essays emptiness

Intro to Buddhism Professor Cho First Essay September 29, 1998 The classification of Buddhism under the heading Religion has long been a source of disagreement among scholars, and rightly so, for it is in many ways far different from the other major religions of the modern world. While Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are all based on mythological narratives, have set rules and ceremonies to follow, and are centered on a belief in a God or gods, Buddhism is not. Oddly enough, what Buddhism does share with these other religions, the claim to be a path to truth, is actually the very thing that sets it apart from them. While the other major religions of the world are effectively belief systems that demand faith in metaphysical truths, Buddhism is rather a critical mode of analysis that seeks to tear down the walls of false beliefs with which humans surround themselves for comfort and security. Buddhists do not have blind faith in anything; instead they seek to understand the world free from allillusions. By removing man's veil of ignorance, Buddhism reveals the truth latent in each person. One of Buddhism's most powerful tools in the onslaught against what the Buddha termed avidya, unenlightened man's ignorance of reality, is the concept of karma. While karma to the Hindus means action, to Buddhists karma is not action, but causality and conditionality. Karma is a law of nature, not an arbitrary construct; it's Western equivalent can be found in Newtonian physics as the law which states that every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. It goes against reason to deny that every event must have a cause, and therefore anything contrary to karma is contrary also to reason and must thus be false. Applying this idea of karma to many popular belief systems brings to the surface serious flaws inherent in their beliefs. For example, most major religions speak.
When I woke up this morning, I was anxious. I didn’t know who I was. No, not in a scary, schizophrenic kind of way. I wasn’t at peace with who I was, my identity, and what I was called to do. Every morning is marked by this stress, but especially Monday morning – the morning after I lead worship. When worship goes well, Monday morning feels empty. I miss the compliments of the crowd. I miss the feeling of a job well done. I feel alone. When worship is a train wreck (yep, it still happens sometimes), I feel like a failure. I feel like I shouldn’t be doing the things that I do. I’m a fake a phony I don’t have what it takes. It’s probably time for a new career. Monday mornings. It’s quiet. And the silence is deafening to my ears. Maybe you feel this way? You either feel too much pride in how you performed or you feel too much regret for how royally you failed. If that’s the case, consider Monday morning a gift. Consider the silence a gift. Because when it’s all stripped away, you can be your truest self. You fully alive in the presence of Jesus fully accepted for who you are and not the work that you do. If you were never to lead worship again or do anything of significance with your life, you would be a success because God has chosen to love you. That. Is. The. Truth. So rather than fretting your life away, thinking about yesterday’s train wreck or yesterdays limelight, be present right now in the love of God. Breathe it in. And rather than losing yourself in thoughts of yourself, inhale His lavish love for you and exhale worship. Because you are a worshiper. You love Jesus. That’s the reason you started leading worship in the first place, remember? Before it was a job. Before it was a crap-ton of administration. Before it consumed your life, you were consumed by Christ. And that’s what compelled you to lead. Monday morning – it may not be a productive day in the.
Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. Say for instance, that you're meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind's reaction is to identify the anger as my anger, or to say that I'm angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother, or to your general views about when and where anger toward one's mother can be justified. The problem with all this, from the Buddha's perspective, is that these stories and views entail a lot of suffering. The more you get involved in them, the more you get distracted from seeing the actual cause of the suffering: the labels of I and mine that set the whole process in motion. As a result, you can't find the way to unravel that cause and bring the suffering to an end. If, however, you can adopt the emptiness mode — by not acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves — you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or possessing. As you master the emptiness mode.
Bracing, chastening, furiously intelligent, Alex Stein's aphoristic essays should be required reading for anyone embarking on a literary career. The quicker you come to the point, he writes, the sooner it unravels. Yet his meditations on life and reading are durable work. Like Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and the prose of W. H. Auden, they will blow the dust off your thinking and provide hours of challenging pleasure. --David Mason, author of The Buried Houses (Roerich Poetry Prize), et al. Editor of Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry and other works.In this remarkable book, Stein moves through a progression of carefully shaped observations and vignettes to turn fragments of thought and experience into a living whole. Beautifully written yet subtly subversive, this book is a powerful, canny, and refreshing combination of insight, wit, and deep humanity. -- Kristen Iversen, Associate Professor, The University of Memphis Editor-in-Chief, The PinchTo attempt to sum up Alex Stein's visionary compilation of essays and aphorisms would be a quixotic endeavor at best, which in fact provides a fit allusion because, like the melancholy knight, Alex Stein is not afraid to tilt with the giants of philosophy, culture and literature, at times exposing them as mere windmills, other times championing their power to ravish. Like the best of Pessoa, Alex Stein's writing proves that the poet philosopher is alive and well. Mr. Stein has drawn the sword of his wit, and it is razor sharp. --Peter Grandbois, author of The Gravedigger.