Buddhism (Buddha Dharma): Lecture Notes

this is your second and final lecture on the religion of buddha dharma or buddhism okay if you're taking good notes here about buddha dharma what i need you to do is to first of all realize in your outline that there are two major traditions within buddhadharma the oldest is the minority tradition and is sometimes referred to as the lesser vehicle because it is the minority tradition approximately 18 to twenty percent of those who claim a buddha dharma identity are part of the terravada tradition okay the theravada tradition again it is the oldest of the buddhist traditions and the focus within the theravada tradition is primarily upon the historical figure siddhartha gautama and his teachings we're going to see in the other school of buddha dharma which we'll get to in just a moment that yes there is belief in the historical figures at heart of gautama but more important than the historical figure is a sort of cosmic or universal presence of wisdom or energy uh that the the deceased buddha spirit passes on to the adherence of this religion the primary focus within theravada buddhism is in the triple gem the triple gem is three particular places where the buddhist finds refuge or finds security or safety and these three parts of the triple gem are based upon the book of holy scripture which you can see listed here on the second bullet the tipitaka and sometimes you'll see this spelled a trippy taka but the tipitaka or the tripitaka is the book of holy scripture that defines the three safe places as being the person of the buddha and then his teachings which we would call the dharma and then the sangha you will perhaps remember from last time is the community of big shoes or big shoonies the disciples are mocks following the teachings of the buddha so you find your safety you find your refuge in the buddha and the dharma and in the sangha there is a strong focus upon meditation within this tradition please get down a word that is not written on this slide that you will need to have down here the the meditation comes in two movements and the first movement is the one that is not listed on the slide here and that is the samatha movement of meditation samatha is spelled just like samantha but without the n okay no n samatha and samatha is when you attempt to quiet your mind to get your mind to come to a place of rest rather than continually racing through thoughts about you know what happened yesterday or what's going to happen later today or tomorrow and once you've come to the place of samatha rest where the mind is very quiet the hope is that you will then come to a time of enlightenment and that second movement toward enlightenment is the word you do see on this slide the vipassana meditation vipassana meditation is coming to a new awareness or an enlightenment about the reality of your life perhaps a purpose or a meaning and certainly since we're talking about buddha dharma a greater uh ability to let go of the self to let go of the ego because teravata buddhists do focus quite a bit upon the historical figure of siddhartha gautama we see a great deal of devotion and a great deal of attention paid to rituals and relics honoring the buddha a relic would be something that is believed to have belonged to be a part of the buddha or to have belonged to siddhartha gautama oftentimes you will have someone with a chip of a bone that they will claim was part of siddhartha gautama or even a splinter of wood that was part of a bowl or some other vessel that sidhart of guatemala ate from or drank from so anything that is a physical tangible item that could tie a person or the person's household to the historical figures to heart of guatemala would be referred to as a relic okay as you continue in your notes here the much larger tradition within buddha dharma and this would be about 78 to 80 percent of the world's buddhists are actually part of the mahayana tradition and as mentioned on the uh previous uh slide of what i was telling you is that even though there is belief in the historical figures at heart of guatemala what's much more important to the mahayana tradition is the belief that the deceased buddha continues to have a pervasive spirit presence everywhere throughout the cosmos everywhere throughout the universe because there is the belief in more than one buddha you will have different depictions of a buddha figure often times these teachers are called bodhisattvas you can see that term listed on the second bullet here a person back up just a little bit here a person who achieves enlightenment or reaches enlightenment and the buddhist tradition is referred to as an arhant and our heart however is not necessarily one who will teach his or her enlightenment to others and arhant who does decide to teach the path of enlightenment is called a bodhisattva so make sure that you can differentiate between those two terms and arhant is simply one who has been enlightened and a bodhisattva is an enlightened one who is committed to teaching others the path of enlightenment and because this is a very diverse school of buddha dharma you're going to see some various expressions of it here in just a moment we do need to understand that there are different representations of the buddha pictured here is one portrayal of guanyin guanyin is a buddha that is sometimes depicted as a male sometimes as a female and therefore uh this buddha is one that we would describe as androgynous if androgynous is a new word for you it's a good word to have in your vocabulary andros is the greek term for man and gyno as the greek term for woman and so an androgynous being is one who has both male and female characteristics and we certainly see the depictions of guanine sometimes as a man sometimes as a woman and often times you will see when guanine is a woman that she will be holding a