Life and Death and Coins

Response to Jess - full post here

Yes, that would be quite the loophole. While I love that game with all of my tiny heart, I think that the analogy is limited to shadow and light, I do not think it would be relevant to life and death conversations. Shadow is the absence of light - death is the cessation of life. You can have things which are neither live or dead (rocks for example).

Right now I agree that immortality is not within our reach. However, I think that it's not so incredibly far away actually. I don't agree that what begins must end, I think that in the not-so-distant future we will be able to see immortality. I'm not saying that everyone will choose it. I think it would be necessary to give people the choice to die when they want to. So in that sense there will be death; but any given individual could choose to live forever, or at least until the universe collapses on itself. Though actually, even then, if the multi-verse theory has any weight, even that won't be able to kill people permanently.

Pre-Marital Sex

This is less relevant to Buddhism than I would have liked but I was thinking about the whole abstaining from sex until marriage thing. The opinion that everyone should abstain from sex until they are married is still around; many Christians still think that this is relevant advice for our contemporary society. I was thinking about it and decided that society has changed heavily since the onset of that guideline. That guideline/rule was put into place many years ago (around 2000 at the least); at that time the life expectancy was much less for any given individual. As such, when people were biologically  ready to produce children, they got married. They, on whole, seldom had to repress their sexuality. In this society, people live to be much older and, as such, tend to get married later in life. These individuals who choose to abstain from sex, assuming that they actually have an inclination towards sex, are only bottling up their sexual energy. I think that  this may not be the best idea, and probably isn't precisely what the Christian God would want. He may want people to have sex only after they are married, but his rules would have to be altered slightly to apply today.

Buddhism and Self-Defense

Chapter 26 Verses 389, 391, 405, and 406 of the Dhammapada, all feature the same message: Do not harm others, even if they harm you; do not use weapons, words, or thoughts to harm them, etc.

While I was reading through this chapter I was thinking about possible scenarios where this sort of philosophy would provide a disadvantage. Given that I follow this philosophy myself, it was something seriously worth considering. I wondered about what a Buddhist would do if someone came up and attacked them, intending to seriously wound them (put them  in critical condition), or kill them. I realized then that I had already come up with a solution which is the style of martial arts that I am learning; aikido, I think, would be an excellent style of martial arts for those who take this part of the teaching seriously and strictly. It's philosophy is basically that if someone is an attacker, something about them is wrong or off-balance so it is the job of the person being attacked to defend themselves and to protect the attacker from injury. I can imagine that aikido appeals greatly to many practising Buddhists. The philosophies seem to blend so perfectly.