Emergence Of The Buddha Essay Example for Free

Emergence Of The Buddha Essay A). Outline the social, political and religious background from which Buddhism emerged. (10) Buddhism is one of the major religious traditions of the human race today. Buddhism was influenced by many different cultures over the thousands of years. This essay will outline the social, political and religious issues surrounding the background and the emergence of Buddhism in Indian Society. In the 1920s archaeological excavations of the ancient cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in North West India revealed the existence of an urban civilisation. This is called the Indus Valley Civilisation. (Buddhism Dominique Side) The background from which the Buddha emerged from stretched as far back as C2700 in a place called the Indus Valley. This was the first sign of civilisation to live on the Indian subcontinent. People were attracted to the Indus Valley because of the of the River Indus. The River provided a good source of vegetation; there was also flat land, stones and trees. The Indus Valley was an Egalitarian society, which meant that everybody living inside the society were all equal and they worshipped both Gods and Goddesses. They believed and worshiped in Brahman, who they believed was the most looked up to and modest God. Archaeologists found statues with engraved scriptures of Gods and Goddesses on; the finding of these pots is where it is believed that the Religion began, although there were never any findings of temples to prove this. Artefacts show its Religion to be related to the forces of nature the worship of a mother Goddess, sacred trees and fertility symbols. (Buddhism Dominique Side) The valley was believed to have been a strong central government and to have two main political centres, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. The Indus Valley civilisation began to move out, many people today still believe this was because of a natural migration. After the civilisation of the Indus Valley had left, Aryans then began to set up home on their land. Aryans were nomadic; they travelled around a lot, never staying in one place for very long. They brought animals with them and built up a strong military. They were thought to be good at building and carpentry. The official religion of the Aryan conquerors of India is referred to as the Vedic religion after their holy books or Vedas (knowledge). The priests of this religion were known as Brahmans or Brahmins and are often mentioned in the Buddhist scriptures. The Aryans were unquestionably tough people, military strong, and they were fierce and war like. Their culture was oriented around warfare, and they were very good at it. The Aryans were a new start in the Indian culture; they adopted almost nothing of Harappan culture. They built no cities, no states, no granaries, and used no writing. They worshipped a pantheon of gods and were mostly connected with forces of the natural world, especially those powers on which humans were dependent. (Buddhism Denise Cush) The Indian caste system began to develop and the civilisations were placed into the category that they belonged too. Each mans duty was to follow the profession suitable for his social class. (Buddhism Dominique Side) Even today the values of the caste system are held strongly, it has kept a sense of order and peace among the people. The caste consists of six different levels, and as a pyramid starting from the highest and working down. The highest being the Brahman, then Kshatriya, Valishya, Shudra, Harijans and the Untouchables. Within each of these levels are the actual castes within which people are born, married and die into. They all have their own place among each other and accept that it is the way to keep society from disintegrating to chaos. The system has worked well for Indian people and still has a major role in modern India. The Aryan society was patrocol, which means it was all male. It was now no longer an egalitarian society. Indus Valley people and Aryans began to mix, which is how the Indo-Aryans were formed, this was the beginning of Hinduism, which was a mixture of Indo and Aryan beliefs and practices. From these two religions they made a relationship and formed the Indo- Aryan people. Like a mighty river, created from mainly tributaries that fed it, Hinduism is an amalgamation of the beliefs of the many people who settled in India in ancient times. (A beginners guide to Buddhism, Gillian Strokes) People now did not sacrifice animals for their religion but would now give gifts to their God called offerings; these would consist of flowers and vegetables. The Indo Aryans did not have or worship a holy scripture, however they did have Vedic hymns that were sang and collected, and which were later written down in the Veda. This means they have a cultural importance. They also worshipped a pantheon of gods. They believed in the highest form of God, the Brahman who was the highest level of the caste system. There was an amalgamation of Indo and Aryans that became the religion Hinduism. Women now did not have any power; men now did everything, women were now considered inferior to men. As a belief in the caste system, you were only allowed to marry within your level of the caste system. The political organisation was hierarchical and centralised. Kingdoms varied in size and kings were no more than village leaders. Some people believe that Hinduism began with the Indo-Aryans, while others believe that it began with the Indus population. Hinduism has no founder and no single moment of beginning. The emergence of Buddhism was now falling into place. Hinduism is the largest religion of India. The religion is based on prayers and believes in many