I’ve spent the last few days comatose and the nights watching an industry webcast from the US. There hasn’t been much time for culture, or for action at all, but I have started reading the introductory book on Bhuddism. The first few chapters were a disappointment. They were about the life of Bhudda, but rather than being a realistic story of how he gave up his princehood for poverty and then realised that the middle path was best, it reads like a Hindu myth. The Great Being that was also the Future Bhudda decided it was time for the world to experience his presence again and looked for the most pure family in a high cast to be born into. He then went around the world allowing everyone to bask in his glory, including the gods of all 10,000 worlds. The ultimate arrogance is that he performed his morning ablutions not out of necessity, but so that his body servant would have the pleasure of serving him. The only useful point I took out of the whole introduction was that Bhudda’s purpose was to end misery in the 10,000 worlds.
The first teaching of Bhudda in the book is that there is no ego. At first reading, this makes sense. It talks about how we are more than the sum of our parts. A deeper reading says clearly that our senses are a product of our being and since there is no such thing as our being in a technical sense, there is no such thing as sensation. Pleasure and pain in all their forms are merely a product of our imagination and can safely be ignored. My interpretation of this, when combined with the overall objective mentioned in the earlier chapters, is that misery can be ignored, but at the cost of ignoring pleasure as well. That’s all very philosophical, but it strikes me as rather negative. Rather than eliminating misery by saying ‘let’s address the cause of misery’ or ‘let’s learn to be happy’, Bhuddism seems to say ‘let’s learn to ignore misery’.
Perhaps Christianity isn’t as backward as I’d thought.