Karmic puzzle. Friend or Foe?
1. Samsara is the realms of existence. I'm not sure but there are supposedly 6 realms - gods, demigods, humans, hungry ghosts, and hell. According to Buddhism we're born and reborn in these 6 realms depending on our Karma (see below)
2. Karma or the law of Karma decides our birth and circumstances of our lives. Karma basically means good actions are rewarded with good lives and bad actions are punished with pain. So, being born in heaven is due to our good karma and suffering in hell is due to bad karma.
What I'm about to say is nothing more than a corollary of the two Buddhist beliefs I outlined above.
According to 1 and 2 we've been born countless number of times in Samsara. Each time we're born we have parents, siblings, friends AND enemies and this has been repeating until our present lives.
Well, if all the above is true, then each person in our world has been a parent, a friend, a relative i.e
someone we love, trust and nurture. But, by the same token, each person has also been an enemy - someone we hate, fear and harm.
My question is how should we view other people in our lives, friends or foes?
2. Karma or the law of Karma decides our birth and circumstances of our lives. Karma basically means good actions are rewarded with good lives and bad actions are punished with pain. So, being born in heaven is due to our good karma and suffering in hell is due to bad karma.
What I'm about to say is nothing more than a corollary of the two Buddhist beliefs I outlined above.
According to 1 and 2 we've been born countless number of times in Samsara. Each time we're born we have parents, siblings, friends AND enemies and this has been repeating until our present lives.
Well, if all the above is true, then each person in our world has been a parent, a friend, a relative i.e
someone we love, trust and nurture. But, by the same token, each person has also been an enemy - someone we hate, fear and harm.
My question is how should we view other people in our lives, friends or foes?
Comments (35)
- if hell is OK by you, pick 2.
Can you clarify what you mean? For me, the situation is perfect to exercise our free will, supposing that we have one. If we look to everyone as past friends good enough - that's the easy way out. Then there's the flip side - they're enemies too. This is the difficult path in a manner of speaking and puts us back in the driver's seat - choosing goodness despite the circumstances; it's stronger and more meaningful.
What do you think?
In actual fact, the final aim of Buddhist teaching is neither heaven, nor hell, but Nirv??a:
[quote=Nyanoponika Thera]the Buddha's teaching is not a nihilism that gives suffering humanity no better hope than a final cold nothingness. On the contrary, it is a teaching of salvation (niyyanika-dhamma) or deliverance (vimutti) which attributes to man the faculty to realize by his own efforts the highest goal, Nibbana, the ultimate cessation of suffering and the final eradication of greed, hatred and delusion. Nibbana is far from being the blank zero of annihilation; yet it also cannot be identified with any form of God-idea, as it is neither the origin nor the immanent ground or essence of the world.[/quote]
Buddhism and the God Idea.
But, on a day-to-day level, I would have thought that having friends was obviously superior to having enemies, and that feelings of friendliness are superior to those of enmity. But if you don't think that is self-evident, then I'm afraid I can't really explain it.
//edit//
Reading your reply again:
Quoting TheMadFool
That is what I'm getting at, so agree - I was just having a bit of trouble interpreting your meaning.//
I'm not that clear on the issue of the distinction between nirvana and heaven. The former is to do with, as the quote says ''ultimate cessation of suffering'' and the latter is, well, a place that fits the description of nirvana. The way I make sense of this is that, from a Buddhist perspective, heaven is as temporary as the other other 5 realms of existence while nirvana is eternal. If I may ask what is the main difference between heaven and nirvana?
Quoting Wayfarer
It's ok, I wasn't clear enough. One thing I want to ask is, should we do good out of fear of hell or desire for reward (heaven)? All religions seem to have some version of this carrot-stick paradigm and while it makes sense (justice, causality) I feel something is amiss. Perhaps there's no way of escaping reason and the business like profit-loss paradigm it engenders. I don't know. I find the reward-punishment system too selfish to qualify as good.
Am I being stupid by asking the impossible, the complete removal of the self/ego? How can one play a game without existing?
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. While the actions of others are beyond our control we can decide on how to react. I have some questions on free will but that's another post.
Thanks.Quoting unenlightened
Great song. Thanks.
My advice is to consult the Dungeon Master's Guide for more information.
Alas I'm not privileged with guides. I walk alone - I think I always have.
Perfectly agree. All organic life operates according to reward and punishment. That's one of the reasons I detested behaviourism so much - I wanted to write a critical essay about Skinner's 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' and call it 'beyond reward and punishment'. It remains a truism that good an bad actions bear their fruit accordingly, but Nirv??a is outside all of that, it is beyond even what we generally understand as 'good'.
Quoting TheMadFool
There's nothing to remove! There's only the sense of 'me and mine' which refers everything back to itself. What happens to your fist when you open your hand?
That's something to chew on. Thanks.
I think nirvana is a state that transcends causality. To break free of the causal web that seems to be all pervading. Just guessing.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you mean the ego is an illusion?
Quoting charleton
Well Eastern ''crackpots'' seem to have explored the inner universe and Western crackpots have directed their attention externally. Don't you agree?
Easy to say, hard to perceive!