child and a mahayana buddhist would view himself or herself as the child being held by guanyin therefore being protected by guanyin the mahayana tradition also stresses meditation just like the older theravada tradition and similar to the meditative move of samatha where you empty yourself the mahayana tradition stresses this same concept with the term sunyata that sunyata is making space in your soul making space in your spirit and emptiness so that something new can be placed there so all of the sort of preconceived ideas or the presuppositions that you have about what makes you important or what makes you valuable even in comparison to others what makes you better than someone else all of those obsessions must be let go of you must empty yourself of all of that that would be sunyata and then in the emptiness your true identity could be found through meditation now again theravada and mahayana but within the mahayana tradition we do have at least four schools that we want to address let's begin with probably the most familiar form of buddha dharma that is the zen tradition uh pictured here you have a two of ten pictures that are part of the story of an ox herder who is searching for his ox who has run away and the story that's told in the ten pictures is that uh this ox herder is of course obsessed with retaining uh his possession his ox that he's lost and we see the journey of him for seeing some hoof prints of the ox and then sing the ox in a meadow and then finally he comes so close to the ox that he is able to eventually capture the ox and then the ox once again runs away and they see a picture of emptiness here with the circle on the right and that would be a sort of a sunyata experience that now this in the circle is actually the ninth picture of the ten and that now the ox has been lost once again and so why carry on with the obsession of saying i have to have that ox or for our culture today i have to have that car i have to have that house or i have to have that person be my boyfriend or girlfriend all of that obsession the zen buddhist will say you finally have to let go of and if we could i don't have the tenth and final picture here you will perhaps see it in your textbook is a picture of a buddha-like figure who is the oxford of the yoxherder has become enlightened and realizes he no longer needs to stay with that obsession of retaining property retaining that material item in his case the ox now one thing that is unique about zen or chan buddhism is the belief that enlightenment is not something that will come to you gradually but that enlightenment is something that will come to you suddenly and there are two terms for this sudden burst of enlightenment that will take place in zen buddhism kensho and satori okay both of those words are on the slide here at the bottom kensho and satori are the sudden burst of enlightenment and perhaps most well-known about the zen buddhist tradition is that in the midst of meditation uh there is the use of cohens and cohens are questions that have no logical answer and so the question is intended to be repeated in the mind over and over and over again and because the question has no logical or rational answer this is an attempt to make your mind let go of always having to have a rational explanation always having to have everything makes sense on a logical level only when you can let go of that can you come to enlightenment uh probably the most well-known example of a cohen is the somewhat humorous question if a tree falls in the woods and no one is present does it make a noise okay many of you may have heard that before of course initially you would think well of course it's going to make a noise whether a person's there or not but then you the logic would come in and say but wait the only way we say that there is noise if there is someone with ears who are who's able to perceive the noise and that's what makes a noise a noise that it's able to be heard and so you know you can kind of go back and forth on that and again it's the idea of asking a question to try to make you let go of this obsession with the rational and logical world okay especially in far east asia we have a pure land tradition of buddhism and for the most part i've told you that buddha dharma is a non-theistic religion but the pure land tradition comes closest to viewing the buddha as a sort of personal god and so realize that we do have diversity within this world religion the primary buddha within the pure land tradition is a mitiba and amitabha is here pictured with two heavenly consorts again adding to the idea of a personal god within the pure land tradition the land within the pure land tradition is stressed in a couple of ways first of all the belief is that within nature there are particular places that the buddha cosmic energy has designed for all of us to have a meeting with god and most often we see this pictured as mountains as you all who have been around mountains at all in your lives you know oftentimes a fog or cloud cover will come over the top of a mountain and of course for the ancient mind that was the belief that the gods are there on top of the mountains and so it is therefore a meeting place and then also is the idea with within pure land tradition is the idea that the gods ultimate reality has granted land to your particular group of people as a safe haven as a refuge for your people and so especially if it's a time when another group of people is oppressing you or trying to take your land from you you would show your devotion to amitabha buddha with the hope that amitabha will protect your people uh and your land of all the traditions of buddha dharma amir buddha is the amitabha buddha and the pure land tradition probably the least ascetic and the least strict of the schools of buddha dharma this uh focuses very much upon the hope of nirvana coming after