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busalover posted:Can anyone recommend academic books exploring the meaning of dharma and karma? I've been watching Youtube lectures for the past three days, but it's at worst contradictive, and at best vague. I realise dharma and karma are hard to translate as well as understand from a western philosophical perspective, but someone must have tried. From my own experience, translating them may not be the right way to go about it. They are new ideas I didn't have before. There's more or less little 'd' dhamma (dharma) and big 'd' Dhamma - that is, dhamma and Buddhadamma, the way things are and (the things that accord with) Buddha's understanding imparted to us of the way things are. Both of these are not really things Western thought has equivalent terms for, so I've found it easier to accept them as new words whose meaning (and import) is this thing I'm a student of. I don't think understanding of kamma (karma) is required for understanding of Buddha's teachings, though it may help understand the context in which they were offered. Kamma I understand to be both past actions and the result of those actions: it is their effect on us and the world, accrued positive and negative. Growing up steeped in Western thought I do not conceptualize the world this way and don't see faith in kamma as a driving force of the universe to be necessary, though others will disagree and that is fine with me.
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Feb 3, 2024 04:53
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Mushika posted:That's my point: that should just be normal behavior! It shouldn't require practice, much less full liberation. That should be normal. Compassion, empathy, mercy; these should all be normal human qualities. This is how people should interact with each other, not a thing to aspire to. If that's work, than there's more to look at than your daily practice. This is a lot of "should". Normative statements risk losing sight of the nature of the world as it is in favor of some ideal. It is tanha when we cling to this ideal, and we bring suffering through judging the world/ourselves/others/etc. for failing to live up to our ideal.
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Mar 11, 2024 21:38
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