Normally, “religion” involves having faith in a superhuman power, especially in a personal God, who takes care of all things.
Buddhism is not such a religion. Siddhartha (before he became Buddha) always wanted to investigate into the ultimate nature of all phenomena, and had discovered the Middle Way: neither leading a life of pleasure nor one of asceticism. He sat under a bodhi tree meditating for 49 days, and finally attained enlightenment – removing the last trace of ignorance from his mind, ignorance being the cause of human suffering. The word Buddha actually means “the enlightened one” or “the awakened one”.
Buddhism is, in fact, a philosophy of life, a philosophy of causality. Nothing is permanent in the universe. Everything one does and experiences could be traced back to some previous actions and events, and would definitely contribute to future actions and events. Good deeds earn merits; wicked deeds warrant punishment. Hence, one must be fully responsible for all of one’s deeds.
Everyone can attain enlightenment. It entails thinking with wisdom and regular mind concentration, all by oneself. Two different ways to attain it, as proposed in the two poems written by two rival great zen masters:
The Chinese Taoist school of thought also proposes a great philosophy of life, through its penetrating observation of relativity in life.
Hence, the wise will not
When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi went to him to convey his condolences. Zhuangzi crouched on the ground, beat a basin and sang.
Huizi said: “You have lived with her, reared children with her, now she becomes old and dies, it is already bad not to weep, but to beat a basin and sing, is it not too much?”
Zhuangzi said: “Not so. When she just died, how could I refrain myself from grief? But then I observe that, in fact, she was originally without life, without even form, and without even breath. And then in a fuzzy manner, breath came into being, transformed into form, then into life. Now it is transformed again, to death. It is just like the succession of the four seasons, one after another. Now she sleeps tranquilly in Grand Space. If I mourn and weep, it means I do not understand the truth of life. So I stop weeping.”
Zhuangzi 莊子