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A slanting bookshelf hovers on the wall in a dark corner. It is a dusty reference library, of books left by patrons over the years. It's a resource not known for its completeness, but you might find something interesting.
A religion started by Sidhartha Guatama when he received enlightenment (earning himself the name of buddha, or the enlightened one). The Buddha's main enlightenment is that desire is the root of all suffering, and thus desire must be crushed (this state is known as nirvana). Buddhism also holds basically that all of physical reality is maya (illusion) that must be transcended.
It is difficult to compare, since buddhism and christianity really have little in common. Basically all that they have in common is their mechanisms. Both buddhists and christians have alters, incense, prayers, fastings, meditation (though meditation is done very differently in the two faiths) and moral codes. They agree on the method, it is the core that they disagree on. Buddhism is pantheistic, christianity is monotheistic.
A. It depends whether you mean exoteric, popular Buddhism, or its esoteric teachings. The former explains itself in The Buddhist Catechism in this wise:
Soul it considers a word used by the ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is subject to change, then man is included, and every material part of him must change. That which is subject to change is not permanent, so there can be no immortal survival of a changeful thing.
This seems plain and definite. But when we come to the question that the new personality in each succeeding rebirth is the aggregate of "Skandhas," or the attributes, of the old personality, and ask whether this new aggregation of Skandhas is a new being likewise, in which nothing has remained of the last, we read that:
In one sense it is a new being, in another it is not. During this life the Skandhas are continually changing, while the man A.B. of forty is identical as regards personality with the youth A.B. of eighteen, yet by the continual waste and reparation of his body and change of mind and character, he is a different being. Nevertheless, the man in his old age justly reaps the reward or suffering consequent upon his thoughts and actions at every previous stage of his life. So the new being of the rebirth, being the same individuality as before (but not the same personality), with but a changed form, or new aggregation of Skandhas, justly reaps the consequences of his actions and thoughts in the previous existence.
This is abstruse metaphysics, and plainly does not express disbelief in Soul by any means.
More Miscellaneous Unsorted
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