Budda

tonyman1989 · Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject: Budda

Was budda a God? did he have powers? is there an afterlife in that religion?
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Philosophos · Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 4:30 pm Post subject: Re: Budda

I can give you short answers:

tonyman1989 · Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 4:32 pm Post subject: Re: Budda

Nimitz · Guest Local time: 2:20 AM

Buddha!

anamoly · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 12:07 am Post subject:

From my understanding, buddha wasn't about being a god. In fact he encouraged that people step away from the idea of gods and to never consider him as one. He didn't believe in the dogma of religions and of course, the irony is that his followers made him a deity against his wishes and have a dogma of their own. Buddha didn't want religion but they made one of him anyways.
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Siderius · Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 5:48 am Post subject:

Buddha is said to have said something like this:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

From everything I have read about Buddhism it really doesnt talk about anything one cannot know like Gods, afterlife and stuff like that.
Reincarnation even doesnt mean what hinduistic reincarnation says. Buddhist reincarnation is that if you believe you are the same person now that you were some time ago then you believe you are reincarnated. Because you are obviously not the same, you have at the later point more experiences and even may look sligthly different. Especially zen buddhism has this view iirc.

The supernatural parts of Buddhism one can find usually isnt part of core buddhism if I can use that term. But its local practises which some buddhists have continued believing in after they became buddhists. This has been possible since Buddhism is a tolerant religion and doesnt try to force others away from their beliefs, but that doesnt mean they can challenge it with reason and arguments.

Buddhism is the closest thing to an atheistic realigion.

CET · Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 7:05 pm Post subject:

Cracked_Vase · Visitor Joined: 31 Dec 2007 Posts: 22 Local time: 11:20 AM

Siddhartha (original buddha) was quite interesting, because he was an atheist in a culture that worshipped hundreds of gods and was highly superstitious. Even when he was alive people tried to worship him, and he had to tell them to stop.

His life must have been a lot like an atheist in the USA where the fundies seem to have all the power.

I didn't know about the walking on water bit ... another rip of for the xtians? Geez, did they ever write anything orginal?
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one with nature · Visitor Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 13 Local time: 11:20 AM

just read some spinoza. thats the closest thing to buddhism/taoism i have come across yet.
the goal of buddhism is to see reality as it really is, and at that point, you no longer suffer.
what happens after that depends on your interpretation of reality. usually, someone who is enlightened will keep on living their lives and doing good things for the world. this is kind of because once you reach enlightenment, you realize that it is useless not to do good for the world, and doing good will help you maintain your state of mind, since usually you will be stronger and more knowledgeable the longer you live.
another idea is that there is an afterlife, or better said, that life neither starts or ends. its just a constant flow, and life and death are only separated by their complexity. buddhism is quite a materialistic religion in this sense, because it hold that everything has an essence, and thus denies the idea of free will, or the supernatural. again, spinoza does a good job at explaining this.
with this idea, it is better to keep on living as an enlightened being, because most likely, you are doing something good for the afterlife (if you can call it an "after"life).

one idea that i have about buddhism is that compassion is the will to survive (not desire to survive. thats different), and since an enlightened being sees everything as one (a coherent whole), then having a will to live is the same as having a will for everything to live. this can seem contradictory at first, because if you have a will for two animals to live, but one animal is killing the other, then you are indirectly having the will for something to die. one animal must kill another for food.
so i define life as simple a different structure within the essence of the universe. as i see it, life is different from other things because of its complexity. higher species with more ability to survive are more complex. you could argue that a tree lives longer than a human and it is less complex. but if a forest burns down, the tree will not survive, and the human will be able to get out and live.
so compassion, or the will to survive, is simply the will for a higher complexity.

im not good at explaining these things, and i need to get my ideas more clear in my head. but i hope you get the point.

CET · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 4:12 pm Post subject:

passrt2002 · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 4:47 pm Post subject:

buddisim dosn't really apper to be a religion bu tmor of a way of thinking
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redraiderdude187 · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 6:15 pm Post subject:

Is there some sort of weird collective unconscious going on here? In the past month or so, Eastern religions have been brought up a LOT more than usual, and at the same time, I started studying a few of them.

Coincidence... or some sort of weird Jungian occurrence?

*ponders*
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CET · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:22 pm Post subject:

Juno22 · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject:

Hands down Vancouver has the best buddha.
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Chubz · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 4:03 am Post subject:

Do all sects of Buddhism believe that there is a hell? I like Buddhism from what I've read, but I don't believe in any type of hell.
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