Sunday, February 7, 2010

Misunderstanding Buddhism


The world's largest solid gold Buddha statue, Thailand (Flickr/HotDuckZ)

Common Things People Believe About Buddhism That Aren't True
Text by (About.com Guide)

Buddhists want enlightenment so they can be blissed out all the time. They believe in reincarnation. If something bad happens to you, it has to be because of something you did in a past life. Buddhists have to be vegetarians. Everybody knows that. Unfortunately, much of what "everybody knows" about Buddhism isn't true.

What follows is a kind of Un-FAQ that lists common but mistaken ideas many people in the West have about Buddhism. [If you can think of any more, please add them through the "Readers Respond" link at the end of this article, or discuss them in the Buddhism forum].

1. Buddhism teaches that Nothing Exists
I've read many diatribes against the Buddhist teaching that nothing exists. If nothing exists, the writers ask, who is it that imagines something does exist?

However, Buddhism does not teach that nothing exists. It challenges our understanding of how things exist. It teaches that beings and phenomena have no intrinsic existence. But Buddhism does not teach there is no existence at all.

The "nothing exists" folklore mostly comes from a misunderstanding of the teaching of anatta [egolessness] and its Mahayana extension, shunyata [emptiness]. But these are not doctrines of non-existence. Rather, they teach that we understand existence in a limited, one-sided way.

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