Buddhism Essay

Buddhism started from a successor of Hinduism, by a man named Siddhartha Gautama during 5th century B.C. in northern India. Siddhartha Gautama was born in approximately 560 B.C. in northern India. His father Suddhodana ruled over a area near the Himalayas (present day Nepal). Suddhodana hid his son to the outside world and isolated him to his palace. Gautama one day saw the dark side of life on a trip he took outside the palace walls. He saw four things that forever changed his life: an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a beggar. Deeply concerned by the suffering he saw, he decided to leave the palace life and begin a quest to find the answer to the problem of pain and human suffering

The purpose of Buddhism is to seek the reason, why is there pain and suffering? The teachings of Buddhism aim on what Gautama believed to be the answer to these two questions. These basic rules are found in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. The Four Noble Truths set out to seek, life is suffering, suffering is due to attachment, attachment can be overcome, there is a path for accomplishing this. The last step, the path to accomplishing this is explained by the Eight-fold Path. This explains that the middle, between idealism and materialism is the way to nirvana. The scientific paradigm and its search for truth and reality is incompatible. Science can never find truth and reality, because it sits out on finding human understanding, on the basis of theories and observations, which are always being proven and unproven.

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Buddhism seeks to understand the natural course of human beings pain and suffering. Which always keeps a constant on trying to answer why is there pain and suffering. One argument is that Buddhism is a way of life on how someone gets to the truth and finds reality. Where science sets out to seek what is truth and reality which can never be found. Secondly, science can only study our existence, thus cannot search for human understanding. Thirdly, science has proved that the big boom theory and how humans have been on earth far after the world was created. But this has nothing to do with human understanding.

Buddha believes that by following the Four Noble Truths and Eight-fold Path you will get to truth and reality. Then and only then you will understand this concept. Scientific explanations only find the answer though rules and laws. Which are made from human beings on how to follow these rules and laws, thus proceeding and changing this rules or laws, science will come closer and closer. Being proven and unproven, again and again. Where it will keep looking for truth and reality, but never finding it. Nevertheless, meaning looking for something that is not there. People may say Buddhism may be a way of life and living better, therefore cannot find truth and reality. But what Buddhist believe is by living this life you will understand truth and reality.

Where science sets out to explain and understand own existence, it can never find this concept. Because science doesn’t know what it is looking for. It tries to answer these questions though observations and theories, what they are looking for is not truth and reality, but the existence and history of the human. Where the Buddhist concept of truth and reality is how a immortal human though living will find this truth and after life will know reality. By doing this you will find your salvation and your own truth and reality. Furthermore, Buddha does not believe in heaven but in a state of being. What science can never find or understand is that finding truth and reality is in the mind. Though what you do in this life, goes onto a rebirth life after you die. Where you find Nirvana, which is an eternal state of being. It is the state in which the birth and the rebirth cycle come to an end. This is the end of pain and suffering, a state where there are no desires and the individual consciousness comes to an end.

The fact that science talks about human evolving and how we come from apes and what not. But then this doesn’t explain why humans and apes still live on the same planet. Many people may say religion can’t put two and two together. But the difference between science and religion is that religion is a way of life. Where science is the search for human understanding. Science takes the wrong approach where Buddhism explains the search for human understanding is within the human. Facts and explanations though science will never have truth meaning on what is truth and reality.

In conclusion, human beings in this life certainly, will never for sure prove or understand why we are here. By seeking and finding what we believe is truth of the world. We may think in our minds that we or ‘I’ I’m right. The purpose of life though pursuing truth and reality everyone has a different, similar, or same view. Buddhism tries to find this middle between materialism and idealism. Not necessarily fighting the two, but the middle meaning that these two things are imperfect and impermanent. That materialism will vanish and idealism is only a way of thinking, though this you will find your own path. Buddha (Gautama) said “ Suppose there is a hereafter and there is a fruit, result, of deeds done well or ill. Then it is possible that at the dissolution of the body after death, I shall arise in the heavenly world, which is possessed of the state of bliss.' This is the first solace found by him.” (quotations adapted from The Anguttara Nikaya 3.65, Soma Thera Trans.) Meaning though doing good deeds you will be with him in the nirvana or heavenly world. Buddhism just points out what the guidelines are to get to pure nirvana, not how everyone should get there, but how a individual by self in it’s own way does so. Therefore, my hypothesis of science and its search for truth and reality is incompatible with the search for human understanding.

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