Thank you for saying that. I have to wonder, though, about my own sincerity if, after saying some, perhaps, rather idealistic things(?) of my own, I then keep an apparent enthusiast like you waiting for nearly twenty days(!) before replying to the following (my regrets for the wait)............:Susma Rio Sep said:
Alas, you overestimate my erudition -- and underestimate my capacity at conning readers hereSusma Rio Sep said:
! Don't forget this is strictly a hobby for me, not a professional discipline.I suppose -- and posters here like Vajradhara are undoubtedly far more qualified than I am to address this -- that there are two chief realms entailed in Buddhist metaphysics: the journey for each individual soul, which is ultimately a part of one large soul; and the pantheon of supra-human beings (or deities), a pantheon that is largely, though not entirely, inherited from Hinduism.
How much of this are we to take literally, and how much symbolically? Believe it or not, many a reference book that I have read makes the glib (IMO) statement that Buddhism is essentially atheistic! For me, though, frankly, anyone who has properly grasped what atheism is (and too many uncomprehending, perhaps lazy, perhaps cowardly[?] encyclopedias/reference tools out there prevaricate and obscure what atheism chiefly is, IMO) could never apply atheism to Buddha.
In fact, what emerges from Buddha's articulation of humanity and its -- and Deity's -- place in the cosmos is a construct more akin to Epicurus than to Critias.
Critias is the earliest writer in Western culture (a Greek in the time of Socrates) to espouse overtly the notion that Deity itself is a fiction cobbled together by homo sapiens, while Epicurus (and Lucretius, whose The Nature of Things is the locus classicus for the full articulation of the Epicurus philosophy) judges Deity (or deities) to be a reality, but one that has little significant impact on human doings. Everyone whom I know personally who claims to be an atheist would candidly associate themselves more with the Critias stance than with the Epicurus one. Yet it is the Epicurus one that more closely mirrors (though it is not identical to) Buddha's. That is not atheism.
There are, at the same time, profound implications in Buddha's judging Deity as not universally influential on the human "comedy". There is, actually, a fairly amusing Digha-Nikaya dialogue (the Kevaddha Sutta: Sutta 11, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/sutta/digha/dn11.html) in which a monk manages to travel through the various realms where the various "deities" in the Hindu pantheon abide. His question is blunt but knotty at the same time: "Where do these four great elements -- the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property -- cease without remainder?"
He eventually makes his way all the way up to Brahma himself and poses the same question. Brahma at first evades the question: "I, monk, am Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be.'
The monk repeats the question: "Friend, I didn't ask you if you were Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. I asked you where these four great elements -- the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property -- cease without remainder."
And Brahma yet again repeats the same formulation in response!
Finally, when pressed, Brahma sheepishly takes the monk aside: "These gods of the retinue of Brahma believe, 'There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not know. There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not see. There is nothing of which the Great Brahma is unaware. There is nothing that the Great Brahma has not realized.' That is why I did not say in their presence that I, too, don't know where the four great elements... cease without remainder. So you have acted wrongly, acted incorrectly, in bypassing the Blessed One [i.e., Buddha] in search of an answer to this question elsewhere. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers it, you should take it to heart."
In other words, Buddha, or _a_ Buddha -- the word is also a generic term, meaning, essentially, someone finally freed from the painful cycle of continuous reincarnation, among other things -- can attain knowledge denied to the gods.
The soul's journey, as Buddha conceives it, is largely a lonely one, achieving enlightenment through continued reincarnations, sometimes entailing the attainment of a wisdom the gods themselves might envy.
At the end of this process -- if one is lucky -- there is "Nibbana" (as rendered in the Pali, although the later Sanskrit "Nirvana" is the more familiar and perhaps less authentic[?] term). There are almost as many suppositions concerning the essence of Nibbana as there are writers grappling with it! Some take it as death, pure and simple, and a death that is finally free of further reincarnations, thus suggesting that non-existence is the ultimate goal after all, since there is such awful suffering in this world that a reprieve from continued existence is really a favor anyway.
Un-consciousness, un-existence, annihilation, and so on, is thus the ultimate absolute blessing. (I don't recall whether there are any doctrinal strictures concerning suicide, but I _believe_[?] that suicide simply brings on yet another -- suffering -- incarnation, making it useless toward attaining ultimate Nibbana.........?)
Another understanding of Nibbana supposes that it entails, instead, the merging of the wandering and long reincarnated and reincarnated and reincarnated soul with the single large soul of which every soul is a part. Thus, Nibbana entails the attainment of a "large" psychic existence beyond the here and now in which inner contentment, oneness with the vastness of all sentient beings, and a capacity to exercise one's love of all consciousness in all that is conscious and sentient in the cosmos without the added burdens of suffering and loss is now possible. This is why the capacity to begin exercising and developing such a universal love for and consciousness toward all that is sentient and conscious in the here and now, to begin with, is so critical to attaining such an eventual existence in Nibbana. The mindset of Nibbana right here is what is needed first toward the attainment of Nibbana for real at the end of our long journey.
This is a drastically simplified description of the process, but it will hopefully stimulate others here, like Vajradhara, to amplify and correct what I've only sketched out here.
The Hindu pantheon is huge. But, while the Hindu pantheon is largely adopted in Buddha, what is missing from the Buddhist pantheon (and this is hardly inconsequential) is the concept of either an absolute Creator or an absolute Knower among the various godlike beings. In fact, there is no deity in Buddha who either knows all that is or is responsible for it.
In Buddhism, we see a development of an already elaborate Hindu pantheon, with extra elements being gradually added on above and beyond what we see in the earliest Pali tradition. Terms such as the following hardly cover everything, but they give an inkling of the sheer complexity involved.
There is Brahma, who is supreme, although there can sometimes be more than one Brahma; the "Deva", an associate deitic being that is roughly comparable to the gods of the Greek pantheon; "Gandhabbas", celestial musicians who act as attendants on the Devas; "Garudas", giant birds usually at war with the "Nagas", the most complex and hard-to-define non-human beings, wise and powerful, sometimes supernatural snakes, sometimes supernatural elephants; Yakkhas, first conceived as ambivalent creatures, who might sometimes be believers in the enlightenment of a Buddha and sometimes not, but later conceived as considerably more evil than good.
Personally, I feel that all the concepts here regarding both the pantheon and the soul's journey may well be fanciful to a degree, but they are socially valuable, for the most part. And that latter respect is where any true worth of a set of concepts/beliefs resides, after all. To emphasise oneness as the overarching reality of all consciousness necessarily leads to a perception of oneself in the "other", a necessary prerequisite to the Golden Rule. How could this be bad?
True, the overtly hierarchical nature of the Hindu pantheon could also be taken as a reflection of an intensely hierarchical society. Isn't that the very opposite of oneness? Yes, it is, and I can't pretend that I don't occasionally find it troubling. (This perhaps is one of the reasons why I _sometimes_ find monotheism more emotionally satisfying..........)
Yet in looking at any set of beliefs, I look first at what is new in it rather than at what is inherited. Intense stratification was inherited through the social context of ancient Indian society above all, while the highly individual spin on oneness introduced by Buddha (although there is already a framework of sorts for that in Hinduism) trumps the feudal constructs that Buddha was building upon, IMO.
I guess once again I've implied a doctrinal relativism galloping away on my part in my acceptance of the moral thrust of the main Buddhist tenets while still conceding a higher comfort level with a Single or mono- construct for Deity
.......Oh well.
Cheers,
G. Riggs
