[Buddha-l] The authentic Buddha

[Jim Peavler]

On Oct 21, 2005, at 6:27 AM, John Chamberlin wrote:
> The Question: How does one find authenticity in any system of 
> beliefs/practices if there are no absolutes? 

Since I am a person for whom absolutes make no sense at all, and for 
whom absolutes seem to me to be impossible of existence, I am probably 
not the right person to answer this. However, for myself, I have found 
that years and years of meditating over an hour each day, on as close 
to absolutely nothing as I can come, I have taken great solace in the 
nothingness of meditating. It has come to pass that I do not need to 
meditate in a formal way very often any more, but, simply by taking two 
or three slow deep breaths I can get in touch with whatever it is (or 
isn't) that gives me strength and encouragement. As for my behavior, I 
try, like you, to live according to the lay precepts and a handful of 
the monastic ones that make sense to me, and I try to take full 
responsibility for my actions without subscribing to any "absolute" 
standard.

In my opinion, (and, it seems to me to be within the Buddhist 
framework) a person has to work at a rather deep level within one's own 
self and one's own experience. The more serious a person is about 
living that life, and the harder one works to emulate persons whom one 
admires and to live up to one's own expectations of morality and 
compassion, the closer one comes to living a moral life. I think that 
is as close as a person can come, because, no matter how much closer 
one comes to one's ideal, experience causes the target to move, and one 
must not have any idea of "achieving" any particular state, but must be 
willing to understand that life is an activity and a process, and (in 
my humble opinion) cannot have any particular goal, especially an 
"absolute" one.