Post by ognyana on Nov 23, 2008 6:56:24 GMT -5
Dear Sofia,
Thank you for your response and your piece of advice. I’m sure I can find a lot of wise and useful ideas there. I’ll try to look for the book, but it might be an uneasy task in this country. What I mean, there are Buddhists in this country, but they may follow their own teachings, as they are more than one in Buddhism. The 2 regions where they actually practice it here widely and traditionally are Kalmykia and Buryatia. They are both rather far from where I live.
My religion? Indeed, what’s it? I believe it’s a queer mix of ancient Slav heathenism, Orthodox Christianity and French existentialism. By the way, you’ve given me an idea to go and think it over to present (at least to myself) what I believe in in a more or less coherent way. It’s eclectic, and rather belongs to ethics, then to a philosophy or to a religion.
It’s not the place for discussing my own beliefs (for this send me a message please, if you feel like it), but if you are interested in any further discussions of the ideas presented, you and everyone here could take the thread up.
Why I am writing all this here? TK seems to be a courageous man, because he not only has his own ideas and a good sense of humour, but has courage to make them public. So I respect him all the more. It is that TK’s ideas touched off some response in my mind. It’s curious to know he also asked himself the same question as many people around me. Frankly speaking, I think that when he writes [“What is myself then? aha...”] he really already knows his own answer to that, but still it doesn’t make the matter less interesting. I am also glad that you have found yours. Others, and me too, still may be willing to find their own answers, as there might be as many answers as individual ways to them.
It is not that I think that I am ‘smart’ and showing off (though you may have thought so, if yes, I apologize for my poor choice of words), I don’t claim I know the truth (and I doubt there’s only one truth), I’d like a discussion, sharing points of view, as they may provide food for thoughts (a kind of ichiza-konryu?). I believe asking questions is sometimes no less important than providing the answers, the only thing that matters is whether we are able or not to grasp the meaning and the aim of the question.
As is obvious, I’ll certainly not set the Thames on fire or ‘discover Americas’, I am just an ordinary person who tries to think from time to time, especially in my spare time. I have not read philosophy extensively, and I believe my reading was rather shallow and superficious, but I’ve read several books, and that’s what I think, as a result (and it might be interesting to those who don’t look at the pronoun ‘I’, but at the question. I really wish there were fewer I’s in what is written here, but the English grammar won’t allow this):
Basically, I could easily accept the essence of Buddha teaching, but there are two small, but crucial BUTs:
The Four Noble Truths – they seem to me a road to nowhere, to nothingness. By the way, Buddha himself says: “I see … nirvana as a nightmare of daytime.” All the inanimate matter seems to be already there.
Buddha speaks about 8 right things to do, and then here’s a quote: “I look upon the judgments of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon.” Isn’t that a contradiction? So there ARE right things that are not a dance of dragon? If all of them are, so why bother speaking about the 8 right things to do? Or was something lost in translation?
Speaking about the judgments of right and wrong as serpentine dance of a dragon, I recall a story. Here it is:
There’s a short story “Genesis and Catastrophe” by Roald Dahl describing the pains and torments of a woman giving birth to a weeny weaky son, her last hope. The reader grows to commiserate with the woman, to wish good luck to the newborn, and only from the last line of the story the reader gets to know that the baby was Adolf Hitler. A question: will it be evil to let the weak baby die (remember, it will grow into an ogre, and kill about 50 million people. Kill the baby and save the 50 million, tempting, isn’t)?
In terms of Christianity, I’m surely a heretic, as I don’t blindly accept the traditional explanation of many lines in the Bible. So, I’ve come to believe that the line "According to your faith be it unto you" (Matt. 9:29) is not about the degree of faith. For me it reads as: “Everybody will get what he believes in.” – so a Buddhist will finally get the nirvana, a Christian – heaven or hell, a Viking - his Valhalla or Hel, an atheist – complete decomposition and annihilation, and so on. It would only be just, wouldn’t it? I doubt whether we shall ever KNOW what’s there after death (and if there’s anything at all), as it’s “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.” On the whole, I don’t believe any religion or any philosophical system holds a monopoly for truth and righteousness, but the best in them makes them One.
So what are the criteria of what to believe in? Buddha said: “Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
To my mind, a religion, a philosophy, a way of living is yours only when you can honestly say to yourself: "Here I stand, I can't do otherwise.” “Hier Ich stehe, ich kann nicht anders”. (Martin Luther)
In the Russian translation the meaning reads more like “This is the essence of my persuasion, of my whole personality, my ground which I defend till I breathe, and I CANNOT LIVE otherwise.” I think the nuance is important.
And another point of view on “What is myself then?”
Roland Barthes wrote: “…the reader (I read this as “man”) is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text (you may as well say ‘life’ here) is constituted.” I should only add that ‘self’ here can also be viewed as a system of filters through which all those influences are sieved, a constant making choices.