this life and that you can actually experience some of the bliss and joy of nirvana in this life you're going to see other traditions of buddha dharma that are much more strict especially these next two that we look at but pure land would be the least ascetic or least strict of the buddhist traditions pictured here is nikitatsu fuji who is a primary teacher of the nichiren tradition uh nichiren buddhism seems to come around in the 14th century ce or a.d and this fellow here uh mr fuji his teachings even though you may have never heard of him before his teachings greatly influenced someone who i'm certain you've heard of mahandas or mahatma gandhi and of course gandhi had a great influence upon martin luther king jr the focus within the nature and tradition is to try to move away from self and to focus more on society that if your primary uh goal within religion is simply to save uh the self that would be a very egotistical form of religion and so the nature and tradition says that uh we all should be much more focused upon the greater good of society and you know we have to be somewhat careful here with the bias and prejudice that we have with the way media throws words around but oftentimes we hear today in the media social activism and social justice are used as litmus words for uh liberalism uh but within the nichiren tradition that is the goal of religion is to be socially active and by being socially active bring about greater justice this tradition goes back uh to a young fisherman named nichiren and nichiren is coming into the buddhist tradition having been trained by two bodhisattvas okay two enlightened teachers and their names tell you everything about them superb action and always abused if i could make a parallel with another world religion here for just a moment to help this make some sense for you within judaism and later christianity there is focus upon a book in the hebrew bible named after a prophet isaiah and this prophet isaiah has four passages in which he describes a suffering servant and later the christian new testament we'll pick up on we'll pick out on this concept of a suffering servant and assign that role to jesus of nazareth of course the christ who was crucified and so here we see in that tradition that the suffering servant later jesus christ is a person of superb action and because of that superb action he is crucified and so that would be the always abused aspect here of the nichiren tradition and so the belief within the nutrient tradition is that when you stand up for what is right when you speak out on behalf of others who are oppressed or downtrodden or in poverty then because you are speaking out for those people you will likely face abuse or persecution for that and so that's why it's very important in this tradition that these two bodhisattvas come together that the person of superb action will be one who is always abused and nonetheless there needs to be that commitment to speaking up for those who are oppressed in order for justice to be actualized okay in your fourth and final school within the mahayana tradition is the probably the most visible and well-known tradition within buddha dharma today that's the vajrayana tradition and pictured here is the 14th dalai lama and i would probably say next to pope benedict the 16th this would be the most globally recognized religious leader religious figure in the world today uh you're going to have a picture in just a moment on a future slide of benedict the 16th and the dalai lama meeting with one another what you need to have down in your notes for the vajrayana tradition is that it is considered the most aggressive form of buddha dharma and that it tries to hasten or speed up the path to enlightenment uh by the way a llama and dalai lama allama is a teacher and adale is uh the the most enlightened of the teachers and so the dalai lama is the primary teacher within this tradition we haven't had the term yoga in a while not since sanatana dharma but we do have a form of yoga called deity yoga within this tradition and this refers back to the aggressive nature of this buddha dharma and trying to speed up that process of enlightenment yoga is the belief that you are already a bodhisattva you are already a buddha you're already an enlightened person and you just have life experiences that have become a crust over that buddha over that bodhisattva that enlightened one and so deity yoga is to try to imagine and envision yourself as one who is already enlightened and the more that you're able to do that that crust of life experience that has blinded you from seeing that you are enlightened will break and fall apart and then you will finally emerge as a deity as a as a buddha as an enlightened one so that's what is meant by deity yoga okay there's only two holy days that you're responsible for for buddha dharma most importantly make sure you have the term vsac down in your notes for both theravada and mahayana buddhist visak is the day the anniversary of celebrating the enlightenment of siddhartha gautama okay the enlightenment of siddhartha gautama is celebrated on vsac and you may want to ask what date is vsac well there's no definitive answer to that because depending on the buddhist tradition uh the date changes from time to time but a vsac is what you're responsible for and again that is the anniversary of the heart of guatemala's enlightenment now for that smaller tradition theravada buddhist as you can see pictured here there is also the belief that the birth of siddhartha guatemala and the death of siddhartha gautama fall on this same day of visac so for mahayana this is only the celebration of the buddha's enlightenment but for the theravada tradition it is on the same date that you have the birth the enlightenment and the death of siddhartha gautama and then secondly majapuja day is another buddhist holy