From: Nate Osgood <hacrat@lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: RE: Details for MITAAH panel event
To: mkgray@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 20:04:44 -0400
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Intro info:
Name:  Nate Osgood
Title:  Member, Buddhist Association of MIT
I have been a practicing Buddhist for 4 years, and led the MIT organization
for a few years.  I am currently  a graduate student in computer science,
first came to MIT in 1986, and have been involved in a few computer startups
since then.

the stock Q+A follows:   i've cut it down, but let me know if it's too long.

thanks!
n
-------------------


o  What is/are the basic tenet(s) of your faith?
Buddhism is best described as an approach to life rather than as a faith
(the teachings strongly discourage absolute belief without understanding
born of one's own direct experience ).  The basic nature of this viewpoint
and approach is as follows:  Our experience in this world is imperfect:
There are good things we can't get or that eventually disappear, bad things
that we want to avoid but must deal with.  We suffer a lot because of this.
Some of this suffering is inevitable (e.g. physical pain and bad health),
but the large majority of it is quite unnecessary, and arise instead from
poor mental health. Most of this unnecessary suffering arises from deeply
ingrained mental habits that color how we see the world, how we view
ourselves, and how we relate to others - and, ultimately, how we act.
Common manifestations of these habits are the types of anxiety and neuroses
so common in modern life:  Cravings and aversions for material things,
hatred or disdain for people different than us, compulsive worrying about
our ranking on some judgement scale, anger or sadness about something that
happened some time ago, agitated fear of a challenge we will face, etc.
Fortunately, there is a way to live less habitually and more consciously.
An important step in moving beyond such habits it is to recognize them as
products of delusions about the way the world really is:  At base, much of
our mental suffering rest on refusals to acknowledge that the world is
constantly changing, or (even more deeply) on the superstition of an
immutable "self".    But an intellectual understanding of such delusions is
not enough:  Before we can lessen the grip of these mental habits, we must
integrate this realization into our daily life and emotional structure.
Meditation serves both to allow us to uncover our delusions and to replace
them with a deep understanding that ramifies in both our intellect and
emotions. Cultivating such mindfulness awareness serves automatically to
lessen our defensiveness and fosters both greater compassion for other
conscious creatures and appreciation for the pleasant aspects of life.
Good books on this include "What the Buddha Taught" (Rahula) and "Seeking
the Heart of Wisdom" (Goldstein and Kornfield.  Additional Q&A can be found
at the BAMIT homepage, at http://www.mit.edu/activities/metta/home.html)

o  Briefly summarize the history of your faith (cite references for more
detail)
Although it has many roots that extend back far longer, Buddhism first
emerged around 600BC in Northern India with the life of Siddartha Guatama.
Siddartha abandoned his sheltered life as a prince and took up life as a
wandering ascetic, but ultimately proposed a "middle path" between epicurean
indulgence, craving, and self-aggrandizement on the one hand, and ascetism,
aversion to life, and desire for self-annihilation on the other.  The
Buddha's teaching was iconoclastic, universal and experiential, stressing
meditation and mindfulness for all people, regardless of class, sex, or
background. Always intent on making a practical difference in people's
day-to-day lives, the Buddha urged his followers to avoid accepting his
teaching on faith and to investigate it on their own, and sometimes
recommended potential recruits to remain with their existing teachers.
Following the Buddha's death, the story of Buddhism is one of tolerance,
local adaptation, and consequent diversity. Buddhism spread first to SE
Asia, and later to Central Asia and East Asia as well.  The extent of this
spread is remarkable in that it was accomplished without coercion or
bloodshed.  In each of these countries, the tolerance implicit in the
approach led to an absorption of many pre-Buddhist practice and beliefs into
local Buddhist variants.  This led to the eventual delineation of the three
major existing approaches (with various schools of closely-related thought
in each):  Theravada (Sri Lanka and SE Asia), Mahayana (East Asia),
Vajrayana (Tibet, Central Asia).

o  What is the purpose of life?
Buddhism does not view life or human beings as having been created by a God.
There is no inherent, God-given "purpose" to life in the normal religious
sense.  But the sentient creatures that exist in this world naturally seek
happiness and fulfillment, and we can speak loosely of this as a natural
"purpose" (much as we speak of biological organs having "functions" despite
the fact that they were not consciously designed by a purposeful entity).
Viewed in this way, our purpose is to help both ourselves and other
conscious creatures to live a happy and fulfilled life. (Buddhists view the
achievement of genuine happiness for any particular person as requiring a
conscious and mindful approach to life -- an approach which cannot help but
decrease our tendencies towards self-aggrandizement and foster compassion
for other beings.)

o  What happens to us after death?
The Buddhist approach does not see "death" as a singular event -- it is just
the final change in a life that is always in flux, always changing. It is
merely an illusion to think that there is an unique, well-defined "I" who
has lived a life and now dies.  In a very real sense, we are always dying,
and always being reborn within each moment of this life.  Many Buddhists
traditionally believe that this process of birth-death-rebirth continues
after the end of life as well. In this view, the ever-changing "life
process"  (more akin to an ever-changing flame than an eternal soul)
transfers at death to one or more other destinations (new lives).  The
"personality" does not live on, but the life process does.  In modern times,
many other Buddhists (including prominent teachers and monks)  argue instead
that the processes of "birth and rebirth" with which we are familiar in each
moment are limited in operation to this life.  From this perspective, the
life process ceases at death.  True to its history of as an "a la carte"
religion, Buddhism's "big tent" has no difficulty accommodating both
viewpoints.
o  What is the origin of man?  Of the universe?
Buddhism takes no particular position taken on the origin of man or of the
universe:  It is seen as a rather academic question, not really relevant to
the much more pressing issue of lessening suffering and finding a way to
genuine, compassionate happiness within this life.

o  Where does morality come from?  How do we know what is right?
Buddhism has an ethical code very different from that seen in most other
religions. Most notably, Buddhist ethics is teleological rather than
deontological.  Rather than dichotomizing acts according to some cosmic
scale of "good" and "evil" or "right" and "wrong" a particular act is
instead appraised more impassively according to its many consequences -
typically some desirable, and some undesirable, some psychological, some
physical, some short-term and some longer-term. Though an unskillful act may
have myriad undesirable effects (i.e. causing great immediate suffering and
perhaps strengthening unskillful mental habits in the mind of the
perpetrator or others), it is not viewed as a "sin" - in Buddhism, there is
no soul to be blemished, and no God to be offended. Buddhist ethics is also
distinctive in that it tends to focus not on rule-based reasoning for
particular moral situations (something which is seen as overly simplistic
and leading to weak resolution), but on self-cultivation of practitioners to
the point where they see the effects of situations clearly enough that they
are not tempted by unskillful paths, and cannot help but act in moral ways.
Morality is thus seen as the most important outward manifestation of general
mindfulness; a person in good mental health will act wisely and will not
want to be malicious. Finally, the sphere of Buddhist morality embrace not
only other human beings, but also all conscious creatures; from a moral
standpoint, humans and different species of animals are viewed as differing
only  in degrees.  Some people used to strict, rule-based moral codes may
find this contextual approach bewildering and distasteful; to a practicing
Buddhist, it simply mirrors the genuine moral complexity of real-world
situations.
Good references in this area would be Ken Jones' "The Social Face of
Buddhism", and http://jbe.la.psu.edu/1/whitabs1.html