3 tenets of Buddhism - Peace

The percept of not to kill is a vow taken by every buddhist. Gautam Buddha before becoming Buddha left his palace and kingdom, gave up the prince life and became a monk, solely for one reason: To prevent an unjust war between his and neighbouring kingdom. So, clearly peace has a high regard in buddhism. Also, a buddhist mind tries to avoid conflicts and believes in harmony and co-existence.
 But, still sometimes situations arise in which peace is in danger and sometimes whole existence is in danger. Once, a kshatriya asked the uddha that "You give a lot of lectures on peace. Ut, tell me what is one to do if ones family gets attacked by some invaders. Should one go on to chanting peace at that time or should one defend his own family?"
Toa query like this, the buddha answered," if it is for the sake of truth qnd justice, a war can be waged and fought.". If there is something that threatens peace, then it is not only right, but, the duty of a buddhist to put an end to the voilence by whatever means necessary, be it involving the killing of thousands people. Although, the killing of people is always a sin in all circumstances and one has to atone for it, ut, if it has to be done for the common good, then, the buddhist should take on this duty and save his dear ones from the sufferings that one has tk endure while stopping the evil.

3 tenets of Buddhism - Justice

The concept of justice in buddhism is based on the law of karma. If a person has committed bad deeds, then those bad deeds will have an effect on his charecter, and due to this effect he cannot attain peace of mind, the more a person does bad deeds, the more he is caught in dielema and the more he looses peace of mind.
As per buddhism, there is only one way to get back peace of mind for such a person and that way is by attoning for one's sins. And the only way to atone for your sins is by doing the opposite, do as much good in this world as you can. Give selfless service to those in need and help those having hardships in their life. Depending upon the kind of wrong one has done, a person can attain peace of mind with that much selfless service.
So, the purpose of justice in buddhism is to help the sinner attain peace of mind. Sometimes, the sin committed is so worse, that the person will not attain peace even if he spends all the rest of his days doing good deeds. But, what can be done here is that the sufferings of the person can be lessened of not completely gone by doing good deeds. This way the person can have better life than he would have had doing evil.
There is another reason why the evildoer must be stopped because if he is not, his evil spreads to others and causes sufferings to those qvainst whom he commits evil and the more evil exists in a society, the more chance there is for it to grow.
So, we can say that justice in buddhism is to protect the society from the sufferings the evildoer might cause to it and also to prevent the sufferings of the evildoer, thus doing that which is for the good of all.

Truth Peace Justice - 3 tenets of Buddhism- Truth

Buddhism is derived from the root word buddhi, meaning intelligence. It does not involve believing in mysticism. The founding stone of how buddhists operate can be found in the following quote of Gautam Buddha:
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense "
That is why the following of buddhist principles can also be called as quest for truth.
Truth and justice in our society go side by side. The quest to do whats right, the quest to do that which leads to betterment of all people in the world is yhe central motivation in buddhism. It is this quest that made Siddharth Gautam to become Gautam Buddha and find a path by which mankind can liberate itself from various sufferings.

The basic teachings of the Buddha

1. The philosophy of karma: Our happiness and our misery depends on our own karma.
'pain is inevitable, but suffering is not'
All persons are made up of their thoughts. Thaoughts lead to action. Action leads to habit, habit  builds up charecter which in turn shapes out personality.
In other words, it can also be said that if we harness good thoughts while doing any karma(actions), then, it will lead us to happiness, otherwise, it will lead us to despair. And there is no escaping to this law.
If we sin, then we shall suffer. If we do good, then we shall rejoice.


2. The essence of all living beings is same. We can find ourselves in others, and other can find themselves in us. The truth is that we are all same and very much alike to each other. Hurting others is like hurting ourselves and loving others is like loving ourselves.


3. The ideal of truth: Lord buddha teaches us that difficulties are best resolved by the knowledge of truth. And how is truth to be found? It is not found by merely beleiving in what has been said/practiced for long as age old practices have proven to be false in the past, it is not found by merely following the holy texts, as on many occassions the holy texts have been found to be somawhat unholy, it can not be found just by listening to great paople and sages. Actually the holy books, the traditions, the sages are just help to us, the path of truth must be travelled by ourselves alone, only then by doing logic and by direct and indirect perceptions can we find out the truth.

Some basics in Buddhism

This page will tell you about some basic stands of Buddhism.
1. Attack on caste system: Buddhism states that the worth of a person is measured by his actions and not by his birth. This clearly means that even if a person is born in lower considered caste, or in a higher considered caste, both of them have equal value to begin with and their worth after that is decided by their actions.
Also, this can be applied in another way. It can also mean that the child of a criminal father/mother and the child of the most disciplined person, both of them have equal value as value of a person is not measured by virtue of birth, but by action(in this case, virtue of birth is signified by action of parents).
It can also be applied in the case of gender. The value of both boy and girl are the same and no one is more deserving than other as worth delends not on coincidence of birth, but on actions.


2. Concept of God: Buddhist concept of God is pretty clear. It does not care aboit this question at all. It says that the role of religion is not to find the truth of God and universe. That duty belongs to science. But, rather it teaches the person how to lead a better life.


3. Concept of soul: The concept of soul in buddhism is different from that of others. It does not believe that soul is permanent, never changing and it uses body just as a medium. Rather, it says that soul is nothing more than mental energy inside a person and this energy changes with every moment that a person lives and soul does not leaves the body when the person dies, but, rather the soul dies with the person.




4. No good comes from performing sacrifives and rituals, the only thing we get by this is more sufferings. The cause of all of our sufferings is hidden in our desires. And how can we end our sufferings? then, we can do this by following the eightfold noble path, which will be explained in the next post.