Episode 88, Buddhism (Part III - The Cycle of Life)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
Jack was walking down a street. It was a day like any other. As ever, his mind was a flurry of thoughts, worries, and anxieties, stimulated by coffee and the bright light of his phone. In a bid to relieve his stress, he put his phone in his pocket, and tried to notice the details he would usually ignore.
As he walked past the pharmacy, he saw a sick man coughing and spluttering; he was throwing medication back to stop his disease from decaying his body. Jack kept walking and came across an old woman waiting at a bus stop. She was fragile, crooked, and anxious; clearly age had taken much from her. Crossing the road away from the bus stop, he waited for the traffic to pass. Driving slowly past him was a hearse: a coffin on full display, surrounded by flowers, proceeded by a stream of weeping mourners.
Jack fell to his knees, overwhelmed with despair, "we all get sick, we all age, and we all die. We cannot escape this fate!" His head against the pavement, he didn't move for almost an hour. When he got up, he was approached by a homeless man, to whom he said, "sorry, I don't have any change." The man replied, "It is you who needs a little change, young monk. I know why you fall to your knees in despair: the inescapable suffering of life weighs on us all. Let me tell you of someone who was once like you, who tried to remove suffering from our minds… let me tell you the story of Siddhartha Gotama, The Buddha."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan |
| 0:07.0 | Scicast |
| 0:08.0 | Part 3 It's the circle of life. |
| 0:26.6 | We're going to be talking. |
| 0:28.4 | We're talking about karma. We're talking about samsara. We're talking about |
| 0:33.9 | Nabana or Navana, as the kids are calling it these days let's start with karma |
| 0:38.3 | karma literally means action but it means a little bit more than that to your everyday buddhist |
| 0:44.6 | yes we mentioned in episode one that this is an idea that comes from brahmanism so the idea |
| 0:49.1 | that throughout your life if you do good actions and work in a line with your Dharma, your duty that you're born into, |
| 0:56.0 | you will earn enough good karma. |
| 0:58.0 | Now for the Hindu, that means that they can be reincarnated up and up and up the hierarchy |
| 1:03.0 | and eventually achieve union with God. |
| 1:06.0 | Now we've mentioned that for a Buddhist, especially a Terravada Buddhist, |
| 1:09.0 | this whole union with God thing is slightly different, because as we mentioned in the previous episode, there is no eternal act man or soul. |
| 1:18.6 | So this poses an interesting question that you can post to the Buddhist, which is, well, if there is no permanent act man or soul, what is earning, quote, the karma? And how does this quite work? |
| 1:31.3 | So let's return to that question once we've unpacked the reincarnation and samsar and stuff. |
| 1:36.7 | And then once we've got that system, we should return to that question. |
| 1:41.0 | Let's talk about this moral value, this karma then, like the actions, the way we should live. |
| 1:45.6 | In the Buddha's words, he defines karma as, it is a choice, oh monks, that I call karma, having chosen ones act through body, speech, or mind. |
| 1:54.6 | Volition is the important thing here. There are all sorts of things that your body might experience or your mind might experience, but we won't attribute any karmic response after that fact. |
| 2:06.8 | So let's say going back to what we were talking about, relationships of thoughts and stuff, if a thought comes into your mind and maybe it's even like a negative, aggressive thought towards somebody, if you didn't will that into existence, that can't produce bad karma for you. It might, in fact, be a result of previous bad karma. But it's not going to lead you to be gaining any negative karma in that particular point. However, if you purposely will someone's demise and you think those thoughts. The thoughts themselves actually |
| 2:35.3 | produce bad karma. And of course, if you do an action following those thoughts, that also commits |
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