Buddism for Dummies

While in the Temple of the Emerald Budda, we asked Sam (who is a practicing Buddist) to give us “Buddism for Dummies.” He had until our knees started to give out from kneeling to talk.

It seems that the first Budda was Lord Siddhartha, who was a member of a royal family in India. When he was born, his dad was told that he would be a great king if he stayed in the family business, but if he became a monk he’d make an even greater mark on the world.

Dad outfitted him and at 20 he left the palace for the first time to see the world where he found that people were poor, sick, suffering, etc., and he wondered why. After all, he’d never encountered these things in the palace.

Inspired with a new mission, he returned to the palace and decided to find out why this stuff all existed and do his best to alleviate the suffering. Part of this he did like the Apostle Paul, through meditation and fasting.

He came up with the conclusion that suffering exists because of birth. When you’re reborn, you’re paying for the sins of a prior life. If you do your best, make things better and get enlightenment, eventually you’ll reach the point that you can avoid future suffering and get off the reincarnation treadmill.

You improve your lot by gaining merit by doing things like being patient, forgiving others, making charitable donation, and things of that nature.

He then left the palace and went out teaching in the world until he was about 80, when he died.

After he was dead, his bones were divided and put in sacred places (Stupa) all over India, China and Thailand.

The parallel to shipping holy relics out in the Catholic church is pretty interesting.

Services at the temple follow a lunar schedule, meaning that “Sunday” happens about twice a month, plus a few additional holy days that are thrown in. In kind of an interesting twist, Sunday has become a de-facto day to go to the temple to pray just because offices and businesses are closed.

Although over 95% of the population of Thailand is Buddist, the government has a history of respecting all religions and practicing a great deal of tolerance. At Christmas, there are decorations (usually non-religious from what we see still up), but they don’t exchange a lot of gifts. They have parties instead.

A more important religious holiday is the Thai New Year, which is April 13 – 15.

At this point our knees and legs were screaming the "we're old...let us the hell up" scream....as we had been kneeling (or maybe it was squatting not so graciously) on a hard marble floor for about 15 minutes.