But if the merchant would have been successful in killing other merchants then he would have to carry the negative karma of killing five hundred people. Upon realizing this and seeing the gravity of the situation he had made the decision to kill the person himself and was ready to bear the consequences of willfully killing a person by his own hands.
He came to know about the intention of one merchant which was to kill all the other merchants and take the bounty for himself. There is even a story of a great Bodhisattva (highly realized practitioner) who was on a ship with five hundred other merchants. And accordingly his karma is formed which results in a favorable or unfavorable situation. A lot of it depends on the intention and motivation of the perpetrator. In Buddhism the concept of an act being “good or bad” doesn’t necessarily totally depend on the act per se. The black portion symbolizes negative actions and white portion symbolizes positive actions. The second circle is divided into a black and white portion. Underlying all this push and pull of the mind there is a constant feeling that all this inconvenience(suffering) is caused by the outside world and not realizing that the root of this vicious tree is inside us and this is the underlying ignorance which guides all our actions and forms a wrong world view. Or it sees things as repulsive and wants to avoid it, in a sense it is being pushed by the object thus losing control again.
Our mind looks at the phenomenal world and sees things as attractive and craves for it and in a sense it is being pulled by the object thus losing control over itself. On a psychological level our mind is said to be always shackled and never totally independent until we are totally Liberated or achieve Buddhahood. These are the three poisons which bind us in this cyclic existence or Samsara and each animal is biting the tail of the other which shows that craving, aversion and delusion are all interlinked. In this wheel there are four concentric circles in which the innermost circle has three animals, a cock, a snake, and a pig symbolizing greed, hatred and ignorance respectively. He represents the truth of universal impermanence that is operating every moment. The Wheel of Life contains a very frightening figure called the Yama or Lord of Death holding a wheel in his hands. A lot of this is surely metaphysical but there are various literature which interprets this profound teaching on a psychological level and recently I read a book by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpochay called “ Transcending Madness” which gives us a psychological explanation of the 6 realms and their corresponding bardos or intermediate stages. There is no mention about the Big Bang or how the whole universe came into being, but there is an explanation of how our own inner universe operates.
#Buddhist wheel of life how to#
The whole purpose of putting so much effort is to find out where it all began and questions like how it must have been at the time of Big Bang are just waiting to be answered.īut coming back to the story of the Indian King the Buddha gave him a map of how the consciousness goes on and on in this endless cycle of births and deaths, thus providing him an answer as how to end this vicious cycle. They have even gone to the extent of creating a 30 mile long laboratory at the border of Switzerland, called CERN. Science tremendously helps us to reach a point where we can rationalize our existence to some extent. In our busy lives surrounded by work and all the latest gizmos and constant notifications of social media platforms, we do have rare moments of insight where we wonder about the grand scheme of things, about our lives. Then the Buddha seeing this as a wonderful opportunity to impart a teaching drew the Bhavachakra or “ The Wheel of Life”.
During that time a great king named King Rudrayana asked the Buddha for spiritual guidance for his kingdom. Just as an elephant in the midst of huts,Ībout 2600 years ago these lines were said by the Buddha. Enter into the teachings of the Enlightened One
0 kommentar(er)
