Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 2/28/2010

Question
What is the most unique aspect of Buddhism, in your opinion?

Do Buddhists believe in a form of creationism?

Does Buddhism require prayer or any form of religious ritual?

Are there Buddhist schools? If so, what subjects do the children learn?

What is a Buddhist ideal that you think people should follow?

Answer
Thank you for letting me answer your questions

In my opinion, the most unique aspect of Buddhism is that Buddha used logic and wisdom to figure out why we suffer in our lives.  And with this logic and wisdom, he gave his followers a step by step roadmap to help us end our suffering and the suffering of all sentient beings.  He used his logic and wisdom which he developed within himself over many lifetimes to show us that we suffer because we do not really understand how life works.  We think we can find happiness from outside ourselves when happiness can only come from understanding our true nature and training our mind to realize that we don’t have to believe everything we think.

As four your second question – do Buddhists believe in form of creationism, the answer is yes and no. We do not believe in Creationism the way Christians do. But we do believe that creation happened and is happening every moment.  We believe we create our own world every moment.  Christians tend to think that we only have one mind.  Buddhists say every moment we have a new mind because we are not the same person we were the moment before. We create our world every moment through our actions and intentions.

The reason there is no Creation is because Buddhists believe that we have existed from beginningless time.  We believe in reincarnation; that we have a mental continuum (read soul) that we carry from one life to the next which keeps the record of all our deeds.  We believe this continuum never began and never ends.  The reason we believe this (as I understand it) is because of what we call the belief in dependant arising. It may sound hard to fathom, but if you think about it logically, it does work.  Take your life as Eshita.

Dependant arising means that this moment you are reading this exists based on the causes and conditions of the previous moment before you started reading this. And that previous moment exists based on the causes and conditions of the moment that preceded that.  This makes sense logically, right? So follow each moment backwards, and you get the causes and conditions that produced you at 10 years old, you at 5 years old, you at birth – okey so where does it stop?  If it does stop, it is only because we choose a random arbitrary stopping point.  Can that point be found or proved? Can we say your first moment started at birth? Well then what about conception?  What about the split second before conception? Did you really not exist then and suddenly you existed?  Buddhists say that if you had the causes and conditions to exist at conception, there must have been causes and conditions that existed the split second before that that caused the conception to happen and for you to enter the womb of your mother; because, they reason, if there are causes and conditions that can be traced every second from the moment you were born till now, how can there suddenly be no causes and conditions when you die, for example?  If causes and conditions are occurring that produce the next second of your life, and the next, there must have always been causes and conditions at work creating us from beginningless time and going on with no end.

The Creation in Judeo Christian terms says that God made the heaven and earth.  According to the Judeo Christian belief, God has no beginning and no end. If God made us, we would have a beginning. But this does not make sense for Buddhists for several reasons – one being the belief in karma.  We would have had to have had karma that would have caused us to be made by God.  Where did that karma come from? Nothing is random in the Buddhist perspective. Somehow we would have had to have created the karma to be created. So there would have to be some existence before The Creation of the World or we could not have created the karma to be created by the god of creation.

So as I mentioned, we do not believe in the Judeo-Christian form of Creation but we do believe that we create our world and our reality.

As for Question three about Buddhism requiring any form of ritual or prayer, that is a bit of a tough question.  There are many, many types of Buddhism from Tibetan to Japanese to Thai to Korean to Western.  In each place Buddhism has come, it has developed its own rituals, practices and prayers. Most kinds of Buddhism require meditation, most of them have malas or prayer beads. Most of them do prostrations or bowing to the Buddhas and most of them recite mantras or prayers. From there on, it would be wise to find out the specific rituals for each type of Buddhism.

However, I am not sure that Buddha himself required very many rituals and prayers. He gave teachings and suggested it would be a good idea for his students to memorize his teachings. And he was intent on his students meditating in order to truly understand his teachings. He did give the Sangha, or the Monks and Nuns that followed him a series of rules to follow and I believe some of them may include rituals.

So I believe that most of the rituals (some of which are very elaborate) have evolved as each culture adapted to Buddhism when it came to their country and they are only required now out of habit or tradition.

With the exception of prostrating, I do not think any of the rituals that have grown up around Buddhism are necessary to help someone achieve Enlightenment which is the ultimate goal.  But I do not know that for a fact that Buddha required any specific ritual or prayer to practice Buddhism.

Yes, there are Buddhist schools. In Tibetan Buddhist monasteries children of course learn reading and writing. They are taught debate and the teachings of the Buddha through recitation and memorization. Recently, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has requested that Buddhist monks learn western science as well as their own subjects like traditional Tibetan medicine. Other subjects to be studied inclue the liturgy of meditation deities, and the Buddhist sciences, including epistemology, philosophy, ethics, and the esoteric tantric systems. One can also train in the traditional Tibetan sacred arts such as ritual music, creation of sand mandalas and the making of tormas which are sculptures used in various rituals.

There are many other things children learn in various other Buddhist schools but I am not familiar with them.

To answer your fourth question of what Buddhist ideal I think people should follow, I have to go with two of His Holinesses statements.  One is  one of his favorite sayings. When asked what his religion is he states “My religion is simple.  My religion is kindness”  If we work at being kind to ourselves and to all other sentient beings we come across, imagine how much more happy the world would be and imagine how much freer the world would be of suffering.  And that was the goal of the Buddha originally; to end suffering in the world.

And the other thing I heard His Holiness teach, I believe in 2004 in San Francisco.  Someone asked him what they should teach their children,  He answered “Teach them dependent arising”. Dependent arising goes back to what I was saying earlier – that things are not the way we think they are.  We think things like cars and houses and money are permanent and fixed and never change and because of that we grasp at them as if they are permanent.  So when they change, go away, break, etc., we suffer sometimes terribly.  But dependent arising means that things are not so permanent.  Things only come together based on causes and conditions and when the causes and conditions change, so does the thing.  For example, when the causes and conditions that caused us to get a lot of money change (as everything must) we will no longer have that money.  So instead of crying, being upset, killing people because we no longer have the money we once had, we simply recognize that the causes and conditions that arose that brought the money to us in the first place have now disappeared and therefore we no longer have the money.

So there is no reason to cry or harm others or ourselves, it is just a natural progression of life.  Everything arises, abides for a while and then dies away.  To pretend that isn’t so or that we are above it or can avoid it is only going to bring sorrow because we are trying to go against the very nature of the way the world works; through dependent arising.

I hope I answered some of your questions.  If you have any further questions or comments don’t hesitate to let me know.

Namaste - Laurie