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  hardie karges 2:27 am on November 9, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Brahminism, Buddhism ( 431 ), change, CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), cosmological constant ( 2 ), eternal life ( 3 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), karma ( 50 ), language ( 146 ), Mahayana ( 47 ), meditation ( 192 ), predetermination, reincarnation ( 14 )   

  Buddhism and the Conundrum of Change 

  

  Change is not a cause of suffering if things are getting better all the time. That’s the Buddha’s only conceptual mistake, and that’s what makes him so real. The Mahayanists tried to make him perfect, as some transcental manifestation should be, but the historical Buddha was first and foremost a real person with real-world problems, which he tried to renounce, of course. Some modern women take offense to the fact that he left his wife and child behind, but that must be seen within the context. They were well cared for.

  But his conceptual blunder, just like Einstein’s ‘cosmological constant’, Jesus’s birds with nests but no barns, and Plato’s perfect dictatorship, show his intrinsic humanity. Everything is subject to revision, and everything is subject to change, even concepts. That is a conceptual necessity, since it can never be proven one way of the other, anyway. But if life is predetermined, then there is no reason to act, either good or bad, and karma loses meaning. Change may appear to be a cause of suffering, if your high status is diminished, but that probably says more about superficial status than change itself.

  Christianity thrives on the optimism that change hopefully brings, of course, and the Buddha was certainly right to call BS on that, of course, even if Christianity as such didn’t exist at the time. Bhahmanism did, though, and there are very real similarities. Eternal life is a plaything of children, and we have better things to do, reincarnation ditto. This life and this world require nothing but kindness and compassion.

   

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  hardie karges 2:39 am on May 25, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), change, Eightfold Path ( 17 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), impermanence ( 6 ), language ( 146 ), meditation ( 192 ), nature ( 17 )   

  Buddhism 599: Change (Impermanence) is Not so Bad, After All… 

  

  Nature is the greatest and wisest teacher, unfailing in her knowledge and unerring in her accuracy. In Thai the word for Nature is dharmajati, pronounced something like thammashart, so literally the ‘law of life’, unless you have a better definition of dharma¸ then feel free to use it. The point is, that for all its diversity and beauty and apparent randomness, Nature (with capital N now; see what I did there?) is not only a law, but it’s permanent. This is something that the Buddha warned against constantly, the impermanence of existence, so not something to take lightly.

  That’s because the laws of men are temporary and changing, but the laws of nature are immortal. Now, I probably wouldn’t go as far as the Buddha himself in claiming that change is a cause of suffering, maybe second only to craving and clinging, but still, permanence is a wonder to behold. And if change is only painful when you refuse to accept it, then it can be something truly special when you initiate it yourself. I’m not sure if the Buddha ever experienced that, but I think that it holds true, and I swear by it myself.

  So, if there’s any one thing that I would improve on with Buddhism, it would be the negative connotation of change (and the status of women). Change can be something good, if it follows the Eightfold Path, and so something to seek, not necessarily something to avoid. In the ancient world, I can certainly understand how that could have been an issue, but in our modern world, I think that the greater sin is to avoid change altogether. As always the trick is to follow the Eightfold Middle Path and pursue Right Change, not the bad stuff. Avoid that.
   
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  hardie karges 11:34 am on February 18, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: awakening, change, craving ( 15 ), desire ( 4 ), enlightenment ( 13 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), lovingkindness ( 16 ), metta ( 25 ), Middle Path ( 55 )   

  Buddhism 101: Metta and Karuna, Love and Compassion 

  

  

  When your burdens become blessings and your hatred becomes love, then you are truly enlightened. And ‘enlightened’ may be a loaded term, filled with false promises and moronic miscalculations, but still it is frequently found. So, I use it, as do many others. Is the Buddha’s ‘awakening’ really any more accurate than to refer to his ‘enlightenment?’ I suppose that ‘awakening’ sounds self-motivated, while ‘enlightenment’ sounds as if a light is being switched on somewhere, but that might only be a difference more apparent than actual…

  But the point is to make some adjustments to your current internal conditions, rather than insisting on changing something else, or someone else, to suit your requirements, which are likely nothing of the sort, but instead desires and cravings and itches wanting scratching, for lack of a better metaphor. And as always, I take the middle position, or path if you prefer, that sweet spot between naked aggression, on the one hand, and passive submission, on the other, such that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the apparent compromise is in fact a fresh and superior synthesis. We should be open to change, not scared of it.

