南无本师释迦牟尼佛（三称） Namo Fundamental Teacher Shakyamuni Buddha !(three times)
南无大愿地藏王菩萨（三称） Namo Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva! (three times)
Chapter 3: Contemplating the Karmic Conditions of Beings (观众生业缘品), English sound recording with captions, Bilingual Chinese-English version recording with opening and dedications. Chinese Earth Store Sutra text; English Earth Store Sutra text, A commentary by Master Hsuan Hua at City of Ten Thousand Buddhas;
This chapter went into detail description of the karma causes and effects through the dialogue of Earth Store Bodhisattva with Lady Maya. It is very important to note that, the The Sutras are the statements of Buddha’s personal attainment of the true nature of the universe and essence of life. Buddha did not create those principles, he is merely a keen observer who found those cosmic laws. (大般若经 严净佛土品 一切法不生 如来出世若不出世诸法法界常住. 如来出世、若不出世，诸法法界法尔常住。 然诸有情不能解了诸法法界法尔常住，诸菩萨摩诃萨为饶益故起菩提道，由菩提道拔济有情，令永解脱生死众苦。 ”) Buddha is anti-absolutism in any form. The more you go into the original text of Buddha’s teaching, the further you get away from religion. Buddha was not interested in finding anything that could be understood as a religion. Dharma is not reducible to a dogma, or some kind of doctrinal definition, or as something that can be defined fitted into neat categories like philosophies, metaphysics, ethical systems – all of those are part of Buddhism, but the Dharma which underpins it is a living force that cannot be so reductively identified.
When we study Sutra, we are trying to practice the Dharma, in other words, trying to appropriately embody some of these values, concepts, ideas, texts, meditations and so on in such a way that hopefully we can be able to make an appropriate statement in terms of the situation we find ourselves in today both personally as well as socially, culturally.
Buddhism provide a clear deviation from the Western philosophical tradition that can help end the many confusions of the modern society. One of the leading scholar who explore in depth about the moral pitfall of modernity is Alasdair MaIntyre. His book After Virtue published in the early 1980s had instigated more and more discussions and investigation. In this critique of modern moral philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue in the West, he spoke of how a living tradition is one that is in a constant ongoing conversation with its past. He further argued that, it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity. The following is one of the most consensus comments from the reader:
The discourse concerns the nature of morality which “sustains”or fails to sustain the inner lives of the western man after the cruel shattering of all possible illusions of any kind of moral order in the universe, a world most devastatingly described by Nietzsche. Alasdair Macintyte begins the work raising some fundamental questions about the incompatibility of perspectives which frequently meet our eye in popular culture, in media debates, in popular legislations in supreme court battles, and even in ordinary life, views which are characterized by shrill and often very violent rhetoric between individuals committed to one or other of the myriad positions available for adoption in our post modern marketplace of ideas. The feature of such confrontations is not the lack of so called justifications, which are many, but in their fundamental incommensurability. Understood philosophically, Macintyre shows the underlying lack of any real basis to these arguments. Its not a surprise that they never end.
The book charts an impressive history of this discourse, its origins in the Enlightenment traditions of Kant and Hume, succeeded by Locke, Mill and Bentham, to the final death knell struck by Nietzsche. Its Nietzsche who could see the absolute destruction of the moral sphere that surrounded him and pulled no punches in decrying it. But this history is too short sighted, says Macintyre. The medieval world view which the Enlightenment repudiated, was the last remaining tradition, one inherited from the ancient Greeks, and more specifically, Aristotle, which gave the world a telos, a final goal for the life of man, and thus provided a framework which could synthesize seemingly disparate points of view and philosophical positions. One could question certain premises of that framework, but not the structural foundations of it.
By dismantling the whole structure, he might have gained freedom from the oppressive weight of tradition, but his freedom had no goal to which he could aspire to. He was now free in a world where he didn’t know what to do. Its at this juncture of history where the enlightenment philosophers came forward to provide the free man, a telos, a morality which could justify itself on its own terms without depending on theology or tradition. Reason itself would disclose to man, his goal. the great heights of such attempts is preserved in the works of Kant and Hume.
But all these attempts failed. None could create a self-sustaining world of morality that could be justified by reason alone. Each had its glaring flaws and it was left to the powers that be to impose its own version of morality, also justified by reason. As time went by, the new oppression came from reason itself as it was twisted and turned to suit various ends , a world Nietzsche describes with horrifying precision in his Genealogy of Morals. So the author asks, was Nietzsche justified in decrying the Aristotelian world ? Was that too an example of power masking itself through a system of morals ? The answer as shown in the book is no. The greek view of morality was fundamentally different from the present system of externally defining certain acts as moral. To begin with, there was no word called morality in the greek society. There were certain unacceptable behaviour but the larger conception of modern day morality was missing. The life of ancient man was structured around a community which provided a coherent frame of action and path which he was trained to walk for his whole life ending with death, the character of which would give the narrative closure to his life. His life was a unity, a self contained block of time with its peculiar struggles and victories which made sense in the larger unity of the society which was the ground for his own existence. Thus it came to be that brotherhood was the greatest ideal of the past, an ideal which gave a kind of solidity to society we have no inkling of. Selfishness was a vice and so was acquisition. A modern liberal educated in ideas of individual success and freedom would recoil in horror at the implication of such a premise.
After the fall of the Greeks, Christianity incorporated much of it in its own moral frameworks, although modified by uniquely christian additions like charity or benevolence. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica provided the most famous synthesis of such a marriage of Aristotle and Christianity. In many ways. the telos or end goal of life remained the same in essence, though the outer character of it changed. It was around the 15th century when the corruptions of the Church and its institutional oppressiveness, forced a backlash from the society, ending its reign as the supreme moral preacher and ushering in the Enlightenment.
So why is this history so important ? As the book shows in excellent detail, our problems can be understood as something not unique to our time, but only a later stage in a process which began hundreds of years ago. By understanding this process, we moderns can come to a enlightened understanding of why our debates never end, why we remain confused over life changing issues and what this entails for our fragmented inner lives. The world has been through its flirtations with easy glorification of despair in philosophies like Existentialism, and the great danger today is that the despair itself has stopped being a concern anymore. Art and popular culture has taken over the stage of comforting every searching soul with easy customized and feel good solutions which destroy more than they heal. Its the great accomplishment of this book which is already thirty five years old, that it came out with a hard hitting attack at the post modern celebration of fragmented morality and gave a much needed push to historical understanding of moral structures. Macintrye would go on to write two more books, Whose Justice which Rationality ? and Three versions of Moral Enquiry, completing a trilogy of moral philosophy that remains one of the great “philosophical performances” of our time as another reviewer has pointed out.
With those backdrops, this program show How the West Misunderstands Buddhism, give us further insight into the historical development that led to the collapsing of modern Western civilization: We do need to distinguish Buddhism ( a word of recent Western invention in early 19th century) and what Buddhists called “Buddhism” which is Dharma (Law, Principle).
To be continued ….
Dedicate Merits:
May the precious bodhicitta That has not yet arisen, arise and grow, And may that which has already arisen not diminish, But increase more and more. 回向偈： 愿以此功德，庄严佛净土。 上报四重恩，下济三涂苦。 若有见闻者，悉发菩提心。 尽此一报身，同生极乐国。