Buddhism 101

So... theoretically, mind-altering drugs allow one to escape reality. However, they are also physically self-destructive. So, if I were on a constant drip of some chemical that kept me in dreamland forever (ignore the concept of resistance for the moment), would the escape of the mind trump the damage to the body this would probably cause?

I.e. is addiction and "getting high" acceptable if one removes the singular issue with it: that the high ends and the withdrawal/hangover/whatever begins?

Which also brings up the idea of, could Nirvana (that is the term, yes?) be brought about with something akin to The Matrix (while playing Nirvana? 0_o)?

When I say escape reality I mean "Escape the cycle of rebirth". To ignore reality through any means is frowned upon greatly in Buddhism. Hermits who avoid reality, druggies who are constantly high, people who pretend that bad things didn't really happen, people who spend all their time day dreaming...All these and more are frowned upon.

To escape reality you need to take reality on as a whole. To stand up to it and accept it. It's there. You're there. By God you're going to live and you're going to understand. And then you do. Then things make so much sense and then when you die there is no more reality.

There is the reality beyond reality. And yet you know that that was always a part of reality. You just didn't know it.

Nibbana is an unknowable truth until you experience it.

;_;

Ah, so there are metaphysics. How does the afterlife work?

Now that I'm reading up on Pragmatism (Gutenberg link), I realize that it relates a lot to that aspect of Buddhism you described, that idea of applyable understanding being the only important kind of understanding.

What most would consider the "afterlife" are actually just other lives in Buddhism. Heaven is something you are born into as a result of your kamma. You live there and then you die there to be reborn elsewhere. Ghosts are also living lives and they too will die. People in Hell are living lives and they too will die. Only to be reborn.

Nibbana is outside of reality though it is part of it. If it wasn't we couldn't reach it. When one achieves it the cycle of rebirth is undone and you cease to be born. Heaven, Hell, human life, animal life, life as an angry god, life as a ghost...all of that ends. It's gone and it will never ever come back. You've escaped.

But what Nibbana is we cannot know until we make it. All we know is that it is free of emotion and free of The Three Marks of Existence; impermanence, anatta (the concept of an ever changing self), and Dukkha (sufferings, pains, anxieties of all types and levels of intensity).

So whatever Nibbana, the Nibbana after death as there is Nibbana within life as well, is you're not alive because to be alive you must die.

This is where the idea of faith comes into play with Buddhism. Nibbana is something you can't prove until you get it. You need to have faith in the concept and to keep moving forward towards it, always with a skeptical mind that is searching for truth.

edited 24th Sep '11 11:54:49 PM by Aondeug

...

Is Nibbana the same as Nirvana and kamma the same as karma?

And this is always the issue I have with learning non-European cultural stuff: the words and terms...

They are. As I stated in the earlier posts I always use Pali terminology.

Probably the most concrete response to this is everything WILL eventfully reach enlightenment and the book will be closed on this world/universe.

However, there’s still an unlimited amount of universes just like ours that will need to escape Samsara.

Don’t we all?

Alternative Response Welcome to TV Tropes. It does NOT get better. YOU get better,    or else.   

Yeah more or less. Lots of universes beyond our own out there in Buddhism. And when ours dies it just gets reborn. Reality is very, very, very, very big in Buddhism. HUGE cosmology.

...also I am thinking of Homestuck again. God dammit.

Relativism and multiverses?

Oh my god, I'm in love with it.

What is Samsara, again?

Cycle of birth, death, rebirth, wash, repeat.

So, Samsara is the birth-death-reincarnation circle of life thing, and Nirvana is the enlightened escape from said cycle?

Yeppers.

Alright, terms aligned.

...the name of a random video game character from a game I played when I was a kid makes so much more sense now...

So, we're in Samsara, and by doing the whole Eightfold Path thing, and meditating, etc., etc., do the Buddha stuff, we are enlightened and get to Nirvana...

...and then what? Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence? Or does the "reincarnation ticket" just get voided when you die? I take it that the enlightenment thing is a spiritual idea?

You've got a number of choices. You can decided you've had enough of this crap, or you can go back to help the less fortunate.

