Good Questions and Good Answers (part-2)

But I have heard people say that Buddhists worship idols.

Such statements only reflect the misunderstanding of the persons who make them. The dictionary defines an idol as "an image or statue worshipped as a god".  As we have seen, Buddhist do not believe that the Buddha was a god, so how could they possibly believe that a piece of wood or metal is a god? All religions use symbols to express various concepts.  In Taoism, the ying-yang is used to symbolize the harmony between opposites. In Sikhism, the sword is used to symbolize spiritual struggle.  In Christianity, the fish is used to symbolize his sacrifice. And in Buddhism, the statue of the Buddha also reminds us of the human dimension in Buddhist teaching, the fact that Buddhism is man-centered, not god-centered, that we must look within not without to find perfection and understanding.  So to say that Buddhist worship idols is not correct. 

Why do people burn paper money and do all kinds of strange things in Buddhist temples?

Good Questions and Good Answers

What is Buddhism?

QUESTION:  What is Buddhism?

ANSWER:  The name Buddhism comes from the word ‘budhi’ which means ‘to wake up’ and thus Buddhism is the philosophy of awakening. This philosophy has its origins in the experience of the man Siddhata Gotama, known as the Buddha, who was himself awakened at the age of 36. Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers world-wide. Until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but increasingly it is gaining adherents in Europe and America.

QUESTION:  So Buddhism is just a philosophy?

နိႆယက်မ္းၿပဳပုဂၢဳိလ္၏ အတၳဳပၸတ္(၂)

ရွင္မဟာသီလ၀ံသ

ၿမန္မာ့စာေပသမုိင္းတြင္”သဒၵါမွာ ရွင္မဟာကစၥည္း၊ ကဗ်ာမွာ ရွင္မဟာသီလ၀ံသတည္း” ဟူ၍လည္းေကာင္း”ပါရမီ မသီႏွင့္” ဟူ၍လည္းေကာင္း၊ “ေတာင္းကုိမေဖာက္ ေတာင္ကုိေဖာက္သည္ စိန္ေက်ာက္အသြင္ သီလ၀င္”ဟူ၍လည္းေကာင္း ဥဒါန္းတြင္ခဲ့ေသာ “ေပေလးပင္ ရွင္ေလးပါး”  အ၀င္အပါ

What Is This Religion? (Part Two)

Ven. Dr. K. Sri Dhammananda 

6. Heavenly Bliss

The followers of this religion do not regard themselves as being the only chosen people who could get the chance to attain heavenly bliss. They believe that man creates his own hell or heaven according to his way of life and that sufferings in hell or realization of heavenly bliss can be experienced in this earthly life instead of in the life hereafter, as commonly believed. This religious teacher never tried to introduce his teaching by frightening people through hell fire or by tempting them with everlasting heavenly life but by revealing the truth. In accordance with these teachings, anyone can enjoy heavenly bliss so long as one leads a