Reply To: Questions From a Beginner

#52241
HugoZyl
Participant

Namo Buddhaya

  Dear ones in the Dhamma. Thank you so much for all your kind replies. 🙏 I have in my humble understanding taken a few days to try to consider carefully what you wrote.

  Firstly, I wish to thank those who have limited time, health or opportunity for making efforts to write something here.

  I would like to share how it appears to me… please feel free to disagree. 

  There are 2 ways: the path of devotion and the path of knowledge. Or perhaps it’s better to use the terms, path of self-surrender and path of no-self-concept (anatta). 

  The dear ones on this website are all on the latter path. But let’s look for just a few minutes at the former one.

  If a person completely surrenders himself to ‘God’, whatever that word may mean, it is basically the same thing as the Dhamma. Morality, concentration, insight – the same thing. 4 Noble Truths – the same thing. Ending suffering through ending clinging through ending selfish desire – the same thing. BUT we can’t look at the average path-1 person to see this, you have to look at the Saints. Similarly, you can’t look at the average path-2 person to see the real Dhamma, you have to look at people like we have on this website 🙃.

  If we say there is no Pure Land of Amitabha, we are saying it because we’ve only seen the average person trying it. Same thing with the Kingdom of God or the Paradise of Allah or the Vaikuntha of Vishnu. If we read the life of a character like Shinran Shonin (Pure Land), Saint Francis (Christian), Shirdi Sai Baba (Hindu) or Tajuddin Baba (Islam), it reads very similar to the life of the Buddha (Not the teaching, but the amazingness). Of course there are cultural and geographic differences. There is nothing the Buddha could do which another character could not do. There are things other characters did do which the Buddha did not do! 

  Those dear followers of the Buddha’s Dhamma are doing the greatest thing a being can do. Yes! But I think we have to realize there is an enormous difference between a common person talking about heaven, a follower of the Buddha talking about heaven and a Saint talking about heaven. It is not the same thing at all. The common person’s heaven is pleasure. The Buddhist’s heaven is as we understand it. The Saint’s heaven is Nibbana. Any criticism of strange things Christian people do, you can also make of Hindus and Muslims, AND Buddhists, of course.

  That is my humble understanding which is certainly vulnerable to wrong views and wrong insight but it is the impression in this person’s mind.

  Thank you 🙏

Namo Buddhaya