Buddhists and Intrigued Non-Buddhist Laymen, CONVERGE HERE

I have engaged in horrible conduct on the troper coven thread last night, which deservedly got me threatened with banning.

Please be assured that I am not normally like this. Religion drives me into passions, it is true, but it is horribly rude of me to preach to ye.

I swear as a follower of the five precepts that I sincerely meant every word last night and was not trolling, but hoping to help.

Free of arrogance and free of hopes, motivated solely by thoughts of compassion and pity, with reverent and respectful mind, expound the teachings of Buddhism for the community. ARYA NAGARJUNA (C. 2nd C C.E.), Provisions for Enlightenment verse 27.

I was trying to follow these words here, and for that I am sorry.

I now realize that there are theists who transcend their religions, but I am a Buddhist who has done the opposite with my religion.

None of you want to kill me, or smash me with iron rods, or follow a god blindly, nor do you believe that I am damned to hell. I certainly hold none of these views. You all seek peace and understanding, Like I do.

Any one interested in learning about Marcionitism or Arianism is welcome to PM me. I am sorry one and all for my preaching. Your subject bows his head.

edited 28th Jan '12 4:29:30 PM by terrkerr

I'm the one who summoned her back but eh.

Is weiss intelligent and good to talk to?

Um...yeah?

Wow, you were so worried about the argumen that you used your Weiss summon ability? That's vool. Guys I am drunk again. Im sorry for diobeying the commands of Buddhism.

My girlfriend found this while looking for an amusing image she saw earlier. This being said image if you're curious.◊

This is a rather personal subject to us and to me as an individual. I feel that this article does have a good deal to say on the subject however and so I'd like to share the ideas I've spoken once before, but as stated by another individual. I'm quite fond of how he words himself. Wording is a very important thing to get down.

I think I like that article. Betrayal has been a huge issue for me in the past, and eventually I just decided that I'd try to love everyone around me from a distance without trusting them or having any expectations. It's seemed to work pretty well so far, but a lot of people would argue that it's needlessly cynical and will prevent me from having meaningful relationships.

A bit off-topic, but I require an excorcist.

Why do you need an exorcist, rtl?

I've been having increasingly vivid dreams of myself doing cruel and gruesome things, and when I woke up from one last night I saw a scary demon face staring at me.

edited 8th Feb '12 10:31:47 AM by randomtropeloser

The dreams could possibly be a result of your recent stress regarding your mother and other things. Whereas the face could be the result of what is known as sleep paralysis, a time when you are still dreaming despite being awake. You often times can't move during it, hence the name, and hallucinations are a thing.

I suppose seeking an exorcist could theoretically get rid of something that may actually be there and if there isn't really have a sort of placebo effect on you though.

I don't know anything about exorcisms in any faith though...

Yes, suppose sleep paralysis would probably be a better excuse than posession or some other supernatural explanation. Now that I think about it, it could just be because of my being sick recently causing my sleep schedule to drastically change, and my body is getting used to it.

Ah yes...Sleep schedule changes are always hell. In my case I just take forever to fall asleep.

That's generally what happens for me too. I guess being sick helped me bypass the "Not tired enough to sleep" phase of changing schedules and replaced it with a horrible nightmares phase.

edited 8th Feb '12 11:04:41 AM by randomtropeloser

Eck. Hopefully it'll clear up soon.

And again I suppose it wouldn't hurt to look into exorcism so long as you don't needlessly panic.

It doesn't hurt that searching Buddhist exorcism on youtube has lead me to some lovely vidoes. Observe.

Hey what's up christian guy here.

If you don't mind may I ask you what do you guys believe exactly?

The core of all Buddhist schools are the Four Noble Truths. There's a huge amount of variation between schools, but this is the base they all build upon. They are...

