Posted on 11/20/2015 8:30:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Directly after the Paris attacks, the usual suspects posted a famous quotation from the Dhammapada:
In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.
This is a legitimate quote -- or as legitimate as any quote from the Buddha. (Although it's kind of a horrible translation. What the Pali verse really says is more like "hate can't be dispelled with more hate, it can only be dispelled by ceasing to hate.")
It's usually quoted, however, by man-bun Buddhists who think of Buddhism as Upper West Side liberal pacifism with incense and temple bells.
Real Buddhism is more complicated than that.
Buddhism arose because a young prince named Siddhartha, in what's now Nepal, looked around and realized that he and everyone he knew were usually unhappy about something, annoyed by something, upset about something. These somethings were anything from a mosquito bite to realizing that they were doomed to die. He was a sensitive, compassionate guy and so he resolved to find a way to fix all this unhappiness. (The Sanskrit word is duhkha, which is usually translated as "suffering." We put a lot of additional connotations on the word suffering, though. Think, instead, of duhkha as when something is unsatisfactory.) He left home, and after six years of working really hard and following some blind alleys, he saw through duhkha and the roots of duhkha, and spent the rest of his life teaching other people how to be freed of duhkha, too. He never claimed to be a holy man or a saint, he was just "the guy who woke up" -- the Buddha.
So, how does someone who is awake feel? He still feels compassion and he wishes everyone else well -- he wants them to suffer less, too. So, he taught people to avoid killing, to avoid sleeping around, not to take what isn't given to them freely, and to avoid misusing drugs (like alcohol), not because doing those things were somehow evil, but because doing those things makes you, and everyone around you, suffer. When your eyes are open, you see that for yourself, and so you avoid doing them because they cause suffering.
The hard part, though, is the that real goal is to reduce suffering, and strict rules always seem, in this world, to have exceptions. I wrote a couple of years ago about needing to have my cat "put down" -- which is to say I had the vet kill her so she wouldn't be in pain any longer. If you have a broken bone, setting it can be very painful. If you have cancer, the effects of surgery and chemotherapy and radiation are extremely unpleasant.
The result, though, is to reduce suffering overall.
So, Paris happened. Hipsters and liberals quote the Dhammapada to say "we shouldn't respond to this with hate and anger and violence because that won't stop the haters from hating." And they're right -- it won't stop the haters from hating, and hating hurts us, too -- it eats us up inside, which only makes more suffering.
But Daesh (the Arabic equivalent of ISIL) is also causing suffering -- great suffering. It's not incorrect to take steps to stop that suffering, cautiously, with our eyes wide open. Sometimes, to reduce great suffering, some pain and harm are necessary.
1. Nothing. He took a vow of silence and he WAS silent for years. Of course, no one really knows since the Indians deliberately refrained from developing an alphabet for a couple of millenia and only did so around the birth of Christ from the PRESSURE of surrounding countries. They felt it would be a desecration of their VEDDA, their holy book, to have it written down.
So, since all those great gurus and holy men had no scribes to put down their words of wisdom, it's only an ORAL tradition, NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate and unreliable for history.
2. IF he were going to say anything, it would PROBABLY be along the lines of: "It doesn't matter. We are all nothing."
Sidhartha Gautama [the Buddha] believed in the Great Void, the Great Nothingness. He might have irritated the holy pie outta you.
One male buttock?
I thought the objective is to attain Nirvana. What is it? NOTHING?
Yes, or more accurately, NOTHINGNESS.
In more practical terms it is the, “Embrace of Uncertainty”.
RE: The Indians deliberately refrained from developing an alphabet for a couple of millenia and only did so around the birth of Christ from the PRESSURE of surrounding countries.
I thought they had Sanskrit? At least that’s how I know the Buddhist texts were transmitted to China.
Yep, that about sums it up.
Also, there are no women in Hindu heaven. Only men get to go there, so women PRAY to come back as men.
Budda says, “ISIS is like a grasshopper that has multilped too many times.”
They did have it; still do but it's not much older a writing system than the birth of Christ.
This is the kicker: BOTH the Chinese and Indians REALLY believe that THEIR culture is older, better and far superior than the other.
They've been picking at each other since there have been an India and China.
To me "older" doesn't mean better, by any means. In fact, if you really want to see poverty you go to India; if you really want to see filth you go to China. We've been to both and that about sums them up.
Caveat: At least both countries can and do produce beautiful things: cloth, art, statues, etc. The Saudis produce NOTHING beautiful. Other Arab countries produce beautiful things, but not them.
And, ONE of these days China HAS to come up with an alphabet. They have only pictographs. The pictograph for GOOD is a drawing of a woman with a small boy, that is, SONS are good. Good is pronounced HOE, and very good is GEI HOE...woman with small boy is good.
At least the Hindus don't usually abort their baby girl fetuses. They love all their children and don't dump/kill the females like the Chinese used to do. Amniocenteses really did a number on girls in China.
Female fetus abortion was so bad in China that one entire generation of men in China had no women to marry. Of course, the wealthier men always found a wife. Not so with the poor men. Those men were called "bare branches."
There is no abortion in Saudi Arabia. Even the most deformed baby is loved and not "done away with."
Boy am I blessed to have been born here in the U.S.A. I THANK our good Lord every day for that.
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