nirvnail

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any good websites about buddhism but I am always looking.. A lot of the sites I find try to make it sound to mystical for me or use too much sanskrit to make it seem exotic/authentic instead of just translating it to plain english.

I think my personal form of buddhism is fairly nontraditional(western), I dont really meditate or repeat mantras, I dont really believe in infinite nirvana or reincarnation, but I don't really believe they are necessary either-- I try to understand the concepts in a practical way that I can apply to life everyday. I think the original buddhas intended it to be simple philosophy and a lot has been added to it over the years, which makes it difficult to swallow, especially for us in the west.

let me know if you find any good sites though.

Even good books and teachers are hard to find.

Whispers

If you want any recommendations on good books etc, please do let me know as I am fairly well read on the Buddhist side of things?

paul30

Buddhism contains the concept of ahimsa, which is basically non-harming.

Do not cause pain to anything that feels pain; and do not harm any living things even if they don't (like plants) unless it is unavoidable (if one is to eat, one must harm plants--although this also helps plants sometimes, too).

This is certainly a good principle, but still negative.

It has to be supplemented by the more active endeavor to help all beings. This principle is trickier, however, because it is sometimes hard to know what will help them. That is where non-attachment to results comes in.

I have friends who will not give money to panhandlers on the street; they say, "Oh, they'll just use it to get drunk." I do give money to the panhandlers; I can't be responsible for what they do with it.

Whispers

Paul30, in what sense do you mean negative?

Even if you only take non harming on a personal level, this is of benefit to others, as your vow prevents you from deliberately harming them and the world is one person safer....if you know what I mean.

When it is so very difficult to help ourselves, it is so very much more difficult to deliberately help others. helping ourselves to be less violent, in theory could lead to the benefit of others...

Farren

I'm not an expert on either buddhism or taoism but I have a few books by the Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhism) and a taoist Chi Gung teacher, as well as a copy of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tse Tsu.

One thing I do know is that they share a large part of their heritage, and while buddhists sometimes say that taoism is not a form of buddhism, I've met several lifelong taoists who say the reverse. Anyway, they're all jumbled up in my head, but I think I've got a fair understanding.

What makes both systems of thought difficult from a Western viewpoint is that it starts with different a priori assumptions to both Western secular and religious thought.

The concept of exclusive identity

There's a zen meditation which asks you to consider a wave. You may identify it as a wave in your mind, but it is not in any discrete sense seperate from the sea.

It is an impossible exercise to define where the wave ends and where the sea begins. The wave comes from the sea and returns from the sea, and is intimately and infinitesmally integrated with the sea throughout its brief life.

It's your mind that gives the wave seperate identity, and the seperate identity is a construct of your mind. No two waves are ever alike, so its obvious that "wave" is not a description of an exact thing, just a general pattern.

Buddhism applies this same reasoning to the mind itself. A human being is not distinct from the universe around them. Your skin is constantly shedding. You breath and convert air. You radiate heat. There's an old saw that every single atom in your body is replaced every seven years.

Even more salient is the fact that there are forces that connect you with the most distant cosmic object. Your precise location and mass in the universe has a bearing, however slight, on the most distant star.

All of the Abrahamic religions and a lot of Western Secular Ethics start with the distinct individual as an a priori assumption. The effect of this is that people hold the philosophy to be the reality, and deal with the universe as black boxes, with a discrete set of inputs and outputs. This can lead to ignoring your intuition, empathy and other faculties that interact with the universe at a far more immediate and subtle level, rather than training it.

Both Buddhists and Daoists assume that you are not distinct, and encourage the individual to act as a flow of force within a singular, inseperable entity (the universe).

What makes this difficult is that in order to teach either philosophy, the teacher must begin by speaking of "me" and "you" because this is so ingrained in humanity (it can be argued that it precedes our humanity and ego is in fact an inbuilt aspect of complex metazoan patterns). So many of the basic teachings start just this way then procede to violate common sense by refuting the a priori assumption.

This is one reason why early jesuit commentaries of buddhism (I've got one here from the turn of the century) misstated the aim of buddhism as "self-annihilation" and condemned its ultimate goal as negative. The buddhists they were dealing with considered the ego an illusion and its shedding the loss of illusion.

The concept of "harmony"

This is something sought by both buddhists and taoists.

The abrahamic religions constructed a legal framework of morality, whereby "bad" things were itemised from experience and transmitted to future generations in written form, creating an ever increasing rulebook and increasingly constrained and puritanical lifestyles.

Christianity could even be seen as an attempt to rationalise the endless lawmaking of dominant Jewish sects into a smaller rulebook, but effectively the rule-oriented approach was preserved.

Buddhists and Taoists focus instead on harmony. This emerges from the concept of oneness and flow discussed previously. Harmony may be an active or passive concept.

Its hard to paraphrase so instead I'll attempt to demonstrate by example. Imagine your stomach and your small intestines took issue with each other. Imagine your intestines refused to recieve anything from your stomach. You'd die, and your rotting stomach and corpse would have screwed each other.

