Meditation: The Path to Enlightenment

 

14 Feb. 2005

 

Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha

Meditation: The Path to Enlightenment

Questions for Critical Reading:

 

 

1.  What does it mean to restrain the senses?

 

           To restrain the senses mean that cease craving for pleasure from Worldly Activities whereas constant suffering from transient delusion.

 

 

2.  According to the selection, how can restraining the senses produce the results that the Buddha desires?

 

           The restraint of the senses is one of the progressive steps of Meditation. When you control what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, you will be liberated from unreal imaginations. When you keep from growing a latent tendency towards the sense-pleasures entail and put yourself in meditating system, you will attain the peace of mind that ultimately achieve the enlightenment and reach nirvana.

 

 

4.  What seem to be the primary advantages of meditation? Which advantages are religious, and which are secular?

 

           The primary advantages of meditation seem to attain the state of absolute peace. The religious advantages are “to achieve the enlightenment that will enable the individual to end samsara – the wondering of the soul from one becoming (incarnation) to another – and reach nirvana, a peace that lies beyond human understanding.” The secular advantages are developing “the Eightfold Path – right speech, right bodily action, and right livelihood concern morality; right views, right intentions, and right effort concern wisdom; right mindfulness and right concentration promote tranquilizing concentration.”

 

 

5.  What is the Buddhist attitude toward the body? How does it seem to differ from Western culture’s current attitudes?

 

Buddhist’s attitude toward the body that we drag along with us is a fertile soil for all sorts of mishaps. So the purpose of life is to achieve the enlightenment. In contrast, Western culture’s current attitudes toward the body are for the appearance that most people concern about how other people see their exterior; what’s out look, instead of interior; what’s in mind.