As I've said on other threads, I have a lot of respect for Buddhism, although I'm not a Buddhist myself. Some excerpts of a recent interview with various Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama himself and Robert Thurman:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/spiritofthings/stories/2008/2291097.htmMy favourite bits:
Robert Thurman:
Quote:Well Buddhism is thought of as a religion and the Buddha sometimes as a religious founder or prophet. And his enlightenment is described and very carefully defined as an awareness of the nature of reality, not as a revelation from the God. .....and so it's based on the confidence that the human being has the ability to understand their world, and not only that, but that in order to achieve freedom from suffering, the salvation if you will in the Western sense, that is only achieved by understanding, It can't be achieved just by faith, by believing in someone else, either divine or human. And therefore Buddha has been an educational system and if you will, a scientific system from the beginning in the sense that it has always posited that through an investigation of the nature of reality and thereby discovering that nature, that's where you get freedom from suffering, that's where you discover happiness.......
and
Quote: Karma simply means action or causality, you could say causation. The most famous verse about the Buddha's discovery that the Buddhists have repeated for thousands of years is (LANGUAGE) and so on, that sounds great and, it means 'I celebrate the Buddha as the one who discovered causation', you know, that things have effects and what those causes of those effects are how to intervene in the processes of causation. Therefore it's very much a scientific thing. So when he says it's karma, he means it's a kind of causation and by that he means the physical things about the planet are interwoven with the human being's minds because the mind is a powerful energy in nature and that energy is engaged in the way atoms work and the ways molecules work and sub-atomic energies and so there's no such thing as some sort of abstract bunch of tectonic plates that just completely grind along in their own causation without being interwoven with the living beings associated with them. So it's a very interesting and subtle thing.
Quote:You know, I'm one who says that the conquest of Asia by the Europeans is not a sign of the superiority of the Europeans at all, it's the sign of the barbarism of the European, I'm sorry, but who thinks that the biggest bully on the block is the most civilised? I don't think anybody. I think the civilised person is the gentle person who therefore is vulnerable, and so when you say I'm like the Elijah and so on, I'm trying and I think the Dalai Lama does too, to call upon the world in this late stage of history where we've reached you know what Al Gore - I mean is Al Gore a messianic figure? What is he doing, saying An Inconvenient Truth? He's saying that we have actually reached a point where we have a responsibility to recognise that we could destroy all life on earth, and we're close to doing so. And therefore we really have to change our way of living and way of producing and way of breathing and electric lights, whatever. If Al Gore is an Elijah, OK, I'm an Elijah in the sense that I'm saying that mentally speaking, we have to come to a higher level of ethics and we're able to live at a higher level and we're able to be more happy actually.
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