The core of Buddhism are the For Noble Truths and Eight Fold Path, the interpretations of which lead to enumerable limbs on the Buddhist Tree. Reincarnation and Karma are not core and are subject too all kinds of differing beliefs and interpretations.
Perception at a different level I guess. Perhaps words fail to capture what nirvana is. May be it's like fire, glowing with light but too hot to approach and we spend our time moving in a circle around it, trying to express its meaning from a safe distance, struggling against the limits of what can be expressed.
What's left is more important than what's taken away. I think nirvana transcends human-ness, even life itself. After all, it is asking us to blow out things that form the essence of being human - desire, family, love, hate, etc. According to the Buddha, then, life itself is a delusion, at least the way we're wont to conceive of it.
Not at all.
No. The Four Noble Truths stand as a philosophical insight. One can simply accept them as they are. One approach, my approach, is moderation (The Middle Way). I'm not trying to escape anything. Just accepting. But if one wishes to extend the Truths into something more, one is free to do so and I doing so create a tree within Buddhism. Karma itself can be interpreted in many ways. For me it is simply a way of describing the learning process of evolving life.
Quoting Rich
Correct. But what does it motivate but an escape from suffering?
It is an observation that is all. Everyone may and probably will react differently.
I think there's something about suffering that makes it ''beneficial''.
Evolution has preserved the suffering package for all life. Every living thing can feel pain and suffer. Some say that an inability to feel pain would be harmful. For instance lepers and diabetics who suffer nerve damage (losing the ability to feel pain) are prone to injury, infection, disfigurement and death.
Religion also makes a big deal of suffering. Your quote seems to reinforce my thoughts on the matter. Although the ultimate goal of religion is to escape suffering, religion makes a path of pain. Pain is a way of seeing the divine. I don't know the reason for this but may be suffering switches on our empathy and that makes for a good person.
Quoting Rich
Truths lead to thoughts and these, in turn, lead to action.
It's a simple observation which may or may not cause a reaction. Forget the Truth things.
This is something I've been thinking about too. Knowledge guides our thoughts and actions but the strange fact is we may choose not to be so.
By the way, what do you think of my puzzle? Are we friends or foes?
The irony of those who transformed the Four Noble Truths into some game of seeking Enlightenment is that all they have done is ignore the Noble Truths by creating a huge desire for themselves. The Middle Way avoids this by simply practicing moderation.
You only named 5. Did you leave out Heaven?
My understanding is that Heavens and Hells are said to be temporary experiences before reincarnation.
I don't know what metaphysical mechanism or support there is for the notion of incarnations other than those in worldly life.
Who says? Who says how many lives you've lived. They say it's a finite number of times, and I agree. The number of lives before one's end-of-lives ls likely to be large.
But I claim that the matter of whether you've lived past lives is completely indeterminate (not just unknowable). It isn't true that either you have or haven't.
Those things don't follow. Who says that the people in your world in this life were in previous lives of yours?
Michael Ossipoff
You need to take each person as they come, and ignore the bullshit about karma and reincarnation: there is no universal justice.
Shit happens; then you die. Spread some fun and kindness.
Only with these axioms can you fully enjoy your life and make it better for others, whilst they exist.
Indeed that is the best option. Metaphysics is a dud.
Take it as a game. Assume Buddhism is true. What then?
I ask because Buddhists are very fond of how the many lives notion makes us all related and that, therefore, we should love each other. They never mention the obvious corollary that, by the same token, we're all enemies too.
That's another thing for Buddhists to think about.
Reincarnation is only a side issue. Buddha had some sense to talk. The after life shit is still irrelevant.
Even if it is true, since you don't remember your past lives it's just as if you just die. So no real change. I'll stick to my axioms.
You won't.
If you're reincarnated, you won't know that. You won't remember a past life.
If you instead go into the deep-sleep at the end of lives, you won't know that either, because you won't know that there ever was, or could be, such a thing as a life, body, person, identity, time, or events.
But, as a matter of fact, your experiences with those two outcomes will be different from eachother, even though you won't know that one of them happened.
I'd say that the fact that you won't know what happened doesn't mean that your experience is the same, with those two different outcomes.
Most everyone, including me, who believes that reincarnation probably happens, agrees that only a very, very few people are life-completed enough to reach the sleep at the end-of-lives at the end of this life. In other words, then, reincarnation will be the outcome for pretty-much everyone at the end of this life.
No, I can't prove that there's reincarnation, but, as I've mentioned before, it's implied by an uncontroversial meta[hysics.
I like the discussion of metaphysical issues, but I'm not saying that it's important to convince anyone about a particular metaphysics or metaphysical conclusion.
Michael Ossipoff
Of course that's good advice, regardless of what, if any, metaphysics you subscribe to. ...and whether or not there's reincarnation.
[quoting]
Mad Fool continues:
Metaphysics doesn't determine, decide or change Charlton's advice quoted above.
Are you saying that makes metaphysics "a dud"?
If you want to discuss something physically practical, then discuss engineering (or maybe physics, because it informs engineering) instead of metaphysics.
Definite uncontroversial things can be said about metaphysics.Some people aren't interested in it. Maybe you're one such. That's fine. I recommend engineering.
Michael Ossipoff
LOL(Y)