Mercia Blackcat
Striker
Right you are. I think the Buddhist approach would differ subtly in that I’d imagine the proposition would be to treat others in the way they would like to be treated. If that results in being treated well yourself ...or in some enlightenment, then it all leads to a positive experience of life.
And the question is: are you ever dead? When were you born? That’s when you would say you’re ‘alive’ ... or was it 9 months earlier.. at conception... or were there elements of you that existed in your parents before conception.... ad infinitum? And that principle is fed forward in the same way.
I think the Buddhist belief is that, eventually, those bits of you that are returned to the matter of the universe when the corporeal you is returned to it will coalesce and you will reborn as a new corporeal entity. Hence eternal life. ‘Awareness’ and consciousness of the ‘soul’ that is present throughout all this is the nirvana we seek.
And if you don’t agree with this and think it’s just scare tactics I apologise - I’m not so much explaining the concepts that the great Buddha espoused 2500 years ago as making the whole thing up off the top of my head. If I got it right it was purely accidental
From the Diamond Sutra:
At that time the Venerable Subhuti came to that assembly, sat down...and said to the Lord:.... O Lord, how much the Bodhisattvas, the great beings, have been favoured with the highest favour by the Tathagata, the Arhat, the Fully Enlightened One. How then, O Lord, should a son or daughter of good family, who have set out in the Bodhisattva-vehicle, stand, how progress, how control their thoughts?
The Lord said: Here, Subhuti, someone who has set out in the vehicle of a Bodhisattva should produce a thought in this manner: 'As many beings as there are in the universe of beings, comprehended under the term "beings" egg-born, born from a womb, moisture-born, or miraculously born; with or without form; with perception, without perception, and with neither perception nor non-perception, as far as any conceivable form of beings is conceived: all these I must lead to Nirvana, into that Realm of Nirvana which leaves nothing behind. And yet, although innumerable beings have thus been led to Nirvana, no being at all has been led to Nirvana.' And why? If in a Bodhisattva the notion of a 'being' should take place, he could not be called a 'Bodhi being'. 'And why? He is not to be called a Bodhi-being, in whom the notion of a self or of a being should take place, or the notion of a living soul or of a person.'
I'm not sure Buddha was that original in posing such a question. He took the Four Meditations of Form of the Jains and added to them by adopting a different perspective that resulted in the Four Meditations of the Formless. The last of the Jain great Masters at the time of Buddha was Mahavira and Buddha may have initially been a devotee of Mahavira. The Jains certainly practised an extreme form of asceticism which may be what Buddha rejected for the Middle Way. Both Jains and early Buddhists called themselves Shramanas. The Shramana were older than both and probably pre-dated theism in the form of Brahmanism. The Four Meditations of Form probably originated with the Shramana and most of the concepts of later Hinduism/Buddhism came from the Shramana who were wandering holy men.
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