A U.S. official was quoted on CNN as saying that the Myanmar Government doesn’t seem to grasp the severity of damage caused by the cyclone that struck there last week. He described meeting with a Myanmar three-star general who opened up a map of the country and pointed to the areas worst-hit by the cyclone."[He] characterized activity there as returning back to normal -- his words," Keating told CNN. "[He said] people are coming back to their villages, they're planting their crops for the summer season, the monsoon will come and wash all the saltwater out of the ponds. "His manner, his demeanor, his attitude indicated something less than very serious concern.
Perhaps what the U.S. official doesn’t grasp is that according to Buddhism, this is all an illusion. Apparently, when your really good at Buddhism you don’t even experience emotional pain nor do you care when your desires have been dealt a devastating blow. Total inner peace reigns supreme, as is obvious on the News Reports. In fact, desires are a thing of the past - for the really spiritual I mean. Perhaps what Myanmar needs most right now are more secular Buddhists in power who aren’t so sure that this is an illusion, that in fact they’re in deep, deep trouble and that virtually all of the Buddhist survivors are realising that desires are actually necessary to one’s survival.
As a point of interest, leading atheists appear even more delusional than Buddhism in that, while Buddhism teaches that we should learn to repress our desires; to actually reach a point of nothingness, atheism teaches that desires themselves are an illusion.
You go boys; lead us into the brave new world.
2 comments:
Its not the US officials that haven’t grasped Buddhism, but you. Misinformed people believe that the Buddha taught that everything is an illusion created by the mind and that nothing really exists. This is one of several examples of where a doctrine of Vedantic Hinduism has been mistakenly attributed to the Buddha. Idealism is the concept that everything is just a creation of the mind, the `dance' or `play' of God, according to Vedanta. The extreme opposite of this is naive realism, the concept that everything is exactly as it appears to be. Both these ideas are false, the first much more so than the second, and the Buddha subscribed to neither of them. Very clearly the external world exists in the real sense of the word. The elements of existence - earth or solidity, water or fluididity fire, or caloricity and wind or movement - exist independently of our minds. However, when the external world impinges on our senses we react by projecting ideas, values, assumptions and expectations onto it. As a result, what we perceive is often more a product of our minds than the qualities of the object itself. This is what the Buddha called `the distortion of perception,' Anguttara Nikaya,.II,52). The value of meditation is that in watching the mind we see its projecting and distorting tendency and are less likely to be led astray by it. In time, as the mind becomes utterly still and clear, it stops projecting and sense objects reveal themselves to us as they are. That’s what the Buddha taught and that’s why Buddhists practice meditation.
Very well explained - thank you.
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