gods and goddesses. However, one God named Brahman was more significant than the others. There were special priests known as Brahmin who were used to help you worship this special God, they helped to channel peoples faith. Asceticism defined as the practice of self-disciple, voluntary undertaken, in order to achieve a higher or spiritual ideal began. People didnt agree with Brahman priests, they wanted to live a simple life in the forest. Hinduism also believes in reincarnation, this is rebirth the cycle of life. It consists of Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth; you undergo the cycle over and over again. It is thought that if you live a good life you will be born into a better caste in your next life. You will achieve good karma if you do your duty well which is determined by the caste you are born into. Good karma means a good next life and bad karma means a bad next life. The only way to get out of the cycle is to have continuous good rebirths, which means you will enter Nirvana. All these backgrounds lead to the emergence of Buddhism in some way. Ascetics would move away to the forests and leave all their family and objects behind, even the idea of the caste system. They wanted peace of mind and to achieve enlightenment. The best way to do this was to meditate. They also wanted to get out of the life cycle and achieve Nirvana. Siddhartha Gautama was an ascetic, he was born a Hindu but wanted to escape the life cycle. He emerged as the Buddha after achieving enlightenment and people began to follow his way of life. Political aspects were that people did not use the caste system and also rejected social and political values. They wanted an egalitarian society where everyone was equal and treated with the same amount of respect. One of the effects of these changes was the creation of new professions, such as state officials and traders, which had no place in ancient caste system. (Buddhism Dominique Side) Therefore in conclusion I can see how Buddhism has emerged over thousands of years and that Buddhism now does not have any thing in common with the earliest religion found. Buddhism needed the other religions to be in place in order for it to exist and without the other religions; it might not have existed today. I think Buddhism has become the fairest religion, as it believes in equality. Therefore it has adapted out of the many religions that came before it. B). The Buddha turned his back on all the Religious teaching of his age. Assess this view (10) Buddhism is an Eastern Religion that is over two thousand years old. Buddhism as a religion was influenced by this historical context. The origins of Buddhism are closely connected with the origins of Hinduism. Buddhists dont believe in a God they just worship the highest in the caste system, the Brahmin. The Buddha is a highly respected person in the Buddhists Society. Buddhism is an amalgamation, an adaptation of Religions over time. This part of the essay requires assessing the view of how the Buddha turned or didnt turn his back on the religious teachings of his age. The Buddha lived and taught in the Northeast India about 2,500 years ago and the development of the Religion was influenced by this historical context. He lived for around eighty years, somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries BCE. Siddhartha Gautama developed most of his ideas for Buddhism from Hinduism. He changed and developed them to suit his new religion. He took some but changed them. He was born a Hindu and born into the Kshatriya Caste. He became an ascetic. I believe that the Buddha turned his back on his religious teachings for an important reason; therefore I believe this is because he wanted to get himself out of the life cycle. The Buddha wanted to go to the forests to meditate and reach Nirvana. The Buddha did not want his teachings to be taken as something sacred in itself, but as a means to an end. He made it clear that any teachings, including his own were not to be accepted without noticing but with faith and reverence, but should not be tested out in experience. The Buddhism religion was not just something to believe in or discuss, but something to try out to see if it worked. When you have tried it out it could make you a better person or takes you nearer to your spiritual goal. Siddhartha Gautama did turn his back on the previous teachings are the Caste system; the Caste system was a very important part of the social and religious life within India and Hinduism. When Prince Siddhartha went to find enlightenment he forgot all about the ideas of the caste system even though he was born into a good Varna. The Buddhas invitation was to come and see for yourself, join him in his meditation to reach Nirvana. The Buddha wanted to get out of the cycle of; life, death and rebirth and be enlightened to discover a new life. He didnt completely want to get rid of rebirth; he wanted to incorporate it into Buddhism. He believed in renunciation, which is what the ascetics believed in. They renounced with the Buddha to the forest. They gave up there existence. The Buddha did not want to pray to Brahman anymore, he wanted to break away from the priestly religion and become personal. Men and women both did this. Personal is being spiritual instead of Religious. The Buddha also incorporated Karma into Buddhism because its still the action needed for rebirth. He couldnt change that. He did turn his back on the caste system though as it was seen as a social class factor and not needed for the religion, as everyone was equal for him. The economic developments destabilised the Brahminical order. Prince Siddhartha still believed in the ideas of rebirth and the cycle of life, but came up with a way of escaping the circle.

