“רִגְזוּ וְאַל תֶּחֱטָאוּ אִמְרוּ בִלְבַבְכֶם עַל מִשְׁכַּבְכֶם וְדֹמּוּ סֶלָה”
“Quake and do not sin; say in your heart on your bed and be forever silent.”
A main ritual for the Buddah’s is the ‘meditation’. In a nut shell, by sitting and letting calmness overtake one’s self, the troubles and inconveniences of life are being observed (by themselves) in a way they just stop causing suffering any longer.
Psalm 4:5 suggests otherwise: Confront wrongness –> Will help you avoid sins in the future –> Reduces the bad side in general –> Which brings peace to the world.
“Quake”, that is self examination and criticism.
Do daily self examination – ‘Did I do the right thing?’, ‘Were my intentions pure?’, ‘how can I improve’,
therefor you won’t sin – You know that by the end of the day, you’re going to face the mirror and will have to provide justifications to yourself,
by themselves, the false complaints towards HaShem will stop – The criticism leads to awareness of the source of wrong doing.. Eventually will the false complaints disappear from the world. Selah.
Question: Why do you compare the Buddhist ‘Discomfort’ to the Jewish ‘Sin’?
Answer: The comparison is between the ‘Wrongness’ of each of the worlds. What is wrong for the Buddhist in this world is that people suffer (‘Dukah’) , whereas for us the source of good and bad, right and wrong – are absolute laws decided by the Creator himself.
One thing I would add is that Buddhists do not subscribe to the notion of sin, but rather ignorance. This is not to say that there are not Buddhist ethics, but more that ignorance is the root base of what we would generally consider to be evil. The three branches of ignorance are greed, hate and delusion.
The suffering (dukkha) caused by old age, sickness and death are inevitable. The suffering caused by our greed, our hatred and our delusional perspectives are all (theoretically) curable by correcting our ignorance.
Adrian, thank you for the informative comment.
On a personal level, thank you for the study together in the past four years 🙂