinnerpeace.com/
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm
It's next to the "Exotic foods" aisle.....