Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 3/1/2010

Question
1. How did you discover the Buddhism?
2. What is your favorite aspect about the religion?
3. In what different ways do you honor/celebrate Buddhism?
4. What is your favorite quote from a Buddhist?
5. Is there a god?

Thank you.

Answer
Thank you for letting me answer your questions.

I discovered Tibetan Buddhism from someone I met on vacation. I was not practicing any religion at the time but was in a bad place in my life. I had been a Catholic and had tried many other religions and I knew I was supposed to be a good person but I could not figure out how to be one.  I was looking for a roadmap to becoming a good person.  That is when I met my friend and he told me about Tibetan Buddhism and gave me a book written by Lama Thubten Yeshe who was the founder of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana tradition.  I read it and realized that this religion gave me just such a road map. And I have been happily practicing Mahayana Buddhism ever since.

As for your second question; my favorite aspect about the religion is that it really does give you a road map to go from where you are now all the way through to how to become enlightened. It starts you meditating and gaining control over what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind". You begin to realize the difference between your thoughts and your mind. Then you begin to learn that what causes us grief is our actions. Most of our actions are self cherishing and self serving.  One learns early on that the greatest way to advance on the path is to cherish others and quickest way to stand still or go backward on the path is to cherish yourself.  And there are many meditations that help you work on these issues.

Then a very wise man named Je Tsonkhapa took all the 84,000 teachings of the Buddha and organized them into a book called "The Stages of the Path to Enlightenment". If you follow this book and meditate on the teachings and then try to practice the good things it teaches, like having patience and compassion and ethical discipline, if you don't become enlightened, at least you will become calmer, more happy and be albe to be of benefit to others.

I honor Buddhism by trying to live the teachings (dharma) ever day. I fail a lot but I keep trying and I have noticed my life improving all the time.

I celebrate Buddhism by going to teachings, by going to the Buddhist ceremonies and rituals.

I have tow favorite quotes from Buddhism. The first one is a prayer called The Four Immesurables. The short version of the prayer is;

"May everyone be happy. May everyone be free from suffering. May no one ever be separated from the happiness that brings liberation. May everyone have equinimity; free from hatred and attachment"

Then there is a prayer from the Buddhist Master Shantideva.

"May all beings everywhere plagued by sufferings of body and mind
Obtain an ocean of happiness and joy by virtue of my merits.
May no living creature suffer, commit evil, or ever fall ill.
May no one be afraid or belittled with a mind weighed down by depression.
May the blind see forms. May the deaf hear sounds
May those whose bodies are worn with toil be restored on finding repose.
May the naked find clothing, the hungry find food.
May the thirsy find water and delicios drink.  
May the poor find wealth; those weak with sorrow find joy.
May the forlorn find hope, constant happiness and prosperity.
May there be timely rains and bountiful harvests.
May all medicines be effective; and wholesome prayers bear fruit.
May all who are sick and ill quickly be freed from their ailments.
Whatever diseases there are in the world, may they never occur again
May the frightened cease to be afriad.  May those bound be freed.
May the powerless find power and may people think of benefitting each other.
For as long as space remains
For as long as sentient beings remain
Until then may I too remain
To dispel the miseries of the world."

As far as your fourth question about is there a god - I think each person has to answer that for themselves. But to answer from a traditional Mahayana Tibetan Buddhist perspective, this is the best answer I can give at this moment.

A traditional God has qualities I assume we can agree on.
1)   It is a being or power outside ourselves that created and rules the universe and ultimately judges us.
2)   It is a being or power that we worship.

So, from the perspective of taking Mahayana Buddhism as one’s religion,  there is no one being who created, rules or runs the universe. Why? There is no need. Why? Buddha Shakyamuni, (who started life as a Prince named Siddhartha) the fourth primordial Buddha, whom we generally refer to as just “The Buddha” began teaching for one major purpose.  He saw all the suffering in the world and wanted to free himself from it and later also wished and taught some 84.000 teachings in order to rid all sentient beings from suffering.

He became The Buddha because he realized through his experiences and his meditation the ultimately perfect nature of reality. He realized that all sentient beings can eliminate suffering in their own lives, find perfect happiness and bliss and help others to do the same. He realized that he was no different from anyone else and because he could attain this liberation, so can all sentient beings.  Buddhists believe that we all have Buddha Nature.  And when we truly practice the path of Buddhism correctly, we can access our own Buddha Nature which means that we become free of suffering. We attain enlightenment. We become perfect because we train our mind to seek its true nature of complete clarity and complete wisdom, we train our hearts to have perfect and unlimited compassion for all sentient beings and we use this wisdom and compassion to help all other sentient beings reach this perfect state as well. This nature of perfection resides naturally in all sentient beings, we simply have to develop it. No power outside ourselves does it for us.

There is no need for a God to judge us.  Our karma does that for us. Furthermore, we can eliminate our own suffering because we created it. There was no outside being that created the suffering we are experiencing nor for that matter, the joy we experience.  We create both.  It is called the law of karma. When we do any action (or think something for that matter) it plants a seed in our mind or psyche (or mental continuum as the Buddhists would say) If we do or think something positive, we plant a positive seed, when we do or think something negative, we plant a negative seed and when we do a neutral action or have a neutral thought, we plant a neutral seed. Karma is the law of cause and effect.  It is a natural law. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

So when bad things happen, for example, there is no outside God allowing them or causing them to happen. They happen due to the karma of a past action ripening. So the more good things we do in the present, the more good things will happen to us in the future.  The more bad things we do in the present, the more bad things will happen in the future.

God did not create us. We have existed from beginningless time.  Buddhist believe in reincarnation.  We believe 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 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 Liz.

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 Liz at 10 years old, Liz at 5 years old, Liz 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 Liz's 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.

Therefore, there is no being outside ourselves, there is no being that created us, that rules over us or judges us, because there is no God that we follow, there is no one to worship.  Buddhists also believe that once we gain all the realizations we can, and attain complete Buddhahood, that this complete Buddha Nature does not lack anything. There is no need to worship a God because we do not need to find devotion or love outside ourselves. As I mentioned before, we work very hard to develop Boddichita. Boddhichita is ultimate compassion – the sincere wish to free all living beings from their suffering.  When we have ultimate compassion for all sentient beings, there is no need for worship.

We do, however, honor, pray to and prostrate to beings that have reached Enlightenment.  But that is not worship.  We are honoring them for achieving what we are striving to achieve.  We pray for their guidance to help us get there and we even prostrate (bow to) them in order to help us eliminate the main cause of our lack of progress on our spiritual path, which is our own self cherishing, which places us and not others first.

All this is not to say that one has to give up the belief in God to practice Buddhism.  For example, there are Christians who practice Buddhism as a philosophy as opposed to a religion.  They do so because they can gain things from the study of Buddhism which they can use to augment their own spiritual practice.

I hope these answers help you.  If you have any further questions however, don't hesitate to ask.

Namaste - Laurie