Buddha, the Revolutionary Realist
I’ve been working on some scholars of early Buddhism, Joanna Jurewicz and Richard Gombrich (“What the Buddha Thought). I’ve been reading about the Buddhist concept of the 12 Nidanas. According to some scholars, the Buddhist concept was drawn form the Rg Veda and the Hindu myth of creation. Buddha’s use of the 12 Links was both a commentary and criticism: that if you follow the beliefs of the Brahmins, you are doomed to endlessly repeat this cycle indefinitely. Buddha proposed an alternate pratityasamutpada to the 12 Links that is simpler: “because this, that.” Everything has cause and effect, immediately, in this lifetime and beyond. Our karma, i.e. our intentional acts, have effects that ripple out to those distant form us in space and time, even beyond our lifetimes. By declaring that there is no atman, Buddha pulled the plug on the whole Vedic system of cosmology, creation and…
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