day you're responsible to know about and after the buddha was enlightened and he was teaching in north east india he had many many converts come to his teaching and become big shoes become disciples of the buddha dharma and so that mass conversion of those individuals is referred to as majapuja day the anniversary of that buddhism has done very well in the west uh most in the west are drawn toward buddhism are more than sanatana dharma because as referenced earlier even though it is judgmental of western thinkers to call the stories of hinduism like hanuman the monkey warrior and other such stories bizarre uh western prejudice have tended to go that way toward hinduism and other eastern religions but because buddhism is non-theistic and does not have those kind of stories it has tended to be the the uh form of eastern religion that has done best in the west many people in western europe and america have grown very disgusted by the materialism and the consumerism that is everywhere in our culture of i have to own this i have to have this i'm building up so much death that you're drowning in it all because of a culture that continues to shout and sometimes subtly whisper that we have to have these particular things in order to be happy in order to be important and so buddha dharma with its focus upon simplicity has been a path for many people to try to avoid that sort of materialism and there are even some buddhist scholars in the east that have suggested that the way that buddha dharma is being practiced in the west is more akin to what siddhartha guatemala intended than some of the superstitious forms of buddha dharma that are thriving in the east today especially those forms that focus upon the collection of relics as though that would somehow bring one to enlightenment buddhist scholars in the east feel again that that is more superstitious than what siddhartha guatemala would have intended and this religion is extremely egalitarian today uh pictured here is a big shoony having her head shaved and becoming part of a monastic community we live in interesting times within the past 50 years there have been more bichonies ordained than in the previous 2500 years and we do see the continuing stress on social activism to go back to that nichiren tradition this does seem to be one of the primary emphases within buddha dharma today is the need to identify where there is oppression and where there is injustice in the world and to peacefully non-violently uh speak and act against that and we have seen this especially in the areas of myanmar but even more so in cambodia and so with that information we'll go ahead and conclude buddha dharma and you can look for a lecture on uh religions that are indigenous to china coming in the next few days hope you all are doing well goodbye

this is your second and final lecture on the religion of buddha dharma or buddhism okay if you&#39;re taking good notes here about buddha dharma what i need you to do is to first of all realize in your outline that there are two major traditions within buddhadharma the oldest is the minority tradition and is sometimes referred to as the lesser vehicle because it is the minority tradition approximately 18 to twenty percent of those who claim a buddha dharma identity are part of the terravada tradition okay the theravada tradition again it is the oldest of the buddhist traditions and the focus within the theravada tradition is primarily upon the historical figure siddhartha gautama and his teachings we&#39;re going to see in the other school of buddha dharma which we&#39;ll get to in just a moment that yes there is belief in the historical figures at heart of gautama but more important than the historical figure is a sort of cosmic or universal presence of wisdom or energy uh that the the deceased buddha spirit passes on to the adherence of this religion the primary focus within theravada buddhism is in the triple gem the triple gem is three particular places where the buddhist finds refuge or finds security or safety and these three parts of the triple gem are based upon the book of holy scripture which you can see listed here on the second bullet the tipitaka and sometimes you&#39;ll see this spelled a trippy taka but the tipitaka or the tripitaka is the book of holy scripture that defines the three safe places as being the person of the buddha and then his teachings which we would call the dharma and then the sangha you will perhaps remember from last time is the community of big shoes or big shoonies the disciples are mocks following the teachings of the buddha so you find your safety you find your refuge in the buddha and the dharma and in the sangha there is a strong focus upon meditation within this tradition please get down a word that is not written on this slide that you will need to have down here the the meditation comes in two movements and the first movement is the one that is not listed on the slide here and that is the samatha movement of meditation samatha is spelled just like samantha but without the n okay no n samatha and samatha is when you attempt to quiet your mind to get your mind to come to a place of rest rather than continually racing through thoughts about you know what happened yesterday or what&#39;s going to happen later today or tomorrow and once you&#39;ve come to the place of samatha rest where the mind is very quiet the hope is that you will then come to a time of enlightenment and that second movement toward enlightenment is the word you do see on this slide the vipassana meditation vipassana meditation is coming to a new awareness or an enlightenment about the reality of your life perhaps a purpose or a meaning and certainly since we&#39;re talking about buddha dharma a greater uh ability to let go of the self to let go of the ego because teravata buddhists do focus quite a bit upon the