Aside from work, I spent some time today investigating (Theravada) Buddhism by reading In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, which I bought used a while back. ¹ I had this book on the shelf for a while and was interested in reading something a bit more ancient the 20th century stuff and contemporary things I've been reading lately.

To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any Buddhism stuff in my direct line of descent, though it is such an old way of doing things, I would be surprised if there wasn't any going back into my Chinese ancestry. ² Mainly, I'm looking into these things out of curiosity and for knowledge—I'm not trying to "convert" or anything.

Impressions

Below are some of my impressions—a practicing Buddhist may want to reach out to me and correct my misunderstandings here. What follows is an outsider's perspective.

Tiers

One thing interesting about Buddhism compared with the Christianity I know is that Buddhism is a very much "choose your own adventure" type of religion. Practitioners of Buddhism may be lay people that try to suffer and aquire good kamma (Sanskrit: Karma) by following "best practices", or they can live life in super hard mode and strive for "release" from the sufferings of this world.

Many recommendations for lay people reminded me of Confucian ideas—defining proper relations between different sorts of people (e.g. Children and Parents, Husbands and Wives). This is on one hand unsurprising, but also has got me thinking about how Buddhism became very popular in China during various times/places in Chinese history.

Doing nothing

Compared with Christianity, it seems that Buddhism supports a lot of... inaction. In Christiandom, the Protestant work ethic is (in)famous—industriousness is valued not only for the products of work in of itself but also as a means for fighting against temptation and sin.

In contrast, Buddhism has meditation as a central practice. Poverty, homelessness, and being at the charity of others are required for pursuing Buddha-dom.

Rather than having an integration of serious religious practitioners and "normal" working/daily life, Buddhism divides "serious" practitioners from lay practioners, and the professionals are devoted full-time to practices which do not directly contribute work to society (e.g. by producing food).

Starting from the self

It seems lots of stuff in Buddhism you are supposed to do because it makes sense to do in order to reduce suffering. There is a kind of empirical, internal justification that I think has appealed to many Westerners. ³ From a Christian perspective, this may make a lot of Buddhism seem rather... amoral (c.f. (im)moral).

More later

More to come as I study more; these are some quick initial thoughts.