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PRABUDDH JEEVAN
The Vedic faith rests exclusively on the seers of the Vedas who had heard the divine revelation of eternal truths whilst in deep meditation. Thus the foundation of Hinduism would not have existed if it wasn't for the Vedic seers and hence we as the followers of the Vedic faith are ever indebted to the great seers of the past and the legacy of the disciple succession they have left behind of where we reap the rich spiritual rewards.
2. Deva rna - the debt to the Vedic deities Similar to the first debt, we are obliged to the deities of the Vedic faith for blessing us with the material we need to survive in this material world. It was by the grace of the Vedic deities that the ancient sages heard the divine revelations and thus allowing the Vedic religion to be codified for future generations. The Vedic dieties sustain life on the material world and remove the ailments of the believers whilst ensuring the eternal laws of the Vedic texts are protected and not compromised. 3. Pitru rna - the debt to the ancestors
According the Vedic tradition before the individual soul, jiva of the individual is placed within the womb of the respective family, the jiva is first accepted by the ancestors of the family in allowing the individual soul to enter into their generation for birth. Thus having been accepted, the individual soul is indebted to the respective ancestors in allowing this honour. Buddhist Tradition
According to the traditional accounts, Gautama, the future Buddha, born in Sakya family, was a prince who grew up in an environment of luxury. He became convinced that sense-pleasure and wealth did not provide the satisfaction that human beings longed for deep within. He abandoned worldly life to live as a mendicant. He studied under a number of teachers, developing his insight into the problem of suffering.
NOVEMBER 2014
philosophical component, in its teachings on the working of the mind, and its criticisms of the philosophies of his contemporaries.
After his awakening he regarded himself as a physician rather than a philosopher. Whereas philosophers merely had views about things, he taught the NobleEightfold Path which liberates from suffering. Philosophy
The Buddha discouraged his followers from indulging in intellectual disputation for its own sake, which is fruitless, and distrcating from true awakening. Nevertheless, the delivered sayings of the Buddha contain a
According to the scriptures, during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions. These regarded issues such as whether universe is eternal or non-eternal (or whether
it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self, the complete inexistence of a person after Nirvana and death and others. Emphasis on awakening
One explanation for this silence is that such questions distract from activity that is practical to realizing enlightenment and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. Experience is the path most elaborated in early Buddhism. The doctrine on the other hand was kept low. The Buddha avoided doctrinal formulations concerning the final reality as much as possible in order to prevent his followers from resting content with minor achievements on the path in which the absence of the final experience could be substituted by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. Emptiness
The Buddha's silence does not indicate disdain for philosophy. Rather, it indicates that he viewed the answers to these questions as not understandable by the unenlightened. Dependent arising provides a framework for analysis of reality that it is not metaphysical assumptions regarding existence or non-existence, but instead on imagining direct cognition of phenomena as they are presented to the mind. This informs and supports the Buddhist approach to liberation from adventitious distortion and engaging in the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Buddha of the earliest Buddhists texts describes Dharma (in the sense of truth') as `beyond reasoning' or transcending logic', in the sense that reasoning is a subjectively introduced aspect of the way unenlightened humans perceive things, and the conceptual framwork which underpins their cognitive process, rather than a feature of things as they really are. Going beyond reasoning' means in this context penetrat