historical figure of siddhartha gautama we see a great deal of devotion and a great deal of attention paid to rituals and relics honoring the buddha a relic would be something that is believed to have belonged to be a part of the buddha or to have belonged to siddhartha gautama oftentimes you will have someone with a chip of a bone that they will claim was part of siddhartha gautama or even a splinter of wood that was part of a bowl or some other vessel that sidhart of guatemala ate from or drank from so anything that is a physical tangible item that could tie a person or the person&#39;s household to the historical figures to heart of guatemala would be referred to as a relic okay as you continue in your notes here the much larger tradition within buddha dharma and this would be about 78 to 80 percent of the world&#39;s buddhists are actually part of the mahayana tradition and as mentioned on the uh previous uh slide of what i was telling you is that even though there is belief in the historical figures at heart of guatemala what&#39;s much more important to the mahayana tradition is the belief that the deceased buddha continues to have a pervasive spirit presence everywhere throughout the cosmos everywhere throughout the universe because there is the belief in more than one buddha you will have different depictions of a buddha figure often times these teachers are called bodhisattvas you can see that term listed on the second bullet here a person back up just a little bit here a person who achieves enlightenment or reaches enlightenment and the buddhist tradition is referred to as an arhant and our heart however is not necessarily one who will teach his or her enlightenment to others and arhant who does decide to teach the path of enlightenment is called a bodhisattva so make sure that you can differentiate between those two terms and arhant is simply one who has been enlightened and a bodhisattva is an enlightened one who is committed to teaching others the path of enlightenment and because this is a very diverse school of buddha dharma you&#39;re going to see some various expressions of it here in just a moment we do need to understand that there are different representations of the buddha pictured here is one portrayal of guanyin guanyin is a buddha that is sometimes depicted as a male sometimes as a female and therefore uh this buddha is one that we would describe as androgynous if androgynous is a new word for you it&#39;s a good word to have in your vocabulary andros is the greek term for man and gyno as the greek term for woman and so an androgynous being is one who has both male and female characteristics and we certainly see the depictions of guanine sometimes as a man sometimes as a woman and often times you will see when guanine is a woman that she will be holding a child and a mahayana buddhist would view himself or herself as the child being held by guanyin therefore being protected by guanyin the mahayana tradition also stresses meditation just like the older theravada tradition and similar to the meditative move of samatha where you empty yourself the mahayana tradition stresses this same concept with the term sunyata that sunyata is making space in your soul making space in your spirit and emptiness so that something new can be placed there so all of the sort of preconceived ideas or the presuppositions that you have about what makes you important or what makes you valuable even in comparison to others what makes you better than someone else all of those obsessions must be let go of you must empty yourself of all of that that would be sunyata and then in the emptiness your true identity could be found through meditation now again theravada and mahayana but within the mahayana tradition we do have at least four schools that we want to address let&#39;s begin with probably the most familiar form of buddha dharma that is the zen tradition uh pictured here you have a two of ten pictures that are part of the story of an ox herder who is searching for his ox who has run away and the story that&#39;s told in the ten pictures is that uh this ox herder is of course obsessed with retaining uh his possession his ox that he&#39;s lost and we see the journey of him for seeing some hoof prints of the ox and then sing the ox in a meadow and then finally he comes so close to the ox that he is able to eventually capture the ox and then the ox once again runs away and they see a picture of emptiness here with the circle on the right and that would be a sort of a sunyata experience that now this in the circle is actually the ninth picture of the ten and that now the ox has been lost once again and so why carry on with the obsession of saying i have to have that ox or for our culture today i have to have that car i have to have that house or i have to have that person be my boyfriend or girlfriend all of that obsession the zen buddhist will say you finally have to let go of and if we could i don&#39;t have the tenth and final picture here you will perhaps see it in your textbook is a picture of a buddha-like figure who is the oxford of the yoxherder has become enlightened and realizes he no longer needs to stay with that obsession of retaining property retaining that material item in his case the ox now one thing that is unique about zen or chan buddhism is the belief that enlightenment is not something that will come to you gradually but that enlightenment is something that will come to you suddenly and there are two terms for this sudden burst of enlightenment that will take place in zen buddhism kensho and satori okay both of those words are on the slide here at the bottom kensho and satori are the sudden burst of enlightenment and perhaps most well-known about the zen buddhist tradition is that in the midst of meditation uh there is the use of cohens and cohens are questions that have no logical