An Atheist Explores the Dhammapada Part 1: Introduction

 Dhammapada Introduction

 Welcome to the latest addition to “An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts”. In this series I work my way through the sacred texts of various religions and ponder them from a secular standpoint. Not to mock or belittle or to debunk, but to try to understand them from a mythic and historical perspective, what they tell us of psychology of the people that wrote them and what we know about ourselves now.

 So far I’ve read the Bible and Apocrypha, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad Gita. And I’m still an atheist – the arguments of none have made me Christian, Muslim nor Hindu.

 Now, it’s the turn of Buddhism.

 As with the Hindu corpus, there’s not really a central, essential text like there is with the Abrahamic faiths. Instead, there’s a whole range of different documents (kind of like the Bible) that aren’t necessarily collected into one book (unlike the Bible).

 The essential Buddhists texts are arguably the Pali Canon, a collection of texts in the Pali language that form the basis of Theravada Buddhism – these are divided into the Vinaya Pitake which mainly concern themselves with rules for monastic orders, the Sutta Pitaka which are a collection of texts attributed to the Buddha Siddharta Gautama and his followers, and finally the Abhidhamma Pitaka, which are a reworking of the Sutta Pitaka to make the doctrines more systematic (as I understand it).

 The Dhammapada is part of the Sutta Pitaka, and is sort of a distillation of sayings of the Buddha such that it forms a kind of brief introduction. Certainly it’s the one that came up most as being the “popular” Buddhist text, so perhaps it’ll serve as a simple introduction. The name derives from Dhamma (equivalent to Sanskirt Dharma), meaning “doctrine” or “eternal truth” and Pada, meaning both “path” and implication of a metric foot of verse. So, it’s kind of the “Path of Eternal Truth” and “The Poem of Doctrine”, and variants thereof.

 I expect to be horribly wrong about all of this, but maybe emerge the other side a little less ignorant.

 For the online Dhammapada that I use, see here The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom (accesstoinsight.org)

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Atheist Explores the Apocrypha Part 39: One Last Round Of Bloodshed (2 Maccabees 11-15)

  2 Maccabees 11-15 One Last Round Of Bloodshed   Welcome to the final instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Apocrypha version). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Old Testament Apocrypha, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.   For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5 For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP   2 Maccabees 11 “ Not long after the, Lysias the king's protector and cousin, who also managed the affairs, took sore displeasure for the things that were done. ”   Last time, the Maccabees had rousted the Seleucid forces, retaken Jerusalem and invented Hannukah by rededicating the Temple. Now Antiochus’ cousin Lysias wants to take a crack at them, and gathers a force of ten thousand foot soldiers, “ thousands of horse ” and 80 elephants.   However, the Jews still have God on their side, and are once again joined by an angelic saviour figure, i
Read more

Fiend Factory 5E. White Dwarf Issue 10: Eastern Skeleton

Image
  Issue10: Eastern Skeleton   White Dwarf Issue 10 presents us with yet another smorgasbord of monsters with no discernable theme.  First up is the Blink Skeleton , by Bryan Hanstock, which is basically a skeleton with limited teleportation ability, plus some of them can fire a magic missile. All fine and good, pretty simple to put together and a bit of a surprise. I don’t see any rationale for why they have these abilities, but I don’t think it matters in this case, since skeletons tend to be deliberate creations and so their creator could have given them whatever powers they see fit.   John Culver’s Inverse Monster has no specific stats or pictures, but is more of a template to create things like the Withra (Issue 8), the Nilbog (Issue 9) or the Dahdi (this issue). Anyone that rolls a hit, misses, and vice versa. If it makes a save, it fails. Bonuses become penalties. Other magical effects are reversed according to DM fiat. If you stop and look at it, that’s all pretty po
Read more

Fiend Factory 5E: Issue 1 and 2 Spinescale

Image
Welcome to a new series, and this one’s a bit different. This time I’m looking through the first 50 issues of White Dwarf magazines, but rather than simply reading and discussing things, I’m focussing on the monster entries that were sent in by readers and contributors, choosing one per issue, and attempting to convert it into D&D 5 th edition statistics. But of course it’s not just going to be game mechanics. There’s an interesting exercise here in studying the early days of role-playing games through the changing style of the submissions, even when focussed only on the “monsters” for one game. White Dwarf Issue 1 doesn’t have any new monsters, nor very little in the way of game mechanic-style stuff at all, save for a magic item called the Helm of Vision, and the dubiously tasteful “joke” Pervert character class, and the start of Don Turnbull’s ponderous “Monstermark” system used to calculate a kind of early Challenge Rating, but to three decimal places! Consequently, we need to
Read more