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Hi, my name is Star,
and I hang out inside of Second Life.
I'll be hosting this little series of talks,
so welcome to a Skeptical Buddhist channel
in which we try to blow just a little dust
off some very ancient and obscure writings
to present the essential teachings of the Buddha
in simple language.
We'll start with the very most basic terms and concepts
and over time work up to some of the deeper
and more complex ones.
Sometimes we'll talk about the past,
sometimes we'll talk about the present,
sometimes about the future,
but we will always keep to the very heart
of what the Buddha taught.
Just the basics will give us plenty of depth
and breadth and enough mind-bending
concepts to keep us busy growing
in wisdom and insight.
In today's short introduction
we'll just cover a few
of the most basic terms you may need to know,
and describe what we mean
when we call ourselves Skeptical Buddhists.
Let's start with the big one:
What is Skeptical Buddhism?
I sometimes get asked,
“Didn't the Buddha say that skepticism
is not good for his followers?”
Yes, we do see “skepticism” used in that way
in the Buddha's talks,
but he was talking about being skeptical
in the sense of being negative about his teachings,
of having no trust and relentlessly questioning.
He explained that the cure for that sort of thinking
was for his potential followers to
“Come and see” for themselves.
This is very different from most religions
which ask their followers
to not ask questions and instead “have faith”.
So right there we can see one big difference
between Buddhism and the rest of the world's religions,
that Buddhism encourages you to ask
smart and thoughtful questions,
and to look deeply into your actual
every-day experience and see for yourself
if there is clear evidence for what it describes.
When the Buddha said we shouldn't be skeptical
he was saying that rather than just questioning
in a negative way, we need to actually understand
what's being said and try it out.
Then we'll have useful questions
that increase understanding,
rather than negative questions
that distort understanding.
The “Skeptical” in this form of Buddhism
refers to a school of philosophy in which skeptics
choose to critically examine whether their knowledge
and perceptions are actually true,
with the aim of reaching relative certainty.
This questioning of what we believe,
and what we think we know,
is the central practice that the Buddha taught
in order to give us a more accurate insight
into the ways in which our own
fuzzy thinking trips us up.
The Buddha talked a great deal
about “views” which translates very well
to our modern times. We all have views –
also known as opinions – on just about everything!
What Skeptical Buddhists do, then,
is question whether they are basing their choices
on opinions or on facts.
Actually that is what any Buddhist should do.
So there is something Skeptical Buddhists do
that many traditional Buddhists don't do –
we question Buddhism itself.
But didn't I say the Buddha said
not to be skeptical of his teachings?
Yes I did. But once we have understood
the core teachings, and seen them for ourselves
they don't need constant questioning.
We aren't questioning his core teachings,
we're questioning whether
what's part of the very broad mix
of philosophies and religions under
the name of “Buddhism” are verifyable or not.
For example: Is karma verifiable?
Do we have direct evidence
in our experience for rebirth?
Have we got good evidence
that doing meritorious deeds
will improve our lot in future lives?
We will talk more
about what Skeptical Buddhism questions
in future talks,
but for now it's enough to understand
that as skeptics, we find
there are very few things
we can say we know for sure,
and a whole lot that we must accept
that we don't know and may never know.
This makes us pretty firm agnostics.
In just this brief talk I've introduced
a few terms we'll use again
so I'd like to clarify those, and define a few more.
Most of them have made it into common usage
in one form or another
so those may be familiar.
It helps to understand
that we base our understanding
of the Buddha's teaching
on many volumes of texts
written centuries after the Buddha died.
His followers tried to preserve his teachings
by memorizing them and chanting them,
and when writing became common,
they were written down, but
as you might expect
they are not a perfect transmission of what he said.
The term for this body of writings
is one that's used throughout religious discussions,
and that is “canon”
spelled c a n o n,
with just one “n” in the middle
instead of the two used in the middle of the big gun.
There are many definitions for this word
but we use it here to mean a blend
of these three definitions
7. any officially recognized set of sacred books
8. any comprehensive list of books within a field or
9. the works of an author that have been accepted as authentic.
The oldest parts of the Buddhist canon
come down to us in two languages:
Pali, which is thought to be pretty close
to the language the Buddha actually spoke,
and Sanskrit, which uses the same alphabet
as the main language now spoken in India, Hindi,
but Sanskrit is far more formalized
and limited than modern languages.
So you will hear references to the “Pali canon”
which is thought to be the oldest texts,
and the “Sanskrit canon”
which might not be as old but is still ancient!
Most of the words that have moved from Buddhism
into English are here in their Sanskrit form –
for example “karma” (“kamma” in Pali).
In English it is understood to mean
a sort of bank of good deeds and bad deeds
that gets totalled up when you die
and buys you a good birth or a bad birth
next time around.
When we don't apply it to rebirth,
we Americans use it in a
“what goes around comes around” sort of way.
In the Buddha's day, this was not its meaning,
so in later talks we'll try to define it a bit more.
Because of the way the teachings
were preserved orally,
lots of things got numbered
to help make sure nothing was missed,
and one of those things was
the three biggies deserving of respect,
known as “The Triple Gems”.
These are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Buddha, you know, is what we now call the fellow
who taught what we now think of as Buddhism.
It wasn't his name and that description
wasn't used in his time.
People who fully understand the teaching
so deeply that they can live their lives
in ways not based on opinions
are buddhas with a little “b.”
The Buddha with a big “B”
is the fellow who figured out a better way
to see ourselves and the world
and managed to develop enough of a following
to be sure that that insight would be passed on.
Dharma is the insight, what he saw.
Because what he saw is what he teaches,
the word “dharma” also means his teachings.
It can also be extended out to mean
“the way things actually are”
or “reality”
or even “the laws of the universe”
(though we are, of course,
free to question whether there is such a thing
as one reality or fixed laws of the universe,
or whether these are concepts
views,
Opinons!
- created by humans).
Sangha is the community of people
who practice Buddhism,
who support each other in their practice
and try to share the insight
with those who want it.
Welcome to my Sangha!