ana_akilina
i was reading some topics and i've heard BBR lesson's and i'm confused.
the bad buddhist radio says that what we know about the buddah not reaching nirvana so he could help others is not true, that it is just some crap the newlier buddhist followers made up so he can compete with other Gods and religions.. that it's all fake and that buddah didn't teach that himself...
he also says that buddhism has nothing to do with compassion but rather understanding, but i've been learning a little bit about the schools, and people say Mahayana teachings center on the idea of compassion and the perfection of this virtue before the others, for example...
now i'm confused and i don't really know what buddah tought, anymore
confused can anyone help meout with this? perhaps with some quoting from the budda himself?
Ah, the problem with conflicting schools. Okay, let me try and sort this the best I can. Buddha Gautama did attain nirvana, according to the earliest scriptures. He is one well gone - out of our cycle of samsara. Buddha Gautama didn't teach the idea of holding out in order to help others, but there was no detraction from the idea either. Bodhisattvas (the concept you're thinking of here) do exist in the earlier schools, but they're just people on the way to nirvana and not the purposeful holdouts that Mahayana pitches them. The Buddha Gautama himself called himself a Bodhisattva when her referred to his lives before this one.
The idea of buddhas (not Gautama, but other ones that came later or earlier) hitting enlightenment and then deciding to attain just enough karma to keep going so they could bring everyone else with them is a later addition, from the Mahayana sect specifically, designed to promote universal compassion and loving kindness. Whether the tales are true is, in all honesty, totally inconsequential - it's about the message rather than the actuality, and the message is this: Be exellent to each other.
I love Bill and Ted for that.
3nodding Historically, the statement regarding the Buddha not 'doing it alone' is also correct - he had a lot of teachers he crimped ideas from. He was, keep in mind, a wandering ascetic for many years before hitting enlightenment. He had many masters in yogic disciplines and Indian religious and philosophical thought. Many of the ideas he taught were not new ones at all; he'd just codified them differently and shifted them into his own methods.
Scripturally, he also never claimed to make it up himself - he said it's always been around, you just needed to look for it. There were Buddhas before him, and he said there'd be Buddhas after him.
3nodding If you want to see the earliest examples of the Buddha's teachings, I'd recommend the website Access to Insight. It's an online compendium of the Pali canon, along side discourses on the sutras, articles and all kinds of things.
3nodding
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