| Username |
Post |
| jack1 |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 12:56 PM
Four Noble Truths:
The first is that all impermanent objects and beings are subject to suffering.
The second truth is that the arising of suffering comes from our own ignorance and attachment to impermanence.
The third truth is the realization that there is an end to this suffering and anguish, and that end is the knowledge of the ultimate reality.
The fourth truth is that the Eightfold Path is the way to achieving this ultimate reality.
The Eightfold Path consists of the following:
Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Living, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration
...borrowed.
|
| event horizon |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 01:47 PM
The fifth but the most important truth is:
There is no such thing as truth. Everything is relative and the perception you have likes to see it as absolute and therefore, erring.
|
| vivid |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 01:56 PM
The fouth truth is that the ultimate reality is DEATH.
Sufferings are always part of life so only death will part us from them.
The bitter truth.
|
| jack1 |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 08:36 PM
Ultimate reality is Death? Death is one of the truths ...I think. How do you know Death will part you from the sufferings? none knows what happens after death.
|
| marooned |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 10:19 PM
Death is not the only answer to get free of sufferings...First of all we have to find out the reason behind our sufferings...Why do ppl suffer?? I think SELFREALISATION is the only answer to this...when ppl realise they have made mistakes they suffer...what great suffering would there be than the mental torture???
Think more about dukha,magga,nirodha,samodaya.....these r not mere words..when we try to commit ourselves to these words...we can get some more clearer perception....merely goin thru n questionin oneself is not the answer...practise things urself to know the real answer....i hope u get my point.
peaceee..
|
| marooned |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 10:22 PM
hey jack...
did u borrow this from tao's way of/to peace??
|
| jack1 |
Posted
on 19-Jan-03 10:30 PM
M.....i cant remember where i got it from
|
| event horizon |
Posted
on 20-Jan-03 01:36 AM
Buddha's sutras.
|
| event horizon |
Posted
on 20-Jan-03 01:37 AM
The main text of Taoism is called Tao te Ching by Lao Tzi
|
| Hamjayega |
Posted
on 20-Jan-03 04:18 AM
Death is a part of this life not of the next..so death in itself is not the end of our suffering. I think what we are missing her is KARMA!!! the ultimate reason for happiness and suffering
|
| vivid |
Posted
on 20-Jan-03 09:10 AM
With death, this life ends.
With birth, a new life starts.
Inbetween life and death,
Sufferings here and there.
Suffering is a shadow,
Where life takes a form.
A form without shadow,
Reigns in the dark,
Timeless and dimensionless,
Life after death,
|
| starry night |
Posted
on 21-Jan-03 05:15 AM
We all have our ways of explaining the unquestionable..i just want to read an excerpt from "The Sacred Depth of Nature" by Ursula Goodenough... if you guys get a chance, please do read her book. Shes got an amazing way, very poetic and magic way of reflecting our existence...a little long.just sit tight....:
" the night sky was ruined. i would never be able to look at it again. i wept into my pillow, the long slow tears of adolescent despair. And when i later encountered the famous quote from physicist Steen Weinberg-"the more the universe seems comphrehesible, the more it seems pointless"- i wallowed in its poignant nihilism. A bleak emptiness overtook me whenever i thoguth about what was really going on out in the cosmos or deep in the atom. So i did my best not to think about such things. ....i have come to understand that i can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing taht i dont have to seek a point. In any of it. Instead, i can see it as the locus of Mystery. :
1. the mystery of why there is anythying at all, rather than nothing
2. the mystery of why the universe seems so strange
3. the mystery of where the laws of physics came from
Mystery. INherently pointless, inherently shrouded in its own absence of category. The clouds passing across teh face of the diety in the stained-glass images of Heaven......i think of hte ancients ascirbing thunder and lightning to godly feuds, and i smile. the need for expalnation pulsates in us all. Early humans, bursting with questions about nature but with limited undersatnding of its dynamics, explained things in terms of supernatual persons and person-animals who delivered the droughts and floods and plagues, took the dead, and punished or forgave the wicked. Explanations taking form of unseen persons were our only option when persons were teh only things we felt we understood. Now, with our understanding of Nature arguably better than our understanding of persons, nature can take its place as a strange but wonderous given.
The realization that i need not have answers to the BIg questions, needn't seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany. i lie on my back under the stars and teh unseen galaxies and i let their enormity wash over me. i assimilate teh vastness of the distances, teh impermanence, the fact of it all. i go all the way out and then i go all teh way down, to teh fact of photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high temperatures.i take teh abstractions about forces and symmetries and they caress me, like Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not mattering becasue the words are so haunting.
Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emanicipate....
(and she goes on...but you guys should read the book. really good.)
" the tao that can be told is not the eternal tao.
teh name taht can be named is not the eternal name.
the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
the named is the mother of ten thousand things
ever desireles, one can see the mystery
Ever desiring, one sees teh manifestations
these two spring from teh same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery. "
how lao tzu says it....leaving me
|
| starry night |
Posted
on 21-Jan-03 05:17 AM
lol
i said unquestionable...meant unexplainable... harty har har!
|
| noname |
Posted
on 21-Jan-03 06:44 AM
BBC radio 4 is covering teaching of BUDDHA and the four-noble truths. The link is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/tv_radio/miscprogs/fournobletruths.shtml
The Four noble truths - suffering, their cause, cessation and way to attain a life without suffering - talk about freeing onself from suffering within the existence of life, I believe.
|
| pipaldanda |
Posted
on 21-Jan-03 09:06 AM
Four noble truths:
(1) There is suffering. We all suffer. It is true, we have seen suffering from the rich to the poor.
