Buddhism

MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

Both the beginning and the ultimate nature of the world are left unexplained by the Buddha __ again, those questions are not helpful to consider. The Mahayana school speculates unsystematically about a vast series of heavens, sort of half-way house on the road to nirvana. But in the end even those heavens are illusory. Mahayanist teaching at least implies that the powers of the universe will see to it that all creatures will eventually find salvation.

Buddhism does begin with an analysis of the world of appearances and especially of man. As with Hinduism Buddhism sees the cycle of reincarnation as shot through with pain, largely because life is characterized by impermanence.

The Buddha added the notion that all creatures, including man, are fictions: there is really no “self,” only a series of occurrences that appear to be individual persons and things. Once the so-called person is broken down into his component parts and his different actions and attitudes analyzed during the course of time, it is seen that there is really nothing holding it all together. (The question of how there can be both reincarnation and striving for salvation without a self has occupied Buddhist philosophy form the start.) The notion of no self is difficult, and much effort is spent trying to grasp it fully.

SALVATION AND THE AFTERLIFE

Buddhism sees ignorance rather than sin as the roadblock to salvation. That is, the belief that the world and self truly exist keeps the illusory wheel of existence rolling; only destruction of that belief will stop the mad course of the world.

Its doctrine is summed up in the Four Noble Truths: (1) life is basically suffering, or dissatisfaction; (2) the origin of that suffering lies in craving or grasping; (3) the cessation of suffering is possible through the cessation of craving; and (4) the way to cease craving and so attain escape from continual rebirth is by following Buddhist practice, known as the Noble Eightfold Path.

Original Buddhist teaching and the Therevada place emphasis on the individual monk working through self-control and a series of meditative practices that progressively lead him to lose a sense of his grasping self.

The Mahayana school began with the insight that the ideal of the monk striving only for his own salvation was selfish and did little for the majority of men. Mahayanists eventually came to posit a vast number of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, “heroes of the faith” who reached the point of nirvana but refused to enter it until the rest of mankind was brought along with them. To varying degrees they can graciously grant aids to salvation to those who petition them.

Nirvana literally means “blowing out,” as with the flame of a candle. That is nothing can be said about it except that it is a transcendent, permanent state.

By: Steven Cory (World Religions)