Circumstance. . .
I was recently asked about the origins of Buddhism in the context of what situations and moments brought Siddhartha to begin the The Buddhist journey?
The situation in which Buddhism arose resembles the present more than one might suppose. It emerged in a period of social change in India, when people were increasingly questioning the traditional Vedic religion. Against the background of an economy and society that were growing in complexity, there was an increase in social mobility and the breaking out of traditional structures. Like today, people started searching for meaning on their own initiative and developing new ways of thinking and living.
The Buddha said, the path to enlightenment is difficult and requires full commitment, often across many reincarnations. If you want to quickly reach enlightenment, you can activate turbo, so to speak, and withdraw into an ascetic, monastic life. But people can also take the Buddha’s teachings seriously in their everyday lives and gradually approach the goal – even if the ultimate goals of enlightenment and nirvana are still far off and reaching them may extend beyond the next life.
In the West, we generally see life as unique – it begins with birth and ends with death and life is just what lies between. Buddhism views our current life as one of many, as part of an ongoing cycle, influenced by karma from past lives. What we experience is not random, but caused by our actions in the past.
We tend to pick out the aspects of Buddhism that best suit our everyday reality. One example is Buddhist mindfulness, the modern Western understanding of which emphasizes the good it does us. But according to the original idea of the Buddha, this practice was meant to take us out of ignorance and make us conscious of the realties of life.. Buddhist texts recommend, for example, meditating on the various stages of life and how one’s own body can only take us so far. Meditation, then, is not supposed to make everything OK – not immediately in any case – but to make us conscious of both the positive and negative sides of life, because only then can they be understood and balanced.
Peace and Love, Jim
#circumstance #thedailybuddha
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