What Does Buddhism Require?

[pscot]

since Buddhism is an atheistic religion, it doesn’t raise questions about the existence of God

J.G.: To be a Buddhist is to take refuge in the three Buddhist refuge objects (often called “the three jewels”): the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. To take refuge is to see human existence as fundamentally unsatisfactory and to see the three jewels as the only solution to this predicament.

The first refuge object is the Buddha: the fact that at least one person — the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama — has achieved awakening and release from suffering. This provides hope in one’s own future awakening, hope that through practice one can achieve a satisfactory existence. The second refuge is Dharma, or Buddhist doctrine. The third is the Sangha, or spiritual community, conceived sometimes as the community of other practitioners, sometimes as the community of monks and nuns, sometimes as the community of awakened beings. The project of full awakening is a collective, not an individual, venture.

G.G.: The first and the third refuges seem to correspond to a way of life, justified simply by its results in relieving sufferings. What’s involved in the second refuge, the doctrines?

J.G.: The foundation of doctrine in all Buddhist schools is the so-called four noble truths, explained by Siddhartha in his first talk after gaining awakening. The first is that life is fundamentally unsatisfactory, permeated by suffering of various types, including pain, aging and death and the inability to control one’s own destiny. The second is that this suffering is caused by attraction and aversion — attraction to things one can’t have, and aversion to things one can’t avoid, and that this attraction and aversion is in turn caused by primal confusion about the fundamental nature of reality and a consequent egocentric orientation to the world. The third is that if one extirpates these causes by eliminating attraction and aversion through metaphysical insight, one can eliminate suffering. The fourth is the specification of a set of domains and concerns — the eightfold path — attention to which can accomplish that.

G.G.: It seems then that the Buddhist way of life is based on, first, the plausible claim that suffering makes life unsatisfactory and, second, on a psychological account — again plausible — of the causes of suffering. But what’s the “metaphysical insight,” the truth about reality, that shows the way to eliminating suffering?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/what-does-buddhism-require/?action=click&contentCollection=Books&module=MostEmailed&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

[AtheistCrusader]

1. There are some sects of Buddhism that are theistic.

But the vast majority are non-theistic. (some worship devas as gods/supernatural thingies.)

[Warpy]

2. The "metaphysical insight" the author is looking for is in the practice of meditation.

Meditation is damned hard work, especially in the beginning when the babbling idiot in our left brains is determined to keep a running commentary. Once you figure out how to shut it up, to let it babble just outside your focus, you start to get those insights.

After all, Buddha himself said not to believe a word he said but to practice and discover it all for ourselves.

That practice is central to all sects, whether they tolerate folk gods or not. Without the practice, any discussion of tenets or anything else is just more babbling from the idiot in the left brain.