At least I’m still making choices.
Thank you for your response and your piece of advice. I’m sure I can find a lot of wise and useful ideas there. I’ll try to look for the book, but it might be an uneasy task in this country. What I mean, there are Buddhists in this country, but they may follow their own teachings, as they are more than one in Buddhism. The 2 regions where they actually practice it here widely and traditionally are Kalmykia and Buryatia. They are both rather far from where I live.
My religion? Indeed, what’s it? I believe it’s a queer mix of ancient Slav heathenism, Orthodox Christianity and French existentialism. By the way, you’ve given me an idea to go and think it over to present (at least to myself) what I believe in in a more or less coherent way. It’s eclectic, and rather belongs to ethics, then to a philosophy or to a religion.
It’s not the place for discussing my own beliefs (for this send me a message please, if you feel like it), but if you are interested in any further discussions of the ideas presented, you and everyone here could take the thread up.
Why I am writing all this here? TK seems to be a courageous man, because he not only has his own ideas and a good sense of humour, but has courage to make them public. So I respect him all the more. It is that TK’s ideas touched off some response in my mind. It’s curious to know he also asked himself the same question as many people around me. Frankly speaking, I think that when he writes [“What is myself then? aha...”] he really already knows his own answer to that, but still it doesn’t make the matter less interesting. I am also glad that you have found yours. Others, and me too, still may be willing to find their own answers, as there might be as many answers as individual ways to them.
It is not that I think that I am ‘smart’ and showing off (though you may have thought so, if yes, I apologize for my poor choice of words), I don’t claim I know the truth (and I doubt there’s only one truth), I’d like a discussion, sharing points of view, as they may provide food for thoughts (a kind of ichiza-konryu?). I believe asking questions is sometimes no less important than providing the answers, the only thing that matters is whether we are able or not to grasp the meaning and the aim of the question.
As is obvious, I’ll certainly not set the Thames on fire or ‘discover Americas’, I am just an ordinary person who tries to think from time to time, especially in my spare time. I have not read philosophy extensively, and I believe my reading was rather shallow and superficious, but I’ve read several books, and that’s what I think, as a result (and it might be interesting to those who don’t look at the pronoun ‘I’, but at the question. I really wish there were fewer I’s in what is written here, but the English grammar won’t allow this):
Basically, I could easily accept the essence of Buddha teaching, but there are two small, but crucial BUTs:
The Four Noble Truths – they seem to me a road to nowhere, to nothingness. By the way, Buddha himself says: “I see … nirvana as a nightmare of daytime.” All the inanimate matter seems to be already there.
Buddha speaks about 8 right things to do, and then here’s a quote: “I look upon the judgments of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon.” Isn’t that a contradiction? So there ARE right things that are not a dance of dragon? If all of them are, so why bother speaking about the 8 right things to do? Or was something lost in translation?
Speaking about the judgments of right and wrong as serpentine dance of a dragon, I recall a story. Here it is:
There’s a short story “Genesis and Catastrophe” by Roald Dahl describing the pains and torments of a woman giving birth to a weeny weaky son, her last hope. The reader grows to commiserate with the woman, to wish good luck to the newborn, and only from the last line of the story the reader gets to know that the baby was Adolf Hitler. A question: will it be evil to let the weak baby die (remember, it will grow into an ogre, and kill about 50 million people. Kill the baby and save the 50 million, tempting, isn’t)?
In terms of Christianity, I’m surely a heretic, as I don’t blindly accept the traditional explanation of many lines in the Bible. So, I’ve come to believe that the line "According to your faith be it unto you" (Matt. 9:29) is not about the degree of faith. For me it reads as: “Everybody will get what he believes in.” – so a Buddhist will finally get the nirvana, a Christian – heaven or hell, a Viking - his Valhalla or Hel, an atheist – complete decomposition and annihilation, and so on. It would only be just, wouldn’t it? I doubt whether we shall ever KNOW what’s there after death (and if there’s anything at all), as it’s “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.” On the whole, I don’t believe any religion or any philosophical system holds a monopoly for truth and righteousness, but the best in them makes them One.
So what are the criteria of what to believe in? Buddha said: “Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
To my mind, a religion, a philosophy, a way of living is yours only when you can honestly say to yourself: "Here I stand, I can't do otherwise.” “Hier Ich stehe, ich kann nicht anders”. (Martin Luther)
In the Russian translation the meaning reads more like “This is the essence of my persuasion, of my whole personality, my ground which I defend till I breathe, and I CANNOT LIVE otherwise.” I think the nuance is important.
And another point of view on “What is myself then?”
Roland Barthes wrote: “…the reader (I read this as “man”) is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text (you may as well say ‘life’ here) is constituted.” I should only add that ‘self’ here can also be viewed as a system of filters through which all those influences are sieved, a constant making choices.
At least I’m still making choices.