answer and so the question is intended to be repeated in the mind over and over and over again and because the question has no logical or rational answer this is an attempt to make your mind let go of always having to have a rational explanation always having to have everything makes sense on a logical level only when you can let go of that can you come to enlightenment uh probably the most well-known example of a cohen is the somewhat humorous question if a tree falls in the woods and no one is present does it make a noise okay many of you may have heard that before of course initially you would think well of course it&#39;s going to make a noise whether a person&#39;s there or not but then you the logic would come in and say but wait the only way we say that there is noise if there is someone with ears who are who&#39;s able to perceive the noise and that&#39;s what makes a noise a noise that it&#39;s able to be heard and so you know you can kind of go back and forth on that and again it&#39;s the idea of asking a question to try to make you let go of this obsession with the rational and logical world okay especially in far east asia we have a pure land tradition of buddhism and for the most part i&#39;ve told you that buddha dharma is a non-theistic religion but the pure land tradition comes closest to viewing the buddha as a sort of personal god and so realize that we do have diversity within this world religion the primary buddha within the pure land tradition is a mitiba and amitabha is here pictured with two heavenly consorts again adding to the idea of a personal god within the pure land tradition the land within the pure land tradition is stressed in a couple of ways first of all the belief is that within nature there are particular places that the buddha cosmic energy has designed for all of us to have a meeting with god and most often we see this pictured as mountains as you all who have been around mountains at all in your lives you know oftentimes a fog or cloud cover will come over the top of a mountain and of course for the ancient mind that was the belief that the gods are there on top of the mountains and so it is therefore a meeting place and then also is the idea with within pure land tradition is the idea that the gods ultimate reality has granted land to your particular group of people as a safe haven as a refuge for your people and so especially if it&#39;s a time when another group of people is oppressing you or trying to take your land from you you would show your devotion to amitabha buddha with the hope that amitabha will protect your people uh and your land of all the traditions of buddha dharma amir buddha is the amitabha buddha and the pure land tradition probably the least ascetic and the least strict of the schools of buddha dharma this uh focuses very much upon the hope of nirvana coming after this life and that you can actually experience some of the bliss and joy of nirvana in this life you&#39;re going to see other traditions of buddha dharma that are much more strict especially these next two that we look at but pure land would be the least ascetic or least strict of the buddhist traditions pictured here is nikitatsu fuji who is a primary teacher of the nichiren tradition uh nichiren buddhism seems to come around in the 14th century ce or a.d and this fellow here uh mr fuji his teachings even though you may have never heard of him before his teachings greatly influenced someone who i&#39;m certain you&#39;ve heard of mahandas or mahatma gandhi and of course gandhi had a great influence upon martin luther king jr the focus within the nature and tradition is to try to move away from self and to focus more on society that if your primary uh goal within religion is simply to save uh the self that would be a very egotistical form of religion and so the nature and tradition says that uh we all should be much more focused upon the greater good of society and you know we have to be somewhat careful here with the bias and prejudice that we have with the way media throws words around but oftentimes we hear today in the media social activism and social justice are used as litmus words for uh liberalism uh but within the nichiren tradition that is the goal of religion is to be socially active and by being socially active bring about greater justice this tradition goes back uh to a young fisherman named nichiren and nichiren is coming into the buddhist tradition having been trained by two bodhisattvas okay two enlightened teachers and their names tell you everything about them superb action and always abused if i could make a parallel with another world religion here for just a moment to help this make some sense for you within judaism and later christianity there is focus upon a book in the hebrew bible named after a prophet isaiah and this prophet isaiah has four passages in which he describes a suffering servant and later the christian new testament we&#39;ll pick up on we&#39;ll pick out on this concept of a suffering servant and assign that role to jesus of nazareth of course the christ who was crucified and so here we see in that tradition that the suffering servant later jesus christ is a person of superb action and because of that superb action he is crucified and so that would be the always abused aspect here of the nichiren tradition and so the belief within the nutrient tradition is that when you stand up for what is right when you speak out on behalf of others who are oppressed or downtrodden or in poverty then because you are speaking out for those people you will likely face abuse or persecution for that and so that&#39;s why it&#39;s very important in this tradition that these two bodhisattvas come together that the person of superb action will be one who is always abused and nonetheless there needs to be that commitment to speaking up for those who are