Conversely, imagine your stomach and corpse collaborated for the most part, but your intestines said "no way!" to a toxin, making your stomach heave it up instead. This momentary opposition would benefit you as an organism, and both organs would benefit in the long term.

Buddhism asks you to see yourself in the same light with respect to the living system you are in. It doesn't advocate, for instance, complete passivity when conflict is required, but by making you see the "enemy" and yourself as inseperably and continuously bound, it forces you to seriously consider the consequences of both your actions on the system that constains you, and the million subtle results of conflict.

The concept of "Karma", widely misconstrued as referring to the soul, is simply the naturalistic concept of action and consequence. According to the Dalai Lama in "Book of Awakening", the only distinction from naturalistic "cause and effect" is that Karma deals with the intentional causes and effects of consciousness. In doing so, it doesn't acknowledge the individual ego or discrete entity of the causal agent. Rather, it recognises that the pattern we know as conciousness will maintain and repeat negative karma, and training it to action positive karma is preferable.

Its interesting that another great Chinese philosophical tradition, Confucism (sp?), is much closer to the Abrahamic traditions in this respect, enumerating hundreds of little rules for good behaviour based on past experience, and directly opposite to Buddhism and Taoism.

The concept of unspeakable knowledge

Another koan: "Words are not the moon - words are a finger pointed at the moon"

Anyone who has a special interest in mathematics will know that there are situations that cannot be modelled and predicted mathematically, but exist and happen in the universe.

This is a consequence of the discrete nature of numbers. Quantities exist (abound even) in the universe that are not enumerable. This was recognised early on in western philosophy (Plato for instance, wrestling with perfect vs real-world triangles).

But there is a much wider implication. In mathematics the fault is most obvious because it is the most pedantic. But language too is discrete (or at least for reasoned communication. When words mean different things to two people, communication is not actually occuring).

A system of thought that is wholly reliant on words will tend to see the articulation of the situation, rather than the situation itself. I've personally noticed this a lot since becoming enamoured of eastern systems of thought. Note, by words I mean to encapsulate all symbolic thought, be it numbers, words or any other concept signifiers with discrete meanings in the thinkers mind.

People say to themselves "He said x! I believe that saying x is wrong!" Baddabing baddaboom! Shouting, throwing up and falling over all over the place, instead of feeling what's right, flowing with the situation, working towards the most positive effect rather than the most staturory correctness.

Many buddhist and taoist meditations (I'm doing Taoist meditations for hi Gung) are techniques for "feeling" the flow of your own energy and the flow of energy around you, as opposed to thinking about it. We are so enamoured of thinking in symbolic terms that this seems to be a nonsensical effort, but without it, the astonishing acrobatics of Kung Fu grandmasters would not be possible, nor the "impossible" heart stopping tricks of buddhist monks.

Its a kind of thinking with your whole being (and the energy of the environment around you), that would only slow down and lose its subtlety and instantenaity if it were boxed as discrete components and conveyor-belt processed in Broca and Wernick's areas of the brain.

And this is what makes both philosophies especially difficult for westerners. A large part of the philosophy is physical rather than articulated discussion. Chi Gung, for instance, is almost a physical expression of Taoism. It is a vast cultural archive of exercises and practices designed and endlessly tweaked to focus your awareness of your energy and the energy of your environment at every second of existence, and increase the positivity of the experience.

Nowhere357

Excellent and useful post, thank you. Only the last three paragraphs sort of lose me - but I know we're not talking about "classical" energy.

I would like to say that western and eastern philosophy are not necessarily in contradiction - the wave has no discrete existence, but it sure seems like it does, and both views are valid.

CuriosityKills

I don't believe that Buddhism was constructed with superstition or dogma. People are free to interpret and question the dharma teachings as they wish.

When I was first introduced to Buddhism I was invited to a dinner with the Sifu (teacher) and the rest of the temple. During dinner it was explained to me that the food was prepared without garlic or onions because the sifu was not permitted to eat them. When I asked why not I was told that it was out of fear of the 'Hungry Ghosts'. This sounded superstitious to me.

Upon further questioning I found that the 'Hungry Ghosts' aren't actual feared entities, but are a metaphore for greed. To eat food with intense flavour brings upon craving for more delicious food. To avoid feelings of greed being aroused, monks will not eat foods with garlic or onions.

I think this situation demonstrates the importance of questioning the teachings. Without questioning, how would I have known?

Jutsuka

This is a very good starting point: http://www.buddhanet.net/

monkey mind

www.budsas.org is a good site for buddhist articles.


this one http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebdha016.htm in particular is my favourite. in my opinion, it's all you need

for zen, I like the site http://www2.gol.com/users/doubtboy/ but it's definately not everyones flavour

Murphy

true, the buddha, while religious himself, fought the introduction of religion into his teachings his whole life.

i can't recall any of the top of my head, but i recall finding better information on the practical, non-religious forms of buddhism in books on its history than in buddhist 'tracts.'