1. There is suffering, worry, and conflicts of all kind in the world.
2. This has a cause. Attachment, desire, and ignorance.
3. There is a cure.
4. That cure is the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path itself is the road map to Enlightenment. In theistic schools of Buddhism this is your map to leaving reality. In atheistic schools it's a guidebook on how to be a good and happy person in this one life.

As you may be able to gather Buddhism is highly concerned with the issue of suffering. It's what inspired the Buddha to search for a cure. He saw suffering. Was bothered by it and the fact that none of the existing methods of explaining it fixed the issue in his eyes. And so he broke away and meditated and came up with his own school of thought based around explaining, minimizing, and ending suffering.

The ideas behind what causes suffering especially in conjunction with the end goal being to give up these often give people pause when they hear them. Whether or not you feel that they are worth giving up the theory of what causes suffering can hold for the most part.

Let's use a dog as our example.

You want this dog you saw at the shop. It's cute and awesome and the best damned dog in existence. You want that dog. But you can't get him right now. And that stings. Because you want the dog. You might not feel that the world has ended but it still hurts. Something you want is before you but you can't get it yet. But when you do...the hurt goes away. Because you now have what you want.

But that's just one want. You have many, many wants over the course of your life and they're bothering you in varying levels of intensity and pain.

Now you have your dog right? You like him. You love him and you want him to be happy and healthy and awesome. You've grown attached to him and when he gets hurt you feel sad. Because you love the dog and you're attached to it.

Now again that's just one example of it. You are attached to many, many thing. The biggest thing being life be it yours or the life of others. Look at how much money is poured into therapy to help people accept their fears of death and how centered in on the idea religions and philosophies are. It's a huge concern and it's your strongest attachment. It's just one but it's the biggest one living beings have. Even people who want to die and hate life find it hard to give it up. We're programmed to want to continue to survive and our attachment worsens that.

But there's still ignorance. Now let's say your dog gets sick. And you've never before dealt with this problem. You don't know how to care for a sick dog. So you panic and worry. You find a way to fix the problem and your dog is better now. It happens again later, but you aren't as panicky as before. Because you have knowledge on how to deal with it. You can see a lighted path for you to traverse and you have something to grasp onto. Uncertainty and lack of knowledge is scary as shit.

But it's not just uncertainty when it comes to ignorance. It runs very deep. We may know that everyone has to die and that everything changes, but do we really know that and accept it? If there's still a little bit of you that questions that and you're still refusing to accept it then you will hurt because of it.

Now the three causes strengthen each other. Your distress about death caused by ignorance about death may be strengthened by your attachment to life which is strengthened by your desire for life.

This creates a person who is bound to existence and whose suffering is hard to deal with and tends to build up. This ultimately is what Buddhists of all flavors set out to solve and deal with.

You can believe in the universe eventually dying only to be reborn and the many gods who live in separate god worlds or you can disbelief in all that and more. But at the end of things you believe in the Buddha's theory on how to fix hurt and that hurt is indeed a very big problem.

This is all just theory on what suffering is and where it comes from and such though. How does one deal with it?

The Eightfold Path is the answer. It's elaborated in a number of ways, through virtues and long fancy charts, but this is the core of the treatment plan. Everything we build up comes back to it and the Four Noble Truths.

Now to handle the issue of cosmology and Buddhism...This is something a lot of people like to know about. What do we think about the universe and do we have a God. To the God thing no. Buddhism does not have a central God figure. Many Buddhists borrow one in some form but as a whole the religion itself lacks one.

We do have gods however. Namely two "species" of god beings. They aren't immortal or perfect and are called gods for being so far above humans in terms of life span, physical might, and knowledge. You could say they're Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Now these aren't worshiped as a whole. The occasional rare member of the species are however. God devotion is quite the big thing in Mahayana schools of Buddhism. Namely the Cosmic Buddhas and the Bodhisatta pantheon.