(2) But we don't know what is the CAUSE OF SUFFERING and why we suffer? This is ignorence.
(3) This cause and this ignorence can be removed. (There is a way out so that we don't need to suffer anymore) In other words, there is a treatment to remove suffering.
(4) The way to remove is by following the 8 noble paths.
Among the four noble truths, the fourth one is the real treatment for suffering. This is a path to achive happiness. Which is very difficult to follow. The eight noble paths are similar to ten commandment of Bible. May be Jesues Christ stole from Buddhist religion. And eight noble paths (right speach.......right living etc etc ) are similar to the teachings of Bhagabat Gita.
Example: We suffer because we steal things. We suffer because we tell lies. We suffer because we give trouble to others. etc etc. Can we imagine living in a society without telling lies, without giving trouble to others, without stealing , without having greed and so on? All the bad things we do are the causes of suffering. When there is no bad things happening then that is happiness. Then in that kind of society you be a friend of all the animals. A person of such value is a great saint, mahan atma (great soul) (kind hearted loving person who is no threat to anybody). To him snakes will not bite him, lions will not tear him apart. Because he is harmless and no threat to anybody instead he is like a family to everyliving beings.
Bhagabat Gita says Life is a battle field (which means suffering). In order to win the battle of life, soul and body should work together meaning soul should control over the five senses of the body. Just like Krisna (our soul) directing Arjuna (our body) to do good things (to follow the similar noble paths like the fourth noble truth of buddhism) to win Mahabharat (the battle of life).
Example: When we see (one of the sences) money, our body (Arjun) tries to go there and get it. But the soul (Krisna) should control the movement of the senses by understanding that it is not good to take others money.
When the soul (Krisna) is in control of the bodyly senses (Arjuna), it is absolutely certain to win the battle of life (Mahabharat of sufferings).
|
| sadabichar |
Posted
on 22-Jan-03 10:22 AM
Thought you might wanna read this expert I read somewhere in the magazine. It goes as this:
"I am a Hindu by birth. But I have difficulty defining my own religion. As ex-President of India, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, in 1926, eloquently elaborating the nature of Hindu belief in a series of lectures in Oxford, said, "Hinduism is more a way of life." Hinduism is not a religion but an all-embracing way of life.
We do not have a book like the Bible, and Koran. Nor do we have commandments as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. We have too many books with varying views. The age of our religion has a lot to do with all this confusing picture of Hinduism, the religion of the majority of the population of India.
Actually Indian subcontinent has given birth to three major religions in the past much before Christianity and Islam. Possibly Judaism is the only comparative and competitive religion of significance, which also found its way into India but at a very late stage.
Christianity came to India in the first A.D. and not even many of the Indian Christians know that. Apostle Thomas is buried in Madras. Many intellectuals (Brahmins) converted to Christianity and started calling themselves as Brahmin Christians. This tradition is still alive and can be seen in the matrimonial advertisements if the Indian Newspapers.
Judaism and Hinduism are two major religions, which do not believe in converting or prostelizing. But the former is a very cohesive religion despite many reformist denominations. The outsiders, who immigrated to India, (yes at different times, people did migrate to India!), were also absorbed by the locals in Hinduism. Even Islam would have possibly been absorbed. Emperor Akbar did make an attempt in that direction. But the timing was possibly not opportune. Thus we have not only Hinduism but also many other sects even in Hinduism.
The vast variety of gods, customs, traditions, and languages have emerged over the centuries, which have divided us and yet have kept us some what or weakly glued as people of one faith. Just like the weak glue invented by mistake by a scientist in 3m company became useful for the yellow stickies or "post it" type stickies, Hinduism became a source of weak glue keeping our identity some what together yet allowing the differences to propagate yet tolerated.
Even the temples we have built in the west portray our differences. We worship all kinds of Gods yet we do not worship the same gods. Our Upanishads say that there is only one God but we do not know how to express our feelings for the same. Every stone, rock, tree, animal, half animal and half human in our mythology has been selected to be god by people from different locales. We accept those gods to be equal but cannot accept the person of a lower cast to be equal.
Jainism and Buddhism could not change our attitudes. Gautam Buddha specifically wanted to abolish statue worship and caste system. Buddhism spread to other lands but was almost wiped out from the land of its birth. Why? Because Hinduism adopted even Buddha as one of the incarnations. Above all the illiteracy of the masses and the ingrained beliefs helped people convert or revert back to idol worship and discriminatory caste system.
Even the latest and most recent religion, which attempted to short-circuit the statue worship and other customs, fell prey to the majority religion. The Hindus started converting the first male child to Sikhism out of superstition or patriotism no one seems to know the correct answer. But Sikhs surely were not considered any different from the Hindus. Inter marriage amongst the Hindus and the Sikhs were very common and still are. If it were not for the British the Sikhism would have possibly been completely absorbed in the majority religion.
The result of all the proliferation of religions, languages, customs, Gods, and the caste system has given us the nation as it exists today. We are Indians but with varying languages, religions or religious sects, customs, and even the diets.
We recognize each other and even feel attracted to each other as individuals when we meet, but we do not seem to assist each other as Jews or Chinese do. We do not seem to be able to shed our false identities of caste, regional religions based on the kind of God and provincialism.
The matrimonial advertisements, in Indian newspapers and ethnic periodicals abroad, for the Brahmin Associations from the South, bride and grooms from specific language, religion, caste and custom clearly show that we have a very thick and high wall of ignorance which does not allow us to unite or even think uniformly when it comes to our land of birth."
|
