In general no. Dharma is just the truth, it doesn’t need to be protected. Or, to put it in a better way, it has it’s own protectors already, and their power comes out of the wrath of egolessness.
And as soon as you talk about sacrificing yourself for your religion, you become even more eager to sacrifice others for it as well. :slapfight: Fundamentally, thinking like that too often ends up in violence.
Now, if my teacher or a fellow sangha member were drowning would I leap into the water to save them? I hope I would, but I would do the same thing for others.
Of course, the real world is too complicated for easy answers. There are Buddhists who have done this. We have the example of Vietnamese monks self-imolating out of desperation over that horrible war. And today unfortunately, we have Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns doing the same thing.
thebuddhadharma.com/web-archive/2012/2/8/commentary-a-cry-for-freedom.html
In some Buddhist communities, there are protectors who from some point of view are a military or security service, and who train extensively in personal security and related matters. They would see it as there duty to do everything they could to save the principal, certainly at the risk of their own lives. It’s an interesting practice.
As far as the path goes, the level of commitment is higher than that. You’re giving over both the manner of your life and your death to the path. But except perhaps for the cases above, I can’t think of many scenarios where it would make any sense at all to do such a thing. It’s sort of a romantic notion though. Hmm…
About the closest I can say is that I would supplicate to have enough devotion to have trust in the guru and to follow his instructions with complete faith. But see below.
Yes, I’m glad you said that. For a Christian, to proclaim your faith and devotion is I think usually a matter of celebration and evangelism. For a Buddhist, that would generally be considered bad form, boasting really. That’s because faith and devotion are directly connected to realization, so if you are saying that you have great devotion to the Buddha or the teachings, it’s sort of a round about way of saying that you’ve achieved some kind of realization, which would be
extremely bad form, obnoxious really.
Generally you don’t talk about attainment, except with your closest mentors and teachers as Bakmoon says, for the simple reason that attachment to attainment is the greatest block to any actual attainment, whatever that means. For Tibetan Buddhists, almost all of our practices revolve around devotion, so it would also be a way of saying that you were well-practiced, which again you just would never say. Maybe it is sort of a false modesty, but arrogance is one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to true realization and compassion. Probably the nicest thing you could say about someone is that “so-and-so is a devoted student of the [Teacher X]”.
Even the greatest teachers often talk about how “they don’t really know if this is true, they just heard it from someone else”…
Which leaves us ordinary dharma students to be very wary of thinking that we have any real practice or knowledge. Speaking of monks, for a lay person, comparing your learning and practice experience to what even a typical monk has done is very humbling.
You always know a charlatan (like all of those gurus in the 60s, and cult leaders) because they talk about how they’ve attained this and that, or they had this and that realization. Of course, some teachers have has those kind of experiences but they would only share that when it was really called for as part of a teaching. (For example in an empowerment, it’s important to know that the teacher has actually fully received the teachings that they are giving to you.)
Where a teacher’s devotion often becomes apparent is when they begin talking about their teachers. That is an indescribably touching and very intimate thing to share. Through seeing the example of devotion alone, one can realize devotion in one’s own heart.
In fact, there are aspects of this discussion that I’ve felt a bit uncomfortable about. Like talking about things like Ngöndro. In the Vajrayana, we usually don’t talk about what practices we are doing, except with the people who are doing the same kinds of things. It’s probably okay, but I have to think about whether I’m crossing any lines in sharing my enthusiasm for my own faith and practice.
To be clear, I know that you don’t mean any of that, it’s just a contrast in faith experiences and culture.
