(November 9, 2017 at 10:50 am)KittyAnn Wrote: Thank u..., but can I ask a quick question?
... is it difficult to growing up as a Buddhist, or rather fun for a child, ....in this period of life?
It was very confusing and a bit depressing. For instance, Buddhists pretty much just focus on dying in a manner that will enable them to reach Nirvana.
The manner of dying that they try to achieve is through meditation throughout their life so that their thoughts can be controlled at the time of death to prevent Samsara (the never ending cycle of birth and death).
So through meditation, this is what they try to control:
- Restrict the want (desire) of pleasure as we will never satisfy our desires.
- Time is fleeting, so recognise that as time progresses onwards, we are dying. We need to attain enlightenment before we die to reach nirvana.
- When we die, we cannot have any emotional attachments to this earthly plane so meditating will enable us to severe our attachments to this world.
With the above ideas, it kind of felt like a death cult. There are other values that Buddhism espouses like compassion, mindfulness which are all great but ultimately the end goal was to achieve dying in a particular way which affected me the most (in a negative way). So yeah, it was a bit difficult to grow up as a Buddhist.