Testing the Theory of Multitasking Essay -- Stroop Effect, Experimenta

This experimental investigation has to do with how human’s attention work. It is based on a replication of the well-known â€Å"Stroop Effect† carried out on 1935 by John Ridley Stroop. The aim of this experiment was to demonstrate how hard it is for a person’s attention to be divided in different tasks, by making the participants read a series of three stimuli which consisted of: 1) words of colors in black ink, 2) words of colors in their actual font color, and 3) color words with different ink, where the participant read the font instead of the word present. The research hypothesis supposed that selective attention is as easy to be performed visually as well as audibly. The controlled variable of the experiment were the black ink color words, while the second stimuli was considered to be experimental variable. There were two independent variables that were the color words corresponding to their color and the number of mistakes each participant made in each ca tegory. The dependent variable was the third stimuli, where the participant read its font rather than the word presented. The experiment was completed within a group of sixteen participants from an age range of 13-16 (eight girls and eight boys in total). The average time and mistakes in each variable was the following: 9.28 seconds with no mistakes, 9.53 seconds with one mistake, and 25.53 seconds and an average of two mistakes. In conclusion, the observations were that it took much more time in the last stimuli, which was the one that divided attention into two tasks. Implication findings would be the modicum amount of participants in the experiment. The aim of the experiment was to discover the implications attention has when it is used in two different tasks. This inve... ...me day at almost the same time. They were also tested one at a time, while the others stayed in a classroom being unexposed to what they would do when it was their turn. If the words are given in the participant’s natal language, there would be a greater reliability of results since it was their most proficient language. Two of the participants had the experiment conducted at a later hour on another environment. Works Cited "BACKGROUND ON THE STROOP EFFECT." Rochester Institute of Technology. Web. 16 Feb. 2010. . "BDoughertyAmSchool - IB information - grade 11." BDoughertyAmSchool - home. Web. 16 Feb. 2010. . "Participant Selection -." Participedia. Web. 16 Feb. 2010. .

My family’s relationship to nature and the environment

The history of my family demonstrates the drastic change in the relationship with environment that has occurred over the past few generations. Seeing the change in attitudes and lifestyles between my grandparents, parents, and my own generation is very educational, Examining the changing relationship with environment across this timeframe, one can make conclusions about the relative importance of natural surroundings in the life of people as changing over time. My family history naturally reflects the situation in Thailand, as I come from this nation, but I believe that it to a great degree parallels the events in other parts of the globe. My grandparents lived in a rural area in Thailand and made their living by farming. This is still a common situation in Thailand where 65% of the land is engaged in agriculture (Assumption University, n.d.). Their occupation made them strongly aware of their natural environment as they depended upon it for their livelihood. However, this relationship was not one of adoration or concern – land, water, plants were to them something matter-of-fact, something they perceived as their daily routine. Besides, their attitude was one of consumption. They saw the resources of the land as something they were entitled to merely because of being born in this land, since soil, skies and water were simply vehicles for growing food, not much else. There was little concern as to what will happen in the next generations, and little awareness of the need to implement new agricultural techniques in order to extend the land’s capability to generate harvests over generation. At that time, Thailand’s population was not so large, and it was at many times simpler to move to a new plot of land than to tend to the old one, trying to improve its productivity. With all this said, I would like to note that my grandparents were successful as farmers and developed some new crops that allowed them to outstrip the rest of the farmers in terms of financial gain. In the next generation, the income received by my grandparents enabled my father to receive a college education and obtain a white-collar job. Thus, nature offered them this opportunity to improve their lifestyle and life standards. As a result, my father who grew up on a farm, found himself working in an office in Bangkok, only occasionally visiting his elderly parents in their place. The same is true for my mother who also changed her rural motherland for an urban life. This made nature seem something of a holiday setting to them, rather than an everyday reality. In their office jobs, they did not need to care whether land preserved its fertility and whether the climate remained mild enough for the crops to grow. Although Bangkok and other cities in Thailand are made up of landscapes skillfully integrating trees, lawns and buildings to create a coherent image, this nature is very ‘cultured’ and very far removed from the roughness of the village landscapes. Thus, in my parents’ urban life, nature was very much a distant reality, something they saw on TV and enjoyed in our little Sunday outings. However, they identified with Thai nature as associated with their place of birth and motherland. Given their rural background, they remembered toiling in the fields and gardens, trying to turn the gifts of nature into material benefits. Somewhere deep inside their souls, they looked upon this connection, although on a subconscious level. One change that occurred in the relationship to nature in my parents’ generation was the rising awareness of nature as a global phenomenon. Thanks to books, periodicals, TV, and now Internet, their generation was able to realize that the boundaries of nature transgressed those of nations, and that nature was facing a threat from too much human interference. Seeing pictures of nature all around the world, they began to see in color how different various places on earth were, and realize how unique their own natural surroundings were. This ‘global’ realization, I believe, happened more or less in the time my parents’ generation was active, as millions of people throughout the world realized that the rest of the world has become closer, and reality is such that we live in a small, interdependable world. With the move to the US that happened when I was only 17, the connection with nature as some place in Thailand where my parents were born and grew up, has become even weaker. Here, we were surrounded by a rich and diverse natural setting, even if it seemed alien to us at first. However, the beauty of American nature took our hearts, and as a family we made quite a few ‘nature-focused’ outings, such as, for instance, a trip to the Grand Canyon or the Yellowstone park. More important is, however, the revolution in thinking that occurred in my generation. With globalization trotting over the planet at a dramatically increased speed, environmental plight is no longer something distant and incomprehensible, but instead has become something that threatens us already in out lifetime. With evidence of the global climate change and warming happening on a large scale, no one can ignore the significance of what is happening. Basing my judgment not only on my personal experience, but also on that of my colleagues and fellow students, I can claim that we are much more likely to make environmentally conscious choices. Personally, I agree with the words of James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, that environmental issues today have turned into â€Å"chronic problems,† that emerge and have a long-term nature† (Laverdiere, 2000). The fact that today’s ecological issues such as greenhouse effect, ozone depletion and loss of biodiversity cannot be solved by the efforts of one nation or dealt with effectively on a local level. Their solution requires the coordination of effort on an international level, translating into significant changes in our mentality. My generation is much more aware of the existence of other nations, better informed of their struggle for a cleaner environment and has better opportunities to join with representatives of other countries in the struggle for a safer and cleaner environment. Personally, I have participated in a few demonstrations focused on environmental issues and at one point attended the Ecological Club in my high school. I also know a lot of peers who take this action seriously. This is something my parents and grandparents would not think of doing since they had a totally different perception of their relationship to nature and environment. Thus, over three generations, my family went through a revolution in our relationship to environmental cause. To my grandparents, land and nature was commodity, something they consumed in order to receive material benefits for themselves and their kids. My parents were to a great degree alienated from nature that remained to them very much a childhood memory that bound them to their birthplace; at the same time, their understanding of nature and environment was considerably broadened to include places far away from their motherland. Finally, in my present generation, nature became a source of concern, something that requires distinct political action to protect and save it for future generations. References Assumption University, Bangkok. (n.d.). Agriculture. Retrieved January 27, 2006, from http://sunsite.au.ac.th/thailand/agriculture/AgriRes.html Laverdiere, M. (2000, January 27). â€Å"Forestry dean discusses hidden environmental problems†. Yale Daily News. Retrieved January 27, 2006   

