Thursday 12.56 p.m.
I was bothered by the story of the Afghan joe who went for a visit with his four year old and came back to find his other eight children executed along with his wife and mother and sister in law. And burnt as well.
Made me think of God and omniscience. Christians say Christ was omniscient, that he was God. And God can do anything. So why has the joe to come home and find his family massacred? This is back to why all the bloody suffering.
Well, I'd read that some buddhists talk about the buddha being omniscient. Well, obviously if the Buddha had been able to do everything, he'd have killed all the flatheids in the world on the spot since there's very little, apart from the moaning and groaning, that you are going to get out of them.
I have trouble proceeding with faith since I'm the sole member and single representative of the Disbelieving Congregation, and though the effects of the vase breathing, meditations, etc., continue to increase, I'm cutting down my effort in chasing enlightenment. Apart from anything else, I don't believe in omniscience. I don't believe in anything. Anyway, just before coming here I looked this stuff up. Here's what I found:
The Buddha claimed to see into the real nature of experience and phenomena, he did not claim to be some sort of transcendental know-all. Such a claim obscures the spiritual significance and orientation of his insight. It arises from a conflation of two different orders of knowledge; the Buddha’s knowledge was of spiritual principles, even laws, not of mundane facts. There is no reason to believe that his mastery of the principle of Dependent Origination should also give him access to the total range of mundane facts. The two kinds of knowledge are of a different nature. The claim that the Buddha could potentially know everything obscures the spiritual profundity of his attainment and reduces him to some sort of human encyclopedia.
Well, there it is. No mention there of being able to stop the sun in its tracks. Still, not much use to the Afghani boy whose family we helped to wipe out.
5 comments:
At least the Taliban would only wipe people out if they'd actually done something wrong, like shave.
Albert? If you could take the compassion out of buddhism and maybe call it something else. Hotboyism. In Hotboyism you have everything you get in Buddhism (Theravadin) except without any compassion at all. Then you can do anything and it doesn't matter. The neurotic, hysterical, nightmare visions of fear. It's not you that gets reborn. Some other joe takes the rap. I'm trying to write my crime novel round this idea. What do you think? Hotboy
A Buddhist murder story, why not? Maybe that's what the heartless young guys were doing,e.g. Bret Easton Ellis and Hoellebecq (approximate spelling).
Clarification: not suggesting Buddhists are heartless.
Post a Comment