  But love is not as tricky as it seems, requiring flowers in February, ribbons and bows in December, and God help you if you forget the anniversary, not to be confused with the birthday in another Indo-European language. It’s confusing. But Buddhist love is not. ‘Lovingkindness’ is a Hebrew loanword via Christianity, but metta simply means brotherhood, or sisterhood, as the case may be, universal in its scope and nature, with passion distinctly optional. After all, passion originally meant suffering, and that is the starting point for Buddhism, but not the final word, which is always metta. Most important is to forego all hate…

   
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  hardie karges 12:50 pm on May 23, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alan Watts ( 5 ), anatta ( 22 ), anicca ( 10 ), Buddha ( 49 ), change, Echkart Tolle, Einstein ( 11 ), global warming ( 16 ), Hawking, JESUS ( 21 ), Mahayana ( 47 ), Pandemic ( 9 ), Plato ( 17 ), Wittgenstein, Zen ( 31 )   

  Pandemic Sutra on the Concept of Change in Buddhism 

  

  

  The Buddha wasn’t perfect, and he knew that, regardless of the speculations of some later Mahayanists and their need for transcendent divinity of which the earthly manifestations are just that—nasty, mean, brutish, and short, like life with the sea serpent Leviathan of Hobbes without Calvin. Why else would he have referred to us as no-soul ‘heaps’ of inconsequential ‘skandhas’ with little to commend us but the causes and conditions to which we are subject and of which we are so much a part?

  Zen troublemakers took the Mahayana transcendental position a step further by claiming perfection for all of us, but I’m not sure how that works out except as a point of convergence with some Christian transcendentalists who also think similarly, and so might actually save the world from its own self-destruction if enough people from enough different places could ever agree on any one thing for long enough for us to stop fighting and allow the world to heal from our destructive abuse of it.

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  hardie karges 12:07 pm on June 14, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anicca ( 10 ), Buddha ( 49 ), change, Greece ( 4 ), Heraclitus ( 4 ), impermanence ( 6 ), India ( 15 ), sankhara   

  Buddhist Impermanence and Greek Change, flip sides of the same coin… 

  

  Change doesn’t have to be a cause of suffering. It can also be a cause of liberation, if it’s compassionate, kind and helpful. And if that deviates from the standard Buddhist line of progression, then I’m sorry, but I think it holds true, at least for the modern day, with our modern ways. I personally haven’t shed too many tears over coming changes in a long time, but maybe that’s just a part of growing up, not sure, so maybe I better re-listen to Bruce Springsteen, since he sometimes gets it right, even if the Buddha didn’t. Now I embrace change, but true, it’s certainly better if it’s a change I initiate, so maybe that is the crucial line of distinction.

  So when the Buddha is quoted as saying ‘sabbe sankhara anicca,’ i.e. all things are impermanent, the implication is that that is bad, but maybe that is a faulty conclusion. It is one of the three Buddhist marks of existence, after all, along with suffering and no-self, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate ‘badness’, so maybe it’s just a fact for your perusal, echoing Heraclitus some 3000mi/5000km away (as the crow flies) in Greece right about the same. Coincidence? Ask that crow; only he knows for sure, and he might be fibbing. The fact that both likely had ancestors from the same ‘hood up north 2000 years before is likely irrelevant at this point, so I won’t mention it.

  Bottom line: everything changes but change itself, and if that scares you to death as a child about to move to a new town, or a young adult about to experience Love’s first great letdown, then rest assured: not only does this get easier, but you might even learn to like it, and seek it out, the other, if not another, geographical changes generally considered more socially acceptable than personnel changes, especially after a certain ‘use-by’ date, after which the changes become functionally impractical, and old dogs find it hard to learn new tricks.

  But learn they can, if the will is there, and who knows what ‘sankhara’ means anyway? (It does NOT mean ‘karma’ as modern ‘re-birthers’ like to suggest) I say ‘things’ as shorthand for ‘I don’t know,’ but the devil may indeed lie in the details, if ‘formations’ implies that it is my own fault if they change against my wishes, since I set myself up for that fall in advance. Because he never said that everything changes, but that all ‘formations’ are impermanent, and that is not necessarily the same thing, if ‘formations’ can exist or not exist without necessarily undergoing any intermediate state from one existence to another.

  But our lives necessarily proceed from one point to the next as if we had moved from one point to the next, not simply ceased to exist at one point and re-emerged at another. And so we measure our lives in time. And we mark our journeys in space. And we formulate emotions in reaction to it all. And we develop theories to explain it. So don’t become discouraged if the journey is long. All paths eventually lead home…