Ms. Garratt’s Blog
Here you’ll find a range of resources to help you get the most from your PSHE lessons. I’ve included links to recommended websites as well as a range of study materials to help you become increasingly independent and successful learners. If you need help come and see me or contact me through this Blog.Archive for Buddhism
This Week’s Homework: Preparation for the Buddhism Mastermind Assessment
With the Science Modular Examinations coming up at the end of this week, we have agreed with you that the Buddhism Mastermind Assessment will now be completed in the first lesson in the week commencing 9th March.
Ahead of the assessment check out all the Buddhism Posts on this Blog. In addition don’t forget to look at the relevant sections of the Gold S.I.L.K. Pack. You’ll find this file attached to the The Key Resource for Getting a Great Grade for GCSE Religious Studies Post that I put up on 24th January.
Richard Gere’s Buddhism
As you know, in this programme Richard Gere talks about his beliefs. I’ve summarised some of the things he says. I have also included some brief biographical notes and some details of the activities he has been involved in that connect with his Buddhist beliefs. In any answer you give remember to connect what Gere says and has done with Buddhist beliefs and principles such as The Noble Eightfold Path.
Born in 1949, Gere, a Hollywood A list actor, has been a Buddhist for more than thirty years. Gere says that he is part of the generation who had ‘the problem of what to do with our lives’. He first became attracted to Zen Buddhism, which is one of the ofshoots of original Buddhist teachings. Zen centres on meditation to achieve altered states of awareness and being.
It is partly through the practice of meditation that all Buddhists believe they can make progress towards reaching a full understanding of the meaning of life. When this understanding has been achieved, Buddhists believe that the ultimate goal of Enlightenment has been reached. They have escaped the cycle of birth, life, suffering, death and rebirth and reached Nirvana.
China began its invasion of Tibet in 1950, occupied the country and tried to suppress the Buddhist religion. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of all Tibetan Buddhists, and members of his government were forced to flee the country and settled in Daramsala in Northern India. They are still based there.
In 1982 Gere had a meeting in India with the Dalai Lama. Following the meeting Gere became actively involved in the ‘Free Tibet Movement’. He also set up The Gere Foundation which has raised funds to improve living conditions, health care (including treatment for those with HIV and AIDS) and access to education.
Here are a few of the things that Richard Gere says during the programme. Try learning a couple of the ones you think would be useful for the examination.
The last words of the Buddha are said to have been, ‘Tame your mind. Harness, control and contain its unruliness’.
‘It’s in extreme situations that you find out who you really are.’
‘When you change your mind, you change.’
‘You have ultimate responsibility for yourself and your life – no-one’s going to fix it for you.’
‘The work you do on yourelf is the important stuff.’
‘If we want things to happen, we have to work to make them happen.’
‘Everything sticks to us and makes us heavy..frustrations build up. You have to work to get rid of the clutter.’
‘The world of frustration and illusion.’
‘The suffering of change.’
‘We live our lives on the surface. We are preoccupied with the superficial stuff. We need to find ways to get from the superficial down into the depths of the ocean that’s the mind. The deeper we go, the more vast, complete and boundless we realise the mind is.’
‘The more we look into ourselves, the more we realise there is no such thing as ‘me’. We are simply successions of habitual behaviours.’
The Nature of Hell and Heaven
A while back I mentioned a play called Dr Faustus written in the sixteenth century by a man called Christopher Marlowe. If he’d lived, he would probably have been one of England’s great playwrights. As it was he lived dangerously. He was almost certainly a secret agent – a 007 prototype, I suppose – and ended up murdered in a Deptford pub. But I digress.
In the play Dr Faustus, a highly educated man, decides to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for having everything he wants for twenty four years. Mephistopheles, Satan’s close associate, arrives from Hell to seal the deal. Faustus says life in Hell can’t be so bad for its inhabitants – after all Mephistopheles is able to go where he wanats and is able to have a civilised conversation in Faustus’s study. This is what Mephistopheles says in response:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it./Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God/And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,/Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,/In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss.’
At the time that Marlowe lived people thought that Hell was a physical place. The ideas in Mephistopheles’ speech are really different though and astonishingly modern. Hell isn’t simply a physical place; it is the anguish we carry with us throughout our lives. The sum of all our guilt, regret, anxiety, pain, longing, etc.
Do you think that there are even some resonances with the Buddhist idea of Dukkha and, perhaps, of Tanha too? Remember that Siddartha on his journey to find enlightenment was tempted by the demon Mara and his beautiful daughters. Mara is not anything like Satan, of course. He is, in fact, a psychological phenomenon - as a student said last year, ‘Mara’s our dark side, all the horrible stuff we have churning away inside us; if we let it take control, it can eat away at us until there’s nothing good left.’
What does Hell mean to you? A place? Particular fears? A psychological state? Other things?
What does heaven mean to you? What would you like heaven to be?
