 Buddhism is a method of cultivating the mind. Since Buddhism affirms that the universe is governed by impersonal laws and not by any creator-god, it has no use for prayer, for the Buddha was a teacher and not a god.
Buddhism regards devotion not as a religious obligation but as a means of expressing gratitude to its founder and as a means of self-development. Hence Buddhism is not a religion at all. Nature abhors a vacuum, and religious entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the situation, seize the opportunity to spew prophetic nonsense. At least some area of life should be left to the individual where the person is totally free, without anybody else deciding for him, where he can open his wings like an eagle and fly across the sun with no chains, no bondages, no hindrances. Honesty is honesty. It cannot be Muslim, it cannot be Christian, it cannot be Buddhist. Truth is simply truth. It is neither Christian nor Hindu nor anything else. Love is simply love. It cannot be Eastern and it cannot be Western. Compassion is compassion. It does not belong to any race, to any country, to any climate; it is not dependent on any geography, or any history. Meditation is simply so scientific that just as we accept physics without bothering about whether it is Hindu or Muslim, we accept chemistry without ever thinking whether it is Protestant or Catholic. When we go to the doctor, we never bother whether the medicine is Christian or Muslim. The inner reality is simply a pure silence: Thousands of flowers blossom there but they don’t belong to any organization. They are the reward of our own search, of our own inward-going. All the organized religions are basically depriving humanity of religion because they are misdirecting us. They are always directing us outwards. Their God is far away in the sky. And when we pray, folding our hands towards the sky, we don’t realize that there is nobody to hear us. In fact, the one who is praying, the one who is alive in us, the one who is breathing in us, is the God. We have just to discover it. It is hidden in the layers of our false personality. Find out, in your innocence, and life becomes a sheer joy, a song without words, a dance, a celebration. And at the very end of your celebration, there is nothing but tears of gratitude. Those tears of gratitude belong to the individual heart, overflowing with gratefulness towards existence. Heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. Thoughts of heaven may stave off fears of death and the idea of an afterlife offers some hope in a world where life has been pretty harsh. Religious belief in the afterlife can be a powerful motivator to follow the rules of the religion. If you think of your body as a machine, it’s kind of hard to believe in life after death. Regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers. A deity no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the universe in the light of a series of developments in physics. xisngnlfj2@yahoo.com
Vivianmariadasilvanascimento
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I disabled the Comments to this WordPress blog because I was spending too much time every day deleting spam. However, as I was doing one last sweep of spam, I came across the above comment that may have been sent by a spammer because it doesn’t relate to any particular blog post. However, it is so well-written that I decided to keep it and make it a blog post. I suspect it may have been copied from a learned treatise and used by a spammer – I just don’t know. I disagree with its conclusion as set forth below but that conclusion is preceded by an excellent summary of some basic principles.
A computer is not a sentient being. A sentient being can exist in only two ways: It is either alive or it is alive. The last thought of a dying body is followed by the first thought of a new one. We can read the Buddha’s theory of the citta in the Pali Canon. All of us have died into the void many times and have been re-born from that same void. The fact that we are alive now is proof of re-birth. It’s impossible for awareness to die because it was never created. Bodies die, and the unwise conclude that the self dies with it. But the self is an ever-changing awareness that resides in a sentient body without interruption between deaths and births. Every meditator who practices consistently remembers at least a few of his or her prior lives and remembers the most recent one first. When that happens, all doubt of the Buddhadharma evaporates.
But wise practitioners advise us against practicing if our motive is to remember past lives. That’s sakkaya ditthi, the wrong view of self. To find out who we were, we only have to look at the present moment because it is the result of all that we have done. We have never been static and we gain no insight when we re-live being hanged as a horse thief or being bayoneted in the stomach during a war. The Buddha made it very clear that time spent satisfying idle curiosities never comes to an end; if we recall one life, we just want to recall another one. Our sense of self grows stronger and we move further and further away from waking up. Remembering past dreams does not lead to waking up.
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Zen From An Unexpected Guest
