Buddhism and Christianity Love Essay

Religions give people a view of how they are supposed to live to reach a certain end. This end can become a new beginning in many religions. While on earth one of the most powerful thing religions have is their concept of love. Love is a big part of where someone goes when they reach the end. Buddhism and Christianity both use love in their religious identity.

Buddhism and Christianity have the idea of a true unending love. This love is supposed to be unselfish. In both religion that have people who practice monastic life. In this life, though you are not sharing your life with another through marriage, you are still supposed to love others. Love is in these religions is important because their founders spoke and practice love.

In Buddhism, love is alive and ever growing. It continues to grow until everyone can feel the love that you are giving out. Love and the person that you love will always be there. Buddhists never regret the love that they are giving out and they embrace love everyday. They believe that loving one person is a great opportunity for you to love more. Because of love, sacrifices can happen and your love becomes stronger. Love is something that can nourish you and others and this nourishment of love should have no end.

In Christianity, love begins and ends with God. In the Bible, John 3:16 states that God so loved the world that he gave his son to die for us. This is the purest example of true love. Jesus’ example of death is how we should love others. Love is the desire to share in the life of Jesus. Instead of dying we care for others and follow the commandments given to us in the Bible. Through love we can be like Christ.

Love is very important to religion. It can be practices in many ways such as the monastic life and in being married. Love should never end but instead be continued and spread to everyone. Love is alive and should be felt by all people. Giving love to others should be unselfish and you should never regret loving someone. Love is powerful and unending.

Buddism

The Buddha

Siddhartha Gautana was a prince in a kingdom near the Indian-Nepalese border. He lived a privileged life but realized life included old age, sickness, and death. He then questioned the meaning of life and left his palace to seek Truth. He practiced various teachings but still had not found the answer. Instead, he look into his heart and mind for the answer and sat beneath a pipal tree until he gained Enlightenment. After 40 days, he gained this Enlightenment and became know as the Buddha (The Enlightened One).

The Three Jewels

The three jewels are the ideals at the heart of Buddhism. The Buddha is the yellow jewel. This jewel stands for Buddha himself and the spiritual journey to achieving Enlightenment. The blue jewel is Dharma. It stands for the teachings of Buddha or the truth he understood. It can also stand for the teaching that was born when the Buddha first put his realization into words. Dharma is also the corpus of scriptures which are apart of he Buddist canon and the practices outlined in them. The red jewel is Sangha. Sangha means spiritual community and the people with whom we share our spiritual lives. In a braod sense it is all the Buddhist in the world, living, dead or yet to be born.

The Threefold Way

The Threefold Way includes ethics, meditation, and wisdom. The path is progessive as ethics provides a basis for meditation, and meditation is the ground on which wisdom can develop. With ethics there is a code known as the Five Precepts. They are principles of training which are undertaken freely and put into practice with intelligence and sensitivity. Meditation is a means of transforming the mind. It includes techniques that that encourage and develop concentration, clarity, emtional positivity, and a clear seeing of the true nature of things. Wisdom is the aim of all Buddhist practices. It means developing our own direct understanding of the truth.

The Four Noble Truths

These are the most basic formulation of the Buddha's teaching:
1. All existence is dukkha (suffering/ unsatisfactoriness)
2. The cause of dukkha is craving
3. The cessation of dukkha comes with the cessation of craving
4. There is a path that leads from dukkha

The Noble Eightfold Path

This is a further unpacking of the Threefold Way and is one of the most widely known of Buddha's teachings.
1. Right Understanding
2. Right Resolve
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Meditation

Hinduism

Hinduism Chapter Review

1.Moksha is the Hindu for liberation.it also means release in Sanskrit. It is a release from the ordinary, finite, limited realm of existence into the infinite ocean of the divine.

2. Monism is the doctrine that all reality is one. An analogy for this is all the bodies of water in the world. They appear to be different but they all share the common essence, water.

3. Brahman is the essence of all things, which means the outside world. Atman is eternal self, which is within you. Since all reality is one Brahman is Atman.

4. Each deity is considered a mask for the one essence or god. They are used as accessible ways for people to interact with the divine. Each mask is for a different person so that the interaction with that god will be effective.

5. Samsara or the wheel of rebirth is about how an individual is reincarnated from one life form to another.

6. Hinduism most sacred text is the Bhagavad Gita.

7. The two principles are karma and dharma. Karma is actions or deeds. It works with samsara in picking the next life you are but in. Good actions lead you to a better life and bad actions do not. Dharma is the ethical duty based on divine order of reality. It is the complete rule of life.

8. The four caste system classes are Brahmins, which are the priest, Kshatriyas, which are the warriors and administrators, Vaishyas, which are the producers such as farmers and artisans, and finally the Shudras, who are the servant and laborers.

9. Krishna tells Arjuna to engage in war because it is his sacred duty and if he goes against it he will earn evil.

10. The first stage is right after by reaches puberty. The boy becomes a student studying the Vedas and other sacred scriptures. The next stage begins with marriage. This stage is when a household is formed and the priorities are raising a family and having a career. The third stage is the birth of the first grandchild and is called the forest dweller stage. This stage is when the man, sometimes with his wife retreats to the forest. The fourth and final stage is the sannyasin or wandering ascetic. The forest dwellers are able to go back into society but remain detached.

11. The four goals of life are Sensual Pleasure, Material Success, Harmony with Dharma and the Bliss of Moksha. Sensual Pleasure or kama is to be embraced by whoever desires it provided that it is within the limits of dharma. Material Success or artha is about social and material success. It is unfulfilling in the long run. Harmony with Dharma is highly desired, but has limited joy because of samsara. The Bliss of Moksha is reaching the infinite or the great ocean in which everything flows.

12. The first path is The Path of Works. This path is for the active and deals with doing your ethical duty and being unselfish. The next path is for the Philosophical. It is the Path of Knowledge and the shortest but steepest accent to liberation. It requires a great deal of learning and mediation.  You also have to three schools of philosophy called Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga. The third path is The Path of Devotion. This path is for the emotional. This path directs spiritual energy outward in worship of the deity.

13.The first school is the Vedanta. This school is most faithful to the predominant monism of Hinduism. The philosopher Shankara espouses the predominant form of it. This belief is that the world and all finite beings within it are the stuff of maya or cosmic illusion. Sankhya is contrary to monism. It asserts that reality is composed of two distinct categories, matter and an infinite number of eternal selves. Yoga is a school that emphasizes physical and psychological practices. Yoga carefully acknowledges the connection between the self and the other parts of our human makeup. Yoga is used to free the eternal self from bondage by stripping away the many levels of personhood in which that self is wrapped.

14.The three main important gods are Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.

15. An avatar is an incarnation or living embodiment of a deity who is sent to earth to accomplish a divine purpose. Krishna and Rama are avatars for Vishnu.

16. The Bhagavad-Gita is similar to the bhakti marga.

17. The three aspects of Hindu devotional life are household and village rituals, holy places, and cow veneration.

18. Gandhi insights fuel Hinduism‘s tendency to accept all wisdom as lighting the way to the divine.

19. The government of India forbade discrimination against outcastes. The government is also trying to start the promotion social and economical rights.

20. Sati is the practice of burning a widow on the same funeral pyre as her husband. Sati is now forbidden but it still occurs rarely.

21. In 1947, India was partitioned. Muslims moved to Pakistan and the area that is now called Bangladesh so they could have a homeland. This became bloody as many people on both sides were killed as they moved. The tension between Pakistan and India are still around today.