Word: buddhisme
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Nirvana & Dharma. Buddhism consists of three spiritual components, two traditions, and a multiplicity of sects. The first of the three components, common to all Buddhists, is the legendary life of a handsome Indian prince named Gautama, who, about 600 years before Christ, abandoned his luxurious existence after seeing four facts of life for the first time: a sick man, an old man, a dead man and a holy man. He fled to the forest to seek enlightenment, tried and abandoned the ways of the hermit and the ascetic, and, after meditating under a sacred Bodhi tree for 49 days...
Gautama's teaching, the second chief component of Buddhism, is summed up in the Four Noble Truths: 1) man suffers all his life, and goes on suffering from one life to the next; 2) the origin of man's suffering is craving-for pleasure, for possessions, for cessation, of pain; 3) the cure for craving is the practice of nonattachment to everything-even to the self; 4) the way to nonattachment is the Eightfold Path-right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. The Buddha said nothing about...
Third essential component of Buddhism is the vast body of monks and nuns called the sangha. In addition to celibacy and vegetarian nonviolence, monks practice poverty; traditionally the only possessions permitted are robes, a begging bowl for food, a needle, prayer beads, a razor (to shave the head once a fortnight), and a filter to remove bugs from the drinking water so as not to kill them...
...laymen as well, and stresses the compassionate concern of the Buddha for humanity. The highest Mahayana ideal is the bodhisattva, or enlightened one, who sacrifices himself for others, and Mahayana mythology contains numerous examples of sacrifices as an act of love as well as a means of liberation. Zen Buddhism, one of the subdivisions of Mahayana, imported by the Japanese from China, emphasizes a combination of prolonged meditation and shock to achieve satori, or enlightenment...
Viet Nam's Buddhism, like China's and Japan's, is predominantly Mahayana, and the suicide monks and nuns knew the numerous legends of bodhisattvas' physical sacrifices, such as that of the holy man who gave his body to a famished tigress to keep her from eating her cubs. Some Mahayana monks still aid their liberation from the body by burning the fingers off their left hands, and in the 6th century-before gasoline-monks who decided to immolate themselves completely would eat waxy and fatty foods for a couple of years so they would burn...