Universe wise we're not sure who made it. Traditionally Buddhism posits that the universe exists in its own cycle of rebirth. It's born, grows, begins to die, dies, and is reborn with what was part of it before. You could I suppose compare this to the big bang-big crunch cycle theory. The universe is viewed as being very, very, very big. To put it lightly. Existence is absolutely huge and our world is just one very tiny bit of it. Which Buddhism has mapped in detail with fancy lists. Like The Thirty One Planes of Existence. There's also the Six Desire Realms which we can be born into.

The whole birth thing is governed by Kamma. This is any action and the subsequent fruit that these actions create. It's like a cosmic rule of cause and effect with a moral twist.

Not all Buddhists hold to that though. There are atheistic Buddhists who think it's all rather silly. This is traditionally a very basic view on our cosmology and theistic views though.

edited 28th Feb '12 7:26:52 PM by Aondeug

I was just going to say the Eightfold Path, but as always Aon said it best.

I just found the best thing ever. I might have to shelf What the Buddha Taught (because I was totally in the process of reading that!) for this.

Hello. I thought, "Hey, Aon shows up all the time in the Christian thread, I'll pop up in the Buddhist thread."

So hi. I think my neighbours practice Buddhism, but I can't be sure. Are there any real rituals that are common throughout Buddhism? I'm just curious.

The different sects certainly have their own rituals, but I can't think of many that are practiced throughout the entire religion. Aon should know more though.

edited 15th Mar '12 5:16:03 PM by randomtropeloser

It's not so much a ritual as it is a practice but meditation in both its forms is a constant for the most part. Beyond this we enter branch differences. I cannot say much about Mahayana, but many Theravada rituals are similar in practice. Listening to the monks chant for blessings of the Dhamma, walking around the temple three times with a candle and some incense on Visaka Puja, and so on.

Offering of candles and flowers is pretty common amongst all sects to my knowledge due to the symbolism behind them. They die pretty fast which is meant to get one to realize "Hey things change and I'm going to die. I must accept this, but I also must treasure it and not waste it."

Ah. Okay. Thanks for the info.

Sure thing. If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

So reincarnation. The topic popped up again and for the sake of Fallen Legend I'm providing another explanation on the subject. Though I likely have some hidden away somewhere but having to look...

So...rebirth. It's a thing in Buddhism. It works in the form of a continuous cycle called Samsara. Within Samsara things are born, live, die, and are born again in a new form again and again. One thing that must be kept in mind is that the soul does not make it through completely in tact through this process. Souls break up after death into their base bits and these mingle together until they form another soul.

This new soul is then judged by the kamma of the soul bit containing the soul's stream of consciousness (this is what you would consider your self). It is then born into a new life in conditions based on the kamma judgement. This new soul comes with a fraction of the memories, skills, and traits of the souls that the pieces originally came from. It is for this reason that one cannot remember their past lives in whole or typically at all.

Going back to the Samsara thing as a whole...Samsara is split into 6 Realms of Existence. Deva, Human, Animal, Hungry Ghost, Asura, and Hell. The Deva realm you are born as a god in a Heaven and are happy for a very long time. All your needs are met and sensual pleasures are easy to come by. However you have a hard time understanding the concept of suffering because you yourself don't feel it much if at all. The human realm is where we live. We're the most fit to reach Enlightenment due to the realm's balance between pain and pleasure. The animal realm comprises of all non-sapient animals (there are possibly other realms we don't know about). These animals are considered sentient and to be worthy of love and kindness for they have souls and feel pain just as we do. Animals have lack sapience and are driven by instinct. The hungry ghost realm is where Petta live. They are ghosts who are always in a state of extreme want, but never able to satiate this. The Asura realm consists of the Asura, a race of highly proud and violent gods who are very angry. The Hell realm is a multilayered labyrinth of torture of both the physical and mental varieties.

One can be born up and down this whole scale of realms based on kamma levels. Typically if you reach the human realm you stay here however. Reaching the human realm for the first time is a very rare thing however and very hard due to the inability to really properly gather the kamma needed to reach it in an efficient matter. You just have to get lucky really...