How were people like Buddha able to achieve perfect happiness without God?

[fhansen]

While I don’t know for sure what the Buddhists are describing here, it sounds more like contentment, a certain serenity coming from no longer being attached to worldly things. Descriptions of satori, or nirvana for Hindus, sound nothing like the ineffable elation that Christian mytics relate by immediately meeting their Source and Purpose, an experience that satisfies ones desires completely

 

[Choosevirtue]

We don’t follow God to be happy we follow God to be holy. Many Saints lived very “miserable” lives but were holy and at peace with just God

 

[Vico]

This was a thread I posted earlier in the Apologetics section, but I think it might be more fitting here

Can someone explain to me this:

Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for. - CCC 27

Yet there are religions like Buddhism where people say they have attained a transcendent permanent peace and happiness without God. They claim the search to end suffering and achieve eternal bliss is over. They’ve claimed to have found all of the answers. Buddha said he never relied on God to achieve ‘Nirvana’. Those who reach this do so without a search of God. They actually claim they find out there is no Almighty God.

Does the CCC teach a falsehood here?

In Buddhism happiness is peace of mind, which occurs by detaching oneself from the cycle of craving.

For Christianity, the Beatific Vision is indescribable.

1 John 3
2 Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

 

[neophyte]

Yet there are religions like Buddhism where people say they have attained a transcendent permanent peace and happiness without God.

Key phrase: “they say”. They’re wrong.

 

[straykat]

“Where there is peace, there is no salvation.”

• a special person told me that once

Good for Buddha if he found happiness, but that’s not what Christ promised.

 

[ZMystiCat]

Well if the person really believes they are perfectly happy and have no more desire to search for it, wouldn’t that mean that this kind of happiness can be achieved.

Not really. Terms like “ignorance is bliss” and “sour grapes” exist to deal with those who claim to be content with their lot in life, but they are really just ignorant or frustrated respectively.

 

[adamhovey1988]

I actually was a Buddhist, it’s not correct to call it atheistic, more along the lines of non-theistic or agnostic.

 

[AlbMagno]

I see many people saying that God don’t want us to be happy in this life, I disagree.

This is really difficult to understand and experience, but in fighting, in passing through Redemptive Suffering in our life, we can also be happy. Most saints suffered in their lifes while they were happy for serving in God’s Plan.

And, in the end, sefless Love, Agape, means to be happy for the well-being of another despite our own sacrifices.

 

[adamhovey1988]

I just want to say, that the Buddha taught that life is suffering. That’s not happiness and perfection

 

[abucs]

I mean true, if they are lying.

But if we give them the benefit of the doubt when they say they are perfectly happy and no longer suffer, isn’t this admittedly problematic for the CCC 27 passage above?

Perfectly happy?

Do their children, parents and friends not die or get sick or betray them or disappoint them?

Would you be perfectly happy if your child became addicted to drugs or if your mother went senile?

 

[straykat]

He was quite a late bloomer too. I recall that he was already 35 and had a wife and son by the time he ventured outside the royal household and realized how badly people lived. Better late than never though… and I applaud him for trying to help. But people should leave it at that. He was not the object of truth, but a seeker himself.

 

[straykat]

I see many people saying that God don’t want us to be happy in this life, I disagree.

This is really difficult to understand and experience, but in fighting, in passing through Redemptive Suffering in our life, we can also be happy. Most saints suffered in their lifes while they were happy for serving in God’s Plan.

And, in the end, sefless Love, Agape, means to be happy for the well-being of another despite our own sacrifices.

Yes, but Christianity does not teach a happiness in the form of retreat. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount illustrated much of this state of blessedness in the midst of suffering: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake”, etc… It’s an embrace of life’s ills rather than treating them as some sort of illusion… or saying that all “Pain comes from Desire”. It can be happiness, but it’s rooted in and accepts the pain and reality… nor does it necessarily ascribe one’s pain to the self. Sometimes your “self” has nothing to do with it… but a pain that comes from following Christ… which is the cross we bear.

 

[CRM_Brother]

Well if the person really believes they are perfectly happy and have no more desire to search for it, wouldn’t that mean that this kind of happiness can be achieved.

Now their source of happiness (nirvana, no God, non-self, end of rebirth, etc) is erroneous, but subjectively they are perfectly happy.

I think you are confusing their acceptance of peace as spiritual self-annihilation with actually happiness. To a true Buddhist, if they are happy, then they are doing something wrong. Nirvana is achieved partially from the emptying of oneself from all emotions, happiness among them. If one achieves this state then they are, by the very definition, as totally devoid of happiness as one can actually be.

