RELI 2732 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Himalayas, Gautama Buddha, Mustard Seed
2 May 2018
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Department
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March 5th, 2018
Buddhism Views on Death and Afterlife
Common Principles of Buddhism and Hinduism
• The cyclical concept of time
• The cyclical concept of personality i.e. Samsara – the beginning-less
cycle of birth and death
• Karma and rebirth – the idea that positive actions in one life bring
about rebirth in good conditions for the next life and harmful actions
lead to rebirth under negative conditions
o The idea of principle of order extends to the moral sphere (cause
and effect)
Buddhism Views
• However, Buddhism does not accept an eternal unchanging soul to the
personality
• Buddhism does not accept a universal uncaused being or entity (God)
• In Buddhism, the concept of existence depends on causes and
conditions
o If God eists, the Gods eistee depeds o auses ad
conditions
o Nothing can come into being unless it has a base or a cause for
being
• Accepts the idea that there are many types of beings populating the
earth (hell beings, human beings, spirit beings, animals)
o All of them impermanent
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2
Gautama Buddha 480-400 BCE
• Gautama – family name
• Siddhartha – boyhood name
• Buddha – title eaig Aakeed Oe (aakeed fro the sleep of
ignorance)
• Shakyamuni – sage of the Shakyas (tribe that he was a part of)
• Tathagata – He ho oes ad goes aordae ith ‘ealit (ost
common one he uses for myself)
o Means just come, or just go (he who comes and goes with
accordance to reality)
• The Buddha was born as a son of a great chief in one of the Tribal
republics (present day Nepal) in the Himalaya Mountains
• He was told if he lived he would become a great ruler, and if he left he
would become a sumana (rejected household life and went to find
enlightenment and liberation)
• Buddhas father raised his son to become a ruler because they had a
luxurious life
o He wants to keep him away from ugliness of the world
o Eetuall hes depressed eause he feels that there should e
more to life, he goes out of the palace
o He sees the four sights
▪ Old man, sick man, corpse, and renunciate (sumana)
▪ OR old age, sickness, death and liberation
o This is encounter of someone who has never seen these four
sights
o He asks why these people are like this and the charioteer says
its part of life
o But when he encounters the renunciate, he asks why the person
is so calm if death is at the end of the line
▪ He has found liberation
o Buddha wants to find liberation because of what he sees, and
studies under masters of the time
o He enters a point of extreme fasting almost to death
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