oppressed in order for justice to be actualized okay in your fourth and final school within the mahayana tradition is the probably the most visible and well-known tradition within buddha dharma today that&#39;s the vajrayana tradition and pictured here is the 14th dalai lama and i would probably say next to pope benedict the 16th this would be the most globally recognized religious leader religious figure in the world today uh you&#39;re going to have a picture in just a moment on a future slide of benedict the 16th and the dalai lama meeting with one another what you need to have down in your notes for the vajrayana tradition is that it is considered the most aggressive form of buddha dharma and that it tries to hasten or speed up the path to enlightenment uh by the way a llama and dalai lama allama is a teacher and adale is uh the the most enlightened of the teachers and so the dalai lama is the primary teacher within this tradition we haven&#39;t had the term yoga in a while not since sanatana dharma but we do have a form of yoga called deity yoga within this tradition and this refers back to the aggressive nature of this buddha dharma and trying to speed up that process of enlightenment yoga is the belief that you are already a bodhisattva you are already a buddha you&#39;re already an enlightened person and you just have life experiences that have become a crust over that buddha over that bodhisattva that enlightened one and so deity yoga is to try to imagine and envision yourself as one who is already enlightened and the more that you&#39;re able to do that that crust of life experience that has blinded you from seeing that you are enlightened will break and fall apart and then you will finally emerge as a deity as a as a buddha as an enlightened one so that&#39;s what is meant by deity yoga okay there&#39;s only two holy days that you&#39;re responsible for for buddha dharma most importantly make sure you have the term vsac down in your notes for both theravada and mahayana buddhist visak is the day the anniversary of celebrating the enlightenment of siddhartha gautama okay the enlightenment of siddhartha gautama is celebrated on vsac and you may want to ask what date is vsac well there&#39;s no definitive answer to that because depending on the buddhist tradition uh the date changes from time to time but a vsac is what you&#39;re responsible for and again that is the anniversary of the heart of guatemala&#39;s enlightenment now for that smaller tradition theravada buddhist as you can see pictured here there is also the belief that the birth of siddhartha guatemala and the death of siddhartha gautama fall on this same day of visac so for mahayana this is only the celebration of the buddha&#39;s enlightenment but for the theravada tradition it is on the same date that you have the birth the enlightenment and the death of siddhartha gautama and then secondly majapuja day is another buddhist holy day you&#39;re responsible to know about and after the buddha was enlightened and he was teaching in north east india he had many many converts come to his teaching and become big shoes become disciples of the buddha dharma and so that mass conversion of those individuals is referred to as majapuja day the anniversary of that buddhism has done very well in the west uh most in the west are drawn toward buddhism are more than sanatana dharma because as referenced earlier even though it is judgmental of western thinkers to call the stories of hinduism like hanuman the monkey warrior and other such stories bizarre uh western prejudice have tended to go that way toward hinduism and other eastern religions but because buddhism is non-theistic and does not have those kind of stories it has tended to be the the uh form of eastern religion that has done best in the west many people in western europe and america have grown very disgusted by the materialism and the consumerism that is everywhere in our culture of i have to own this i have to have this i&#39;m building up so much death that you&#39;re drowning in it all because of a culture that continues to shout and sometimes subtly whisper that we have to have these particular things in order to be happy in order to be important and so buddha dharma with its focus upon simplicity has been a path for many people to try to avoid that sort of materialism and there are even some buddhist scholars in the east that have suggested that the way that buddha dharma is being practiced in the west is more akin to what siddhartha guatemala intended than some of the superstitious forms of buddha dharma that are thriving in the east today especially those forms that focus upon the collection of relics as though that would somehow bring one to enlightenment buddhist scholars in the east feel again that that is more superstitious than what siddhartha guatemala would have intended and this religion is extremely egalitarian today uh pictured here is a big shoony having her head shaved and becoming part of a monastic community we live in interesting times within the past 50 years there have been more bichonies ordained than in the previous 2500 years and we do see the continuing stress on social activism to go back to that nichiren tradition this does seem to be one of the primary emphases within buddha dharma today is the need to identify where there is oppression and where there is injustice in the world and to peacefully non-violently uh speak and act against that and we have seen this especially in the areas of myanmar but even more so in cambodia and so with that information we&#39;ll go ahead and conclude buddha dharma and you can look for a lecture on uh religions that are indigenous to china coming in the next few days hope you all are doing well goodbye

Transcript for:Buddhism (Buddha Dharma): Lecture Notes

Transcript for:
Buddhism (Buddha Dharma): Lecture Notes