Buddhists seek truth in spiritual self-annihilation, but they do not actually find something. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. They seek to stop searching, moving, and acting with the will. They do accomplish this but it is futile. There is no truth to be found here, for in nothing, there is nothing. To seek an absence is to seek ignorance of the positive. Thus, to actually find that truth and happiness which man never stops searching; for one must look toward the ultimate act of existence itself, the opposite of the spiritual self-annihilation of nirvana, God Himself.

God Bless,
Br. Ben, CRM

 

[Rutherford2]

@adamhovey1988 Buddhism is not agnostic at all. Unless your version of Buddhism has a mixture of Taoism. I was a Buddhist before too. Pure Buddhism does not believe in the existence of soul and God. When we are dead, we are dead.

Read this.

 

[straykat]

The good thing is that the average (lets say “cradle”) Buddhist believes none of that. Only the teachers and outsider students usually, who come to it late, and were probably nihilistic to begin with. Ask the average Sri Lankan, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, or Viet person on the street and they are more syncretistic. Maybe not consciously all the time, but usually have thoughts like “we all believe in basically the same thing” and try to engender a camraderie through the general human experience. It’s not great, but it’s a start to proclaim that God has revealed himself.

In the case of Thais (which half of my family are), the lines are blurred all over the place. Even if they’re not open to other ideas, their own brand of Buddhism isn’t as fundamentalist as Western teachers would have you believe. “On the ground”, in day to day life, they’re actually more Animist (so are Japanese, for example). They believe “spirits” (good, bad, or spirits of the dead) inhabit areas (basically Ghost Stories) and upsetting them invites all kinds of real, present karma in this life. They believe houses or even small objects can be animated by spirits. They only believe in the Buddhist thing in a more longview/eternal sense, but in day to day living, it’s very Animist.

These countries are called “Buddhist” in statistics, but it’s more complicated. Obviously Buddhism didn’t satisfy and they held on to many folk beliefs. They’re still looking for something.

 

[rossum]

Something from Thomas Merton on Buddhism:

[At Polonnaruwa] I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything – without refutation – without establishing some argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening.

I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock slopping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more “imperative” than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward).

The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life is charged with dharmakaya … everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. … I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains, but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. …

It says everything, it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we who need to discover it.

From: The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

Buddhism includes an array of techniques, many of which are suitable for non-Buddhists as well. Those techniques have been refined for about 2,500 years so by now they work very well indeed.

rossum

 

[Mintaka]

I seriously doubt that any real Buddhist is interested in achieving “happiness,” when the point is to learn to avoid suffering by not feeling much of anything, or not paying attention to them and just doing stuff. You might read a bad translation along those lines, but the enlightened person in Buddhism is not supposed to be “happy.”

The Buddhist idea is that warm fuzzy feelings are just as misleading as fear, anger, desire, pain, etc.

As for “peace,” it is more about not actually caring about feelings, rather than about peaceful feelings. The ultimate peace of nirvana is pretty much a state of nonexistence.

So yeah, anybody selling you Buddhism for peace and happiness is kinda ignorant about Buddhism, or is in a Buddhist sect that ignores its roots. (Some Buddhist groups copy off Christianity or Hinduism, which changes their goals a lot.)

 

[AlbMagno]

I agree.

123

 

[rossum]

These countries are called “Buddhist” in statistics, but it’s more complicated. Obviously Buddhism didn’t satisfy and they held on to many folk beliefs. They’re still looking for something.

That is an after-effect of how Buddhism spread. It does not try to replace existing religions in areas it moves into, but instead merges itself with existing local religions. The Buddhas are always superior to any local gods, but the local gods can be seen as Bodhisattvas: in Japan the Shinto goddess Amaterasu was seen as a version of the Bodhisattva Avalokita (Kannon in Japanese). The same happened to the Virgin Mary among early Japanese Christians, see Maria Kannon.

The only required change is that Buddhism does not allow animal (or human) sacrifice to any gods.

rossum

 

[mrsdizzyd]

How to explain how figures like Buddha were able to achieve perfect happiness without God?

Why do you assume it’s the Church teaching falsehood?

Have you considered that the Buddhists are wrong?

Well if the person really believes they are perfectly happy and have no more desire to search for it, wouldn’t that mean that this kind of happiness can be achieved.

Now their source of happiness (nirvana, no God, non-self, end of rebirth, etc) is erroneous, but subjectively they are perfectly happy.

The happiness they perceive still pales in comparison to happiness in Christ. It is not perfect happiness no matter what they have convinced themselves of.