Studying a little bit about original Buddhism

Lukaris said:

Do you really know Him as your Lord and savior? As clearly testified in the Gospel of John etc., affirmed in the creed etc.? This should be an easy "yes" if you profess the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior. I do not believe Buddha was evil or anything but it is all about Jesus Christ as God become man, his life, his sacrament of the Eucharist, remission of our sin, His cross, His resurrection, His gift to us of eternal life, our confession of our sins. You want to recognize samsara? Know the Lord Jesus Christ is the end of all that and pray for others to have His salvation. I pray that you will truly know Jesus Christ as your savior and that of your neighbor.

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Proscribe,
As someone who has studied a lot of religion, I would have to say that Lukaris is giving you good counsel.

ProScribe said:

yes

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Glad to hear this. God bless.

Faithful Skeptic said:

ProScribe is/was (I haven't been around much in awhile) a regular in this forum. I don't think he's lost.

Buddhism is certainly interesting. I wrote a paper on it last year that compared and contrasted it to Orthodoxy.

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Would there be anyway one could investigate the paper you wrote, if it's in PDF format or something similar?

As much as we can compare / contrast concepts within religions, be very very very careful about trying to transplant a term from one religion to another. Religious terms carry heavy degrees of connotations - they are weighty with thousands of years of traditions, countless devotional texts, etc. etc.

So while the denotation of Bhavana may be applicable to Christianity, as a component of a dense web of another culture's worldview and way of life, I'm cautious to shift it directly into Christianity. By "cautious" I mean "unwilling"; and by "I am" I mean "you ought to be." That is particularly true if you've only just begun to study Buddhism (or any other religion). There may be similarities between prayer and meditation, but the goal and mindset are different (totally different, in fact). Other than that both cultivate a stillness of mind. So why not then just say that Christians need to gain dispassion and that this requires a stillness of mind for which ascetic prayer is useful? Why bring in a Buddhist term with connotations inapplicable to Christianity?

Christians do not need to cultivate Bhavana; they need to love the Lord their God and their neighbor, bearing fruits in keeping with repentance through the faithfulness of Christ by the grace and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They need to be transformed into the likeness of God in Christ - which is to say, they need to take up their Cross and die to themselves that God may live through them, even as Christ, dying on the Cross, revealed in full His Divinity. Becoming this likeness, Christians cultivate their heart like the Garden under the tutelage of the Master Gardener and this garden of the heart - once having been barren and dead in sin - will become resurrected into the New Paradise, the New Earth, the New Kingdom. This cultivation happens through the work of the Master Gardener, but its tools are fasting, prayer, alms, obedience, and sacrament. These are worthless without faith, but, as the works of faith, they bring the faithful into unity with God through Christ by the Holy Spirit.

IMO, Christians ~ especially real Christians need to cultivate Bhavana.

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if we did, Christ would have told us to

I thought so because this culture doesn't reflect Orthodoxy very well.

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then turn to where Orthodoxy is properly reflected, which is Christ's Church

Easy G (G²);60201604 said:

Would there be anyway one could investigate the paper you wrote, if it's in PDF format or something similar?

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https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B49...tOTJiY2JjYTkzYzMy/edit?authkey=CKjnpZwI&pli=1

Thar you go. I never proofread it (which is a very bad habit of mine), so it probably has some grammatical errors.

ProScribe said:

Just so you know - being over at Dharma Wheel and other Buddhist forums is like staying at a house in China or apartment in Japan. (or Taiwan)

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You'd be far better off visiting an Orthodox monastery. Take my word, it goes a long way in reaffirming your faith and helping you to experience the energies of God that are otherwise harder to appreciate in the hustle of worldly life.

Listen to G. K. Chesterton:

To the Buddhists was given a conception of God of extraordinary intellectual purity; but in growing familiar with the featureless splendour, they have lost their heads; they babble; they say that everything is nothing and nothing is everything, that black is white because white is black. We fancy that the frightful universal negatives at which they have at last arrived, are really little more than the final mental collapse of men trying always to find an abstraction big enough for all things. “I have said what I understood not, things too great for me that I know not. I will put my hand upon my mouth.” Job was a wise man. Buddhism stands for a simplification of the mind and a reliance on the most indestructible ideas; Christianity stands for a simplification of the heart and a reliance on the most indestructible sentiments. The greater Christian insistence upon personal deity and immortality is not, we fancy, the cause so much as the effect of this essential trend towards an ancient passion and pathos as the power that most nearly rends the veil from the nature of things. Both creeds grope after the same secret sun, but Buddhism dreams of its light and Christianity of its heat. Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find—the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child.
G. K. Chesterton (from The Speaker, Nov 17, 1900)

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Chesterton said:

NO two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.

'Orthodoxy'

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And see this:
From Darkness To Light: My Life In Christ: Chesterton on Buddhism + reflection



And here's the Quotation:

While reading G.K. Chesterton's book on St. Thomas I came across this passage contrasting Buddhism with Christianity and found it fit in with my own struggle and feelings, so here it is:


"The more we really appreciate the noble revulsion and renunciation of Buddha, the more we see that intellectually it was the converse and almost the contrary of the salvation of the world by Christ. The Christian would escape from the world into the universe: the Buddhist wishes to escape from the universe even more then from the world. One would uncreate himself; the other would return to his Creation: to his Creator. Indeed it was so genuinely the converse the idea of the Cross as the Tree of Life, that there is some excuse for setting up the two things side by side, as if they were of equal significance. They are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as a sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who will not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha. (emphasis mine)


-GK Chesterton in St. Thomas Aquinas pg 90

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ProScribe said:

I'm going to start studying about original Buddhism.

Thoughts? . .

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FWIW, I've been both and am neither now. I don't think most of my comments would be appropriate in this forum, but I will say that I found many parallels between Hesychastic practice and Vipassana (nepsis/mindfulness). In fact, you could even argue for parallels between hesychasm and the "channels" of Tibetan Buddhism, the purpose of both which is to directly experience God (theoria) or reality (emptiness). Then again, you can find common themes in all mystical practices, the most important when it comes to practice being the importance of asceticism in order to experience something beyond the natural realm.

In any case, I'd recommend you pick up Orthodox Psychotherapy for more information on "hesychia as a method of therapy" or "salvation (soteria -> healing) via asceticism in the hospital of the soul (The Orthodox Church)."

Well, since I am known as a fence rider, my credibility is limited, but it's hard and maybe not necessarily the best thing to try to stifle one's own curiosity. Doesn't necessarily mean he is lost to Buddhism.

RKO said:

Well, since I am known as a fence rider, my credibility is limited, but it's hard and maybe not necessarily the best thing to try to stifle one's own curiosity. Doesn't necessarily mean he is lost to Buddhism.

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The thing is, a lot of us have known the OP for years. Our advice to him, based on what we know about his struggles and history, may not be identical to advice we may offer to someone in completely different circumstances.