Buddhism As Education

We made a brief visit to the Fo Guang Shan in Taiwan on November 2011 last year via a tour group. A very big monastery and it is like a city by itself with everything whatever a city needs are available. During our visit, we managed to catch a glimpse on some major locations which we came across. Time is rushing and it is also raining heavily there, therefore our movement were limited to only certain areas of interests.

Another incident of the Lord Buddha's early youth clearly indicates that He had sincerely wished and desired that as humanity progresses on its upward part, it should relieve the domestic animals, from the present grinding burden of the hard physical toil that has been imposed on them by mankind for its own benefit. It is narrated that when the Blessed One was growing into a youth, He was taken by the king to witness the royal ploughing festival in which the king and his ministers and nobles participated with the common man in ploughing the green fields amidst great rejoicing. The Buddha was still too young to actively participate in this colourful event and was therefore left in the care of some attendants under the shade of a rose apple tree. This was perhaps the Buddha's first opportunity at that time to witness a vast congregation of His people who were busy in their toil and grim struggle for existence. The opportunity also came at a time when He was fast growing into wisd...

Ahimsa means non-harmfulness, which represents the first precept. The following sutra gives a clear exposition of the Buddha's views:- "Creatures without feet have my love and likewise those that have two feet and those that have four feet I love, and those too have many feet" . A true and sincere Buddhist therefore cannot but cultivate boundless love and compassion for all creatures. Any other attitude is incompatible with the meditation of Maitri which all Buddhist need to cultivate. A Buddhist therefore cannot offer an animal for sacrifice, he cannot kill one for sport or for meat. Nor can he take meat diet, even though it has been offered to him as a gift as this would indirectly encourage the act of killing. He also cannot participate in war, for that is even a greater sin or crime. The Buddha's teaching on this point, a few of which are reproduced here, admit of no doubt or compromise on this most important issue: "Thou shall not kill, nor shall ye injure...

It is not that the Buddha dislikes the idea of us living a happy life by telling us not to enjoy ourselves in sensual pleasures. On contrary, he himself led the happiest of live in nekkhamma sukha (happiness in renunciation). He only advises us to abandon kama sukha , to abandon the desire for and attachment to desirable objects, not the things themselves. Remember that for 29 years as a layman, he had lived very luxuriously. But had he remained a prince, he would never have realized the Dhamma. Being completely free from all attachment, the Buddha himself was always in a state of freedom. Seeing a desirable or undesirable object, he had neither attachment nor aversion. Yet, he could appreciate beauty as beauty. A deity Pancasikha once sang and played the harp beautifully for the Buddha. He praised the deity but he did not ask to listen more of it. All indulgence in one's sensual desires can only end in bad result and is thus not beneficial. At the same time the Buddha realized th...

Impermanence is a keynote in the Buddha's teachings. Down to the smallest dust speck, nothing is permanent. If it was't so, the Buddha had said, then there is nothing to practice for. Everything is conditioned, due to cause and condition joining together to create an effect, different combinations of different conditions giving rise to different effects. In many of His suttas, He tell us to reflect on our condition: Subject to parents who have died or will die one day, how could we ourselves then be permanent?? We therefore cannot progress any further in right understanding without first understanding the first of the Four Noble Truth: The Truth of suffering. The Buddha never used words casually. In this case His choice of the word dukkha had a purpose to show the cause of life. Here it means not so much the suffering of aches and pains but "du" (to be disgusting) + "kkha" (nothing, empty): that is what we assume to be doesn't exist. What we take to be a...

Problems in life start when we are born. Otherwise, if we had not been born, would we be subjected to aging, sickness and death? Instead of seeing life's unsatisfactorily, many of us see its problems as something good, even desirable. Many people and even monks during the Buddha's time saw no fault in enjoying sensual pleasures as much as possible. Such indulgence in one's desires is very easy to practice, even animals can have their enjoyment too. By choosing to ignore such problems, they only look to fulfill their happiness. But their apparent happiness is just an illusory, a cover for a host of unpleasantness such as worry, anxiety, boredom, jealousy, anger, grief and depression that permeate their daily life and relationships around them. This way like a millipede walking around and round along the hoop, we will not be able to find an end to life's problem in the cycle of rebirth, which is never ending. Ignorance is the problem that is the starting point of the prob...

Let us go back to the teaching of Dependent Origination. The first link on the chain is ignorance. This is not a culpable ignorance. For example, the driver who pleads that he did not know he wasn't supposed to drive through a red light. He ought to have known it. But if a child sets fire to a house, it would be hard for the court to convict him for an arson. Perhaps a better word is nescience, simply "not knowing". Nescience is the state of not knowing that we all begin life with. What does the fetus or the new born child know? The development of that knowing is the flourishing of our pure awareness and intuitive intelligence. These are the 2 qualities of the enlightened mind, the Buddha within, which develops both gradually and in quantum leaps. An obvious stage when we enter into a different level of awareness, a different way of relating to the world, is that passed by most 7 year-old kids. Although the child steadily grows in understanding, all of a sudden at 7, the...