it reccently occured to me that although buddhism contains some facsinating ideals, they do not believe in a god, yet they write on prayer flags which is supposed to carry their prayers to GOD, is it me or is this contradicting itself?
just because they do not believe in your god does not mean they don't believe in *a* god. there is an entire Pantheon of gods attached to buddism. The point of buddism is that you don't *need* their help to remove yourself from the cycle of suffering. You have all that ability built in. trust in youself.
or you could look at prayer flags as a sort of "note to SELF" type thing Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Prayer flags Prayer flags are cloth printed with formulas of mantra designed to benefit beings in different ways, such as removing obstacles, granting long life, giving good fortune, and so on. They can be blue, white, red, yellow or green. People may put up prayer flags of the five colours alternating or of only one colour - according to the astrologer's recommendations. As the wind blows the prayers are carried into the environment and any beings that meet the air or breathe in that air are blessed. Source: Sherab Ling
mahayana is a waste of time and is a religion and is for those of us that cant stand on their own two feet. dolts! i demand you diassociate from gautama pronto! stop the pollution! imbeciles!
I don't think I quite understand what you mean. What do you base your obvious disdain of mahayana buddhism on?
doctrine of the maitreya ,trikaya, boddhisattva .............. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I have to say that I like the people of the far east a lot. Including Indians, chinease, Japanease, ect. I'm ignorant of the Buhdism faith, but I must say, if I'm to correlate people morals with their faith, I'd say, those people have great ethics and morals and thus must practice a great religion. They are also very peacefull people who love the environment and so their religion must be very peacefull and envionrmentally conscious.
buddhism is NOT THE RELIGION it originally was. buddha preached around the time when hinduism was becoming very ritualistic and very expensive to perform pujas, yagnas etc. buddha eveolved buddhism as a religion sort of for the common man. while all the mantras of hinduism were being chanted in sanskrit which only the elite understood, buddha preached in prakrit, the language of the people. anyway, buddhism as it originally was had NO GOD. the basic philosophy was to live your life by a virtous code of conduct so that in the end your sould would be free from the cycle of death and rebirth-- a state called nirvana, which is another word for the corresponding state in hinduism called moksha. anyway, around 200 to 300 years after buddha died a great sage called sankaracharya was born. he helped revive hinduism and freed a great deal of it from all the ritualistic crap. so many people turned to hinduism again. but what happened to buddhism was people began to worship buddha as a god. after some time the hindus declared that buddha was an avatar of lord vishnu--- the greatest insult to buddhism, i feel. buddha isn't worshipped by hindus as an avatar of vishnu, but it had been declared, and buddha had lost his fundamental identity and became a god---the very thing he campaigned against. anyway, tibetan buddhism is rubbish. it's a fusion of buddhism and the old pagan religion of tibet. an indian buddhist monk called rinpoche travelled to tibet and translated the works of buddhism into tibetan. gradually buddhism was adoptec by tibetans BUT it was fused with the old pagan religion. i'm sorry to say, buddhism as buddha envisioned it is no longer practised anywhere on the earth.
Good post airavata Very similar to christianity, Jesus also is being worshipped as a god now by modern christain, the very thing he campaigned againest......I guess people are pagan by nature and would always rather hang on to materials than spiritual meaning.
I agree, very good post. I was under the impression that buddha asked for help in his quest for enlightenment from one of the hindu gods. does that not mean that the gods must exist in the belief system? Part of what I like about buddhism is that it doesn't ask you to worship any god. It is logical in that the basic teaching seem to be that compasion in action is much more important than calling the name of a a god in reverence. But that doesn't seem to preclude the exsistance of a god. it just reduces the importance in the active involvment of the God in everyday life. And I would fully agree that holding Buddha as a god, and not simply as a really nice guy who tried to help people is an offront to what he was trying to do.
the basic tenet of buddhism was virtous conduct, to help the people. i can understand what buddha was thinking because even now hinduism has so many rituals for this for that it's irritating. and the priests chant in sanskrit which is a dead language, so you have no clue what they're saying, so it gets a bit irritating. so the loss of buddhism as it was is rather sad. i mean now even buddhism has rituals etc. so what buddha aimed at is now defunct. plus i realised another thing, most people call buddha-- 'lord buddha'. it's almost unconscious, but it does reflect the common perception of buddhism.
