Maddie

That is a very interesting article.

I'm going to contrast this against my previous post. Medicine Buddha seems to be dredging up some crappy karma. Amitofu makes me feel better. It makes me think of what Bill Brodie said about finding one practice that you like and one that you hate. He says the one you hate is making you progress and the one you like keeps you from being too discouraged.

Since I have a lot of time to experiment with various mantras I think I'm finding that is zhunti mantra and probably nam-myoho-renge-kyo are my go-to mantras for the corona situation, in the economic since especially.

I think in my experimentation this week with various mantras and chanting that the medicine Buddha seems to be digging up the most problematic karma.

Things become easier to forgive when we separate actions from self. When it's an action then it's just an event that happened at a point in time and it's over with. When we think it's a self that committed an action and we think the self is eternal then the action by default becomes eternal in our perception.

I would say in this case an even more immediate cause of suffering than the attachment is the self-judgment about the attachment.

I only know of one manjushri mantra. Om A Ra Pa Ga Na Dhi. And yes I study the Dharma extensively.

This is why often karma tends to be self-perpetuating. You might be attracted to somebody because of past karma and then by acting on that attraction you create more attraction karma in general and for that person specifically thereby perpetuating the cycle. There is mind. Even with the partner it's ultimately mind. If it's with the partner you still experience them through the senses and the mind becomes conscious of the sensory contact through the senses thus creating more conditioning for future attachment. Without a partner with porn for example there's still seeing and feeling tactile sensations even if they are self stimulated and conceptual concepts. So in the ultimate since there's not really any difference it's still craving and clinging due to conditioning.

I think one thing that would help when it comes to trying to understand the Bible is to remember it's not one book written by one author but it's actually more like a library avascollection of books with many authors spanning of time frame of roughly a thousand years at least. So yeah in the pentateuch there is some very cruel and primitive stuff which isn't surprising for a bronze age culture. On the other hand you have some of the prophets like Isaiah that in my opinion tend to anthropomorphise the effects of collective karma into a personal judgment from a personal deity. I might not think that they got all the details right but at least they were picking up on the causes and effects of collective societal actions. Then you fast-forward to the New testament and you have Jesus saying a lot of things that sound much more like the Buddha and Lao Tze than the bronze age era pentateuch. I just think it gets more complicated when you look up the Bible as one entity as opposed to a collection of very different sources.

Does anyone know much about manjushri mantra? As I've had a lot more time to experiment with the lockdown I found that I really like this one. aside from making one smarter I wonder what other benefits come from it?

I tend to ponder karma a lot anyhow but this pandemic has caused me to ponder collective karma more. So what the sutras teaches is that karma seeks opportunity to ripen when the conditions are right for it to do so. So if you have a few people who were mass murderers in past lives but they're sprinkled out amongst people who do not have this karma it would seem very unlikely that this kind of karma on a mass scale is going to have opportunity to ripen. on the other hand it would seem logical to assume that if you have a large number of people who have a decent amount killing karma and they're all together in one place at one time then the likelihood of this karma ripening into a genocide for example is much more likely. On the other hand he have a bunch of people whose karma is predominantly one of kindness and compassion generosity then you would assume this society would be very peaceful and healthy and prosperous assuming these people didn't just go to one of the Heavenly realms. From a karma point of view though I think basically comes down to the proportion of people in the same place and at the same time with the same karma increase the likelihood of major events to occur they're pleasant or unpleasant.

What I find kind of interesting and baffling at the same time is while I share a lot of the hesitancies about Christianity already mentioned in this thread by many, but in my experimentation with chanting I have tried the Catholic rosary and to my surprise it did seem to have an effect.

Well another one that resonates very well with me is nam myoho renge Kyo which is about the lotus sutra as opposed to a Pure land so not really sure what that means?

I guess this is why when Buddha and Lso Tzu tasted the vinegar, the Buddha thought it was bitter and Lao Tzu thought it was sweet.

Mindfulness. When the mind understands this attachment is suffering it will automatically let go.

Due to the lockdown I've had a lot of time to experiment. Just from a personal experience frame of reference I've noticed that Amitofuo seems to resonate with me better than medicine Buddha but I'm not sure why.

So is there a list of things that Amitabha Buddha helps with in a similar manner as the medicine Buddha list? Besides just getting into the pure land?

Interesting as I did not realize there were sidis involved with pure land practice. I had noticed that extensive zhunti mantra practice had an opening effect on my third eye.

Speaking of the pure land since you seem to be knowledgeable of the medicine Buddha I was going ask how much you knew about Amitofu? For whatever reason the Amitofu chant seems to resonate with me more than the medicine Buddha mantra. Not sure why.

The reasoning behind your motives make sense for sure. I do agree that if there were just thousands of Nichiren Buddhist that were currently enlightened it would make for a stronger argument. Though perhaps if by following Nichiren practices one is going to have a reasonable chance of liberation then I wonder if by default it increases one's chances of obtaining rebirth in a pure abode if that is what is necessary to get the job done?

There's a similar school of thought in Hinduism with meditation not being adequate for the Kali Yuga but rather chanting practices.

I think this is a common misunderstanding but also easy to understand how it could be misunderstood. To the best of my understanding I don't think Nichiren thought he knew better than the Buddha. I believe his main thesis was that there are different methods for different times and that the time of the Buddha was a different time and therefore the methods he taught were good for that time but in the time of Nichiren so he argues new methods were needed for new times. At least I think that's his argument from the best of my understanding of it.

One other one that I forgot to mention that I did to my surprise fine to have some effectiveness was the Catholic rosary but I suspect that Mary and Kuan yin are possibly the same being.

It's the sectarianism that also is a little off-putting to me as well. And yes the more traditional forms of nichiren are to my understanding not considered to be culty like the more modern SGI. I believe part of the cultural context behind the high degree of sectarianism of the time in Japan was the threat of the Mongol invasions and there is a widespread belief that the correct form of Buddhism had to be found in order to save the nation.

I guess I would add personally my thoughts on Nichiren's thoughts. My greatest exposure and initial immersion into Buddhism was primarily from a Theravada point of view. This being the case meditation was of primary importance and chanting was a minimal importance. So just based upon that I had a tendency not to take what Nichiren said very seriously. On the other hand though the Buddha said to you not just take someone's word for it even his own word for it but to prove everything by experience. My experience that are for showed that hours and hours of meditation we're not really helping to make me much happier. On the other hand experience showed that by doing various mantras I would notice more obvious results as far as I could tell from my subjective point of view. So from a purely experiential basis it would seem to me personally that there's something to what Nichiren said about the third phase of Dharma decline and meditation being less effective in this day and age. If one is curious about Nichiren the wiki page about him is actually a pretty good place to start. I tend to avoid SGI sources because they seem culty.