Also we have no idea what happens when you take your Parinibbana. Your final death after which you don't return. You only know when you get there...

Cue frog parable. (bottom of page)

edited 25th Sep '11 1:57:38 AM by Justice4243

Oh, so Nirvana is not automatically assumed to be just 'you disappear from existence', it's more of a 'who knows where you go'?

In Theravada Buddhism, at least, the Buddha could still communicate with the Bodhisattvas and other beings . Though, the frog/tadpole parable highlights that Nirvana is pretty much impossible to describe to the unenlightened, because they have no frame of reference.

I've always had an interest in Buddhism but have never learnt much about it so thanks for making this thread =)

I have a question though. Does Kamma accumulate over lives? As in, this life I am in now, I don't really do anything much. I live my life, have a normal job. Help some people when I can but also do some greedy or selfish thingsbut am not a good or bad person overall.

Now I die and am reborn into I assume the Human realm again. Do I have Kamma from my last life still building or will it all of come to fruition now. Or a better way of asking it. If I stopped world war 3, then jumped into a burning building filled with crazy flying mutant sharks that shoot lasers and get disembered to save about 20 new born babies or ill patients, then die. Do I get reborn with Kamma from that or is each rebirth a new slate?

This post here answers all your questions on the subject.

In short: Kamma does accumulate over lives, it carries over, and some of it plays a part in the circumstances of your next life. You also generate kamma for every last action you perform.

And we're back in business! DOUBLE POSTY BUSINESS. As we have may been able to garner Buddhism is really very interested in that mind thing and how it works. So much so that our definition of soul is basically "stream of consciousness" and we believe that the universe exists because of our minds (though this doesn't mean others are mindless; there's just a shit ton of copies of the universe). The mind and consciousness and figuring out how it works has been a popular subject for a lot of human history really. So much so that we have a name for the philosophical study for it. Phenomenology.

Buddhist phenomenology is a sprawling labyrinth of insanity, but we can break down the formula in a much simpler form thanks to the Skandha or Aggregates. These are form, sensation, perception, mental formation, and consciousness.

First up is form. Form is simple enough to define. It's your physical body. Not so tough.

Second is sensation. When your body comes into contact with a sense object it takes this info in and senses it. An immediate reaction is formed that judges the sense object as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So if you touch a table that is sensation in work! But what about when you forget about the table because of sensory conservation...

That is where perception, the third aggregate, comes into play. Perception is the conscious recognition of the sensation. We're not constantly perceiving things in full. If we were we'd probably lose our fucking minds. The brain ends up filtering out lots of shit in your perception, effectively blinding you to it. You can't focus on absolutely everything at once all the time.

The fourth aggregate is mental formation which is a really fancy way of saying "thought". It consists of all your thoughts, opinions, views, and so on. You might hate your noisy neighbor. The opinion "I hate my noisy neighbor" is a mental formation and skandha four at work.

The fifth aggregate is consciousness. It is the sum of the other aggregates. Basically sensation, perception, and mental formation come together to form this confusing thing we call "consciousness".

So. Those are the five skandha. They work something like a formula or something I guess you could say. Everything that happens to you you could categorize into these five. An example!

Let's say you touched a hot stove. A burning pain comes to your hand and you pull back. You're quite aware of this pain. It's hard not to be. I mean it burns like hell. That's hard to ignore and put into the brain's "Don't care" category. And so a thought arises. "I don't like that...I WON'T EVER DO IT AGAIN". You now hate the stove and everything it stands for because it had the gall to assault you in such a fashion. And you're conscious to all this of course. Unless you're some braindead zombie that can still hate stoves.

So...To break it down...

Body touches stove>pain from hot stove burn>Perception of pain>Forming of "I don't like this stove" opinion>consciousness at work

It gets much, much more complicated when we start thinking about things in the big scheme, which Buddhism does. I mean we've got that dependent origination crap and this/that conditionality. Which we'll get to in due time...

Ooh, interesting. :O

Also, I has another question.. What are the scriptures of Buddhism, if any?

edited 1st Oct '11 8:42:03 PM by Zersk

Poli canon is probably the most recognized of the scriptures as much of it can be attributed to the Buddha himself.