Learning French Where to Begin

One of the most frequent questions potential students of French ask is Where do I start? French is a vast language, and there are so many resources available that its easy to feel lost. So before you start studying anything about the French language, there are a couple of things you should know and some questions you need to ask yourself. There Are Two French Languages There are essentially two French languages: written French (or book French) and modern spoken French (or street French). Book French is what youd study in a school, where you follow typical grammar lessons and learn vocabulary. Learning Book French teaches you the structure of French, and you cannot master French without it.Modern spoken French uses all these rules, but with strong pronunciation variations and sometimes softer grammatical structures. For example, here is a typical grammatically correct French question:- Quand Camille va-t-elle nager ? The here is the same question in street French:- Camille va nager, quand-à §a ? Both mean When is Camille going swimming? But one is grammatically correct, and the second one is not. However, its likely even French language purists would use the street French way of saying this when they speak to their family and are not in the spotlight. Now, you need to decide why you want to learn French. What is your primary reason? The reason will allow you to clarify your search. Youll be able to focus and find what requirements you face in order to learn French, what information youll need  to learn French, what resources you can draw upon to help you learn French and much more. What is your reason for learning French? Do You Want to Learn French to Pass Tests? If this is your primary reason, the core of your studies should be in book French. Learn the grammar, all the topics most common in tests, check exactly what you should be studying to pass your test and focus on that program. You might want to go to a school that specializes in preparing you for French-certification exams such as the Diplà ´me dEtudes en Langue Franà §aise (DELF) or  the Diplà ´me  Approfondi de Langue Franà §aise (DALF). Both are official qualifications awarded by the French  Ministry of Education  to certify the competency of candidates from outside France in the French language. Anyone who passes one or both of these is awarded a certificate thats valid for life. Check with your teacher about the exact requirements for these or other exams. Do You Want to Learn French to Read It Only? If this is your goal, you need to concentrate on learning a lot of  vocabularies. Study verb tenses, too, since books use them all right away when other methods will usually ease you into them. Also study linking words, which are the essential connective tissue in French. Do You Want to Learn French to Communicate in French? Then you need to learn with audio files or other audio material. Written material cannot prepare you for the modern gliding youll hear when the French speakers and you wont understand them. And if you dont use these glidings yourself, native French speakers may not understand you. At the very least, youll stand out as a foreigner. This brings us to the final points. After youve decided what your goal is in learning French, youll have to figure out  what method best fits your needs and what your options are (studying French with a tutor/ a class / in immersion or self-studying). Online courses are very effective for the independent student and not so expensive. Look at sites with good views from verified reviewers and experts, a site that explains French grammar clearly to a native English speaker and one that