Thinking About Yourself – A 15 Minute Homework Task
I don’t know where this came from originally, but it was part of a footnote to an e-mail I received a few days ago.
You are not born for yourself, but for the world…..
How do you see yourself in this world? Are you here by chance? Are there particular reasons for your existence? How would Christians and Buddhists respond to these questions?
Work out your answer in no more than a hundred words, remembering to give reasons for what you say, and e-mail it through to me.
Important Post! The Buddhism Mastermind Test
As you know if you’ve been in lessons, they’ll be a big test on Buddhism when you come back after half term. I need to assess the learning gain you have made since the Mock examainations. In addition to knowing everything on the A* Guide to Buddhism, make sure that you are clear about the details of the life of the Buddha that you learned from the programmes we studied in class. You may find these notes useful. If you don’t know these things already, learn them please.
Prince Siddartha Guatama was born approximately 2500 years ago in Lumbini in what was Northern India and is now in Nepal.
The Four Sights that he saw when, as a young man , he went outside the walls of his father’s palace, were, in this order, an old man, a sick/diseased man, a dead man/corpse and a holy man or sadu/sadhu.
The Prince left the palace and his wife and young son and set out on a spiritual journey to find the true meaning of life and how to be happy. He listened to the ideas and the teachings of Hindus and Jains and practised extreme aestheticism in an attempt to achieve the altered states of consciousness and awareness that he believed would enable him to achieve enlightenment.
Extreme aestheticism involved denying himself all pleasures and comfort and reducing his intake of food to the absolute minimum. He followed this regime for six years and became emaciated (very, very thin). The story goes that he was about to die without having achieved his aim when a young woman offered him a little rice. He accepted it and realised that he had brought himself to the moment of death without achieving enlightenment. He decided to follow a less extreme way of life and it was through following this Middle Way that he subsequently achieved his aim.
The Buddha’s enlightenment happened at a place called Bodh Gaya. It is said that the Siddartha sat beneath a Bodhi tree and vowed not to move from that place until he had become enlightened. He sat there for some time in a deep meditative state. By the time that the sun rose he had become enlightened, a buddha. The term Buddha means ‘the one who knows’ or ‘the enlightened one’.
Having achieved enlightenment, Buddhists believe that, at death, the state of Nirvana will be reached and there will be no more rebirth. Reaching Nirvana is the aim of all Buddhists. Nirvana can be defined as the end of suffering when a sentient or fully knowing and aware human being has developed all the positive qualities and eliminated all the negative ones.
Siddartha is said to have been 35 years old when he became enlightened. He spent the next 45 years until his death at the age of eighty teaching his followers how to model their lives so that they too could achieve enlightenment. The Tipitaka and Dhammapada embody his teachings.
The Sangha (the Buddhist orders of monks and nuns), was founded during this time. Today Buddhist monasteries or viharas can be found all around the world. The Forest Hermitage at Barford near Warwick is our nearest vihara.
In order to consolidate your learning ahead of the test, look at my other postings on Buddhism and be sure check out the materials on the PSHE website at www.psheok.co.uk
Good luck with your studies!
A Good Mnemonic for Learning The Noble Eightfold Path
Helena Dwyer came up with this one.
It’s SAVV MALE for
Right Speech; Right Actions; Right Viewpoint; Right Values
and
Right Meditation; Right Awareness; Right Livelihood and Right Effort
Of course, you need to be able to give a brief explanation of what these terms mean (cross check with the A* Guide to Buddhism for this!) but when you’ve fixed the words and ideas that go with SAVV MALE in your memory, you’ve learned the ‘headlines’ for The Noble Eightfold Path.
Thanks Helena!
PS: This is the corrected version that you need to work with. It does help to check posts carefully before you put them up!
AGa 4th February 2009
A Student’s Mother on What Being a Buddhist Means to Her
a-students-mother-on-being-a-buddhist
This is a copy of the letter I talked about in class. I suggest you highlight the key phrases and ideas that the writer uses to explain her beliefs and way of life – it will help you remember them.
Remember the examiners will want to see that you can make connections between religious teachings and what believers do with their lives. The more specific you can be with your examples the better.
You’ve listened to what Buddhist monks have said as well as having the chance to get some insight into Richard Gere’s thinking. Add what you learn here to those notes.
Another Good Mnemonic -The Five Things That Hinder a Person’s Progress
Folllowing on from the really impressive Don’t Touch Naked Men mnemonic for The Four Noble Truths (see earlier posting), here’s another good one, this time for the Five Things That Hinder a Person’s Progress:
Laziness; Hatred; Doubt; Greed; Restlessness
can be remembered as
Let’s Have Darn Good Raves
Thanks to Tom Johnson for this one – he came up with it within a minute of me asking the question and is owed a couple of tickets for the Year 11 Draw!
A Great Website for Finding Out More About Buddhism
This is a great website if you are interested in Buddhism and want to find out more. You can even test yourself to see how much you know. There is an excellent e book library with lots of free downloadable reads.
