Sorry couldn’t resist my son in the army rooms with a Budhist and I think the statement came from a movie, because my son unfortunately used it to say now how is that discipline. But I do apologize it was uncharitable.
This are the very same people who say that ALL religions are essentially the same, what is called the heresy of religious indifferentism. It is the mindset of those who want to enjoy the best of both worlds (ex. a second chance thru reincarnation, heaven …) while avoiding what they want to avoid (an eternal hell, God’s judgment, evil…).
But Christianity involves the worship of a deity (God) which means man’s undeniable dependence upon and obedience to God is necessary for the attainment of salvation. Perfection of one’s behaviour to achieve enlightenment without God’s help (solely through one’s own efforts) is reminiscent of the ancient heresy of Pelagianism which the Church condemned long ago.
This simply isn’t true. While catholicism maintains you must keep all of their beliefs sacred, buddhist do not. For example if you believed in both, you would believe there was no reincarnation, only heaven and hell.( or perhaps a God induced reincarnation if you want to flip the coin) The point is they can choose the path that is right for them as people reach enlightenment in different ways. So what better person to enlist for help than God? Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion. So what if they want to take a few extra vows to be kind and live justly, monks do that sort of thing.
Like I said above, you CAN worship a deity (as buddha was a hindu) but it is not required. Obviously it would be required if they also wanted to be catholic, but they have that choice as buddhist. So where is the conflict?
You seem to be looking at it from the perspective of Buddhists looking into Catholicism. While it may be true that worship of a deity, to a buddhist is not required, and hence the Catholic view that we must worship God would not really pose a problem with them, yet the **other **perspective, that of Catholics looking into Buddhism, it would pose problems, because a Catholic as you have said yourself, is required to worship God and therefore such Catholics would have trouble reconciling it with the concept of “optional” worship of a deity among buddhists. Hence, there is the conflict.
To be fair to Buddhism, one has to recognize that nirvana is not “nothingness.” If nirvana were truly nothingness, then how would nirvana be different from the state of the after-life atheists believe in? Whereas the Buddha made it very clear that he was not suggesting that nirvana was simply the disappearance of the human person after death. He said many things about nirvana, and even though he was hesistant to describe nirvana in positive terms, he did do so a few times: he called it the “highest happiness”, “the deathless”, “the unchanging”.
Obviously, the worship wouldn’t be optional if one were to refer to themselves as catholic right? At least not within my understanding of catholicism. So you could worship God, do your sacraments and still meditate and follow the eight fold path correct?
Depends on your vehicle. Nirvana is also described as a seperate plain of existence in which there is no suffering. When you achieve enlightenment, you can visit others who have reached this plane. Who is to say that the union with the father isn’t nothingness? Do you see yourself sitting in some heavenly church for eternity?
They are probably following the example of Thomas Merton, who was a Trappist Monk and a Zen Master. He had no problem balancing Catholicism and Zen. Fr Francis Xavier an early Jesuit missionary to Japan incorporated some Zen meditation into the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.
I’m sure Buddha-Full can reply, but I would like to point out that the “desire” of the Four Noble Truths is (in Pali) “tanha”, which is more properly translated as “desperate thirst and greed”, with connotations of selfishness and harming oneself and others. Otherwise, if mere desire were bad, then the desire to follow the Eightfold Path would itself be self-defeating. The Buddha often told his monks and lay-followers to desire to do the good, to put all of one’s effort into avoiding that which is harmful. This sort of desire is the desire that leads, amazingly, to the state of “no-desire”. But you can’t realize no-desire, or nibbana, just by rejecting desire and staying home, sitting on the couch in a confused stupor. Desire the good, do the good, and that good desire will lead to the highest happiness.
In Buddhism, the path one takes to realize nibbana requires that one develop a strong sense of individual dignity. How could someone who didn’t have a healthy sense of “self” ever realize the Deathless? But in Buddhism, this “self” is not something that is grasped onto; it is not something that will forever remain in the same form it is now. We fear that the self will grow old, get ill, and suffer. We try to grasp onto the many things that will re-assure us that we have control over our self: plastic-surgery, romantic love, trips to the mall. Nibbana is releasing that fear, and releasing that attempt to control what is not in your control. It would take a strong sense of “self-hood” – in the sense of believing in one’s potential – to release that fear and desperation.
This is a perfect example of something being taken out of context. That is like me saying" Catholics eat flesh and drink blood, they’re all vampires or cannibals. To free yourself from desire, means the desire for worldly things. If you look at the eightfold path you will see they still have to be good. And all things in this world ARE temporary. Are you planning on taking your house and car to heaven?
The illusion is that we were ever seperate from God. So, your sense of self that maintains you are a seperate entity is just an illusion, just like pain. Even Einstein agrees that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration (i.e. we are all made of the same subatomic energy vibrating in such a frequency that we can be experienced by each others sense organs). Physics is on the side of the oneness theory.
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First off, I said Buddhists recognize that the world is temporary, which does not imply any disagreement with them; in fact, it suggests agreement. Secondly, Christian “good” desires can still be this-worldly and thus expose us to the suffering that Buddhism is supposed to be freeing us from. I’ve never seen any list of proper vs. improper Buddhist desires, which makes it hard to understand. If I love my neighbor, I will suffer when he gets cancer and dies. Is there a rule that suffering due to good desires is actually not a problem, whereas suffering due to bad desires is a danger to your enlightenment?
I suppose that was meant to reinforce my assertion that the salvation claims are incompatible.
I think the confusion here is between physical suffering and mental suffering. The “suffering” spoken of by the Buddha refers (for all practical purposes) to mental suffering, when your mind is captured by hatred, fear, and obsession. That is the suffering that the four noble truths are meant to end. Which means that as long as a human being is alive, there will be the potential for physical suffering (bodily pain, e.g.), even if one’s mind is free from mental suffering.