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Peacemaking
Apr. 15th, 2025 07:21 amStill reading Living Buddha, Living Christ. I guess I will finish this book, since it is Holy Week, but I think I am not the target audience. I can see how for some people without any exposure to Buddhism, seeing the parallels between Buddhism and Christianity would be helpful, but I just feel like the messages are pretty basic because he's making the comparisons.
The chapter I read today was about peacemaking, so he did quote a lot of Jesus’s sayings so for example “whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of judgment... Jesus did not say that if you are angry with your brother you will be put in a place called hell. He said if you're angry with your brother, you are already in hell. Anger is hell.” Which is probably not what he said. But it is a parallel between Jesus and Buddhist teachings, of course.
As in his other works, here he is focusing on the necessity of changing your consciousness to enact real peace. You can't be a true peacemaker when you're full of anger. That means not creating a division between you and those who you label as your enemies. That means overcoming your anger towards them, which requires deep understanding of them. So here he quotes Jesus’s famous turn the other cheek as a Christian example of this.
I have been thinking a lot about anger, and how easy it is for anger to arise in me these days. I know his advice would be to avoid the sources of anger if I can, but honestly these days it feels they are everywhere. So I'm trying to notice my anger and breathe with it, but it really doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere. I guess he would say I have a lot of the seeds of anger in me, and they get watered by almost everything in the news these days.
The chapter I read today was about peacemaking, so he did quote a lot of Jesus’s sayings so for example “whosoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of judgment... Jesus did not say that if you are angry with your brother you will be put in a place called hell. He said if you're angry with your brother, you are already in hell. Anger is hell.” Which is probably not what he said. But it is a parallel between Jesus and Buddhist teachings, of course.
As in his other works, here he is focusing on the necessity of changing your consciousness to enact real peace. You can't be a true peacemaker when you're full of anger. That means not creating a division between you and those who you label as your enemies. That means overcoming your anger towards them, which requires deep understanding of them. So here he quotes Jesus’s famous turn the other cheek as a Christian example of this.
I have been thinking a lot about anger, and how easy it is for anger to arise in me these days. I know his advice would be to avoid the sources of anger if I can, but honestly these days it feels they are everywhere. So I'm trying to notice my anger and breathe with it, but it really doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere. I guess he would say I have a lot of the seeds of anger in me, and they get watered by almost everything in the news these days.
