Buddhism Paper

What are the basic tenets/principles of the religion?

Many of the tenets described in the sections that follow have been handed down over 2,500 years by oral tradition. Many Buddhist sects emphasize the importance of obtaining teachings from a qualified master who has received teachings from masters before him. The Theravadan sect emphasizes the importance of studying and interpreting the Buddha's original oral teachings. The first teaching of the Buddha, known as the Four Noble Truths, is of paramount importance. The first truth is that all existence is suffering (www.buddha101.com ).

The second truth holds that all suffering caused by the afflictions of craving, aversion, and ignorance. Ignorance itself caused by an incorrect understanding of the nature of reality, which described as an erroneous belief in an independent, permanent self or soul (atman). The third truth affirms that the suffering of existence can cease in a state described as "passing away" (nirvana). Finally, the fourth truth is the actual path comprised of techniques for achieving the cessation of suffering and supreme enlightenment. Traditionally, meditation or the development of concentration (dhyana), ethics (shila) restraint from the non-virtues of body, speech, and mind, and the cultivation of wisdom (prajna) in order to correct erroneous views of reality compose the fourth noble truth (Winter, 98).

What are the beliefs concerning life and death? When does life begin, when does it end? What happens after we die?

Siddartha Gautama (c. 560-480 bce) was born in a time of cultural change and search for the meaning of life and death. According to Buddhist traditions, the sheltered life of Siddartha was altered by the sight of an ill man, an elderly man, a dead man and a world renouncer. These individuals shocked the future Buddha into an awareness of suffering and death, precipitating his own renunciation of the ordinary world of desire and leading him into a symbolic death as an itinerant ascetic or world renouncer. For the late Vedic period, death was the separation of the soul from the body, and the soul was reborn until liberated from the cycle of rebirths. For the Buddha, death was a separation of the life principle, and the cycle of rebirths resulted from ignorance and attachment. Suffering became the starting point for the future Buddha of his own spiritual journey and practice (Winter, 98).

The Buddha conquered death in his realization of enlightenment or nirvana. He refused to define nirvana intellectually. He was primarily interested in its realization, not its definition. Nirvana was an alternative to the endless cycle of rebirth, a deathless state or the final death. The Buddha recontextualized death in terms of his concept of 'no-self', that there was no fixed entity called a self but a mental continuum or life principle which could achieve a state of perfection. Nirvana became a radically integrative or unitive experience in which the individual and self-centred existence was transcended; it was 'free from coming and going, from duration and decay, there is no beginning and establishment, no result and no cause; ...