Mahayana schools often have other texts.

The Lotus Sutra being the first to come to mind.

Fun fact: The World's largest book if off the Tipitaka Pali canon.

edited 1st Oct '11 8:49:14 PM by Justice4243

Now for more Buddhist theory fun times! Today you shall learn about the wonderful thing that is Paticcasamupada. This term is translated in a variety of ways because Buddhists lack any sense of coherent and unified jargon! Dependent Origination is probably the most common term though I myself have grown fond of This/that Conditionality.

So what is this? This/that Conditionality is a simple enough idea. Because of this, that arises. It's cause and effect. Let's say I have a ball. I drop the ball and the ball falls to the ground.

• This: I dropped the ball.
• That: The ball fell to the ground.

If I didn't drop it that ball wouldn't have fallen to the ground. It needed the this for the that to occur. There's other "this" factors in this. Like that annoying gravity thing. Gravity always up in our shit man. Making balls fall to the ground and making jumping off cliffs with a safety net of some form labeled a suicide attempt.

But how did the ball get in my hand in the first place? It's a that itself. The this was my picking it up. There are causes to the very existence of the ball as well. They get smaller and smaller.

Life is a vast web of interconnected cause and effect. We can't exist without it. I need those atoms and cells and tissues and muscles and limbs and bacteria and other shit just to exist. And then there's that air stuff and food and god knows what else. If I do things it affects other things. Even if I can't see it. I am killing hundreds of little things right now as I type. DIE BACTERIA. I am committing heinous bacterial genocide or something like it.

You basically can't outrun the horrible truth of reality that is This/that Conditionality. It is this idea that enables us to escape reality though! Though without it there wouldn't be a need to escape since there wouldn't be anything! Funny how things work like that...

So because Buddhists are incapable of laying down any sort of idea without creating a list of the various parts of it the Theravadans created The Twelve Nidana and added it to their post-canonical commentaries. Which are a very big thing in Theravada tradition and Buddhology as a whole. So...Nidana.

1. Birth-The coming into being or coming forth. This refers not just to birth like we normally think about it, but also as acquisition of a new status or position. I am born into the status of a student for example. Birth leads to aging and death.
2. Becoming-There are three types. Sensual becoming, form becoming, and formless becoming. Becoming leads to birth.
3. Clinging/Sustenance-There are four types. Sensual clinging, view clinging, practice clinging, and self clinging. Clinging leads to becoming.
4. Craving-There are six types of craving. You crave for sounds, tastes, tactile feelings, smells, sights, and ideas. Craving leads to clinging.
5. Feeling/Sensation-We have six senses. Sight, sound, smell, tactile sensation, taste, and thought. Feeling leads to craving.
6. Contact-This is our coming into contact with an object. Contact leads to feeling.
7. Six sense media-The eyes, ears, tongue, skin, nose, and mind that we use to sense the world around us. Sense media leads to contact.
8. Name and form-Feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention make up Name. The four great elements (change this with science stuffs now) make up form. Name and Form leads to the six sense media.
9. Consciousness-We have six classes of consciousness for each of the senses. The formula of consciousness is The Five Aggregates as seen earlier in the thread. Consciousness leads to Name and Form.
10. Fabrications-There are three types of these. Verbal, mental, and bodily. I'll discuss Sankhara at length another time because it's a thing that needs to be explained...Fabrications lead to Consciousness.
11. Ignorance-This is being unaware of The Four Noble Truths. You aren't aware of suffering, where it comes from, that you can deal with it, and/or that The Eightfold Path is the way to deal with it. Ignorance is also not understanding The Dhamma fully. Ignorance leads to fabrications.

Now you follow these steps backwards to undo the cycle of rebirth. These were mentioned in The Tipitaka itself, but the commentaries just sort of gathered them into a neat list. For those wondering where number 12 is...12 is aging and death. Once you reach that the cycle just repeats. It's sort of the beginning and the end so I'm not sure where to put it...

edited 3rd Oct '11 2:28:21 PM by Aondeug