hi, im new to the board and ive been a buddhist my whole short life. both my parents were actually tought by trungpa personally so if anyone has anyone questions about him or buddhisim in the US i wouldnt mind taking a stab at answering them.
-solomonSo, in a sense, the Buddhist idea of Karma is similar to the way the threefold rule works in Wicca, right? [Good happens, so does bad. Nature keeps things in balance. People’s wrongdoing is balanced by them receiving back what they put out times three.] I think I may be beginning to understand a great many things these days. It all started when I stopped making too much of an effort to be a better person; understanding just came to me.
again, back to Karma,
perhaps i shouldn’t have posted about it having anything at all to do with good or bad. That’s irrelevant. The point i was trying to make was that it’s unrelated to anything except for cause and effect. Whether that cause and effect relationship extends over hundreds of millenia, or just a few minutes. Time is irrelevant to it. It trancends all time, and physical limitations, so that what is done long ago/or a short time ago is having an impact now or in the future. No three fold anything here, and it’s unrelated to good and bad. There’s no such thing in the Karmic explanation that if you do something bad it will happen so many times worse to you later, rather, if you do anything at all, it will have an effect good or bad in return somehow, anyhow. Karma is not a justification for things happening, merely an explanation for us to understand that what we do has an effect eventually, and a further reason why we should be compassionate, and follow the five precepts in order to live a right life. But defining a right life is not so simple either.
Gautama Buddha tried to avoid having to tell the original sangha too much, because even he was adament that we look in ourselves for the answers, and only look towards him for guidance on following that path.
Originally posted by soulsling
Nice explanation, soulsling, as it reflects my understanding of what karma is.
Perfect. For those interested in knowing more about/understanding Buddhism, I can’t think of a better way to put it.
Thanks, longhair and ren, for the help with help with the chogyam trungpa quote, and welcome to SMDB, Solomon!
friend sskuggiii, you asked:
“a flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we don’t love it” (dogen)
friend soulsling, you wrote:
“rely on the message of the teacher,
not on his personality;
rely on the meaning, not just on
the words;
rely on the real meaning, not on
the provisional one;
rely on your wisdom mind, not on
your ordinary, judgmental mind.
(buddha)
friend ren, thanks for the recommendation, I’ll pick the trungpa book up tomorrow.
welcome friend solomon,
friend svinlesha, glad i could help. ren and solomon had better answers though.
(warning- lame and unoriginal joke coming)
My dogma likes to chase karmas.
Sorry, guys, just had to get that in.
agisofia, my karma may have run over your dogma. :rolleyes: Sorry! 
Whee, guys, sorry to come in so late on this wonderful discussion. I’se a Buddhist too.
This wasn’t clarified, so tho late, here goes:
red_dragon 60- It’s “Mahayana”. Simply put: “ayana” is vehicle, and “maha” is greater. “Hinayana” means “lesser vehicle”, although that’s rather derogatory, so Theravada seems to be the more appropriate term these days.
In aenea’s post, she has some confusion as to how many Buddhas exist. Gautama and Siddhartha are the same entity, as explained in previous posts, but the upcoming Buddha, temporal wise, is Maitreya. Perhaps it’s best explained, though, by visualizing your outstretched palm. The five(could be any number though) fingers are the emanations of the thing we catch out of the corner of our eye (fer lack of the better word, Truth). So, they’re Buddhas, guys who know what’s up with The Whole Universal Shebang. They’re all connected though, and while they may pop up at different eons to us, they’re all on the same hand. So, different Buddha, same source. This, of course, is an oversimplification.
To go further with this analogy, picture the hand underwater. Underwater is where we live. We’ve learned how to live there, to breathe there, to swim in that environment. We gear our whole being to be able to swim there. But say that one day you swim up to the surface and discover the interface of what you’ve always known to be “IT”, the environment you’re comfortable with, and a larger world. It takes a huge leap to realize that there’s a whole other realm to learn to live in. The Buddhas have broke the surface of the pond and know how to live beyond our limited scope. I think that this is an appropriate anology, in Buddhist terms. A consistent Buddhist symbolic image of enlightenment is of the lotus flower, which rises up from the muck of the pond, and floats up and beyond it’s root and transcends the boundary between water and air, becoming a magnificent flower.
As to the discussion of Karma, as touched on here, it seems like we all want an absolute definition of Good and Bad. Perhaps,though, in the true scheme of things, that absolute judgement doesn’t apply. Maybe it’s more in accordance of what the- soul- is the wrong word, so I’ll use -entity- will bear, without that absolute definition. I think that this is a major difference in Buddhist and Christian principles. If it’s an accumulation of past wrong doing that has messed you up, and you can do better by right-doing, or, as I’ve been taught, negating negativity, supposedly you can get out of the Wheel just by learning the proper procedure. But, the kick is with Buddhism, you have to do all the work yourself. Gautama Buddha gave the blueprint, a nice set of directions, but you have to do all the shit homework on your own.
No saving graces. It’s really just looking into yer own yawning maw and deciding over and over again that you’re not that hungry.
Not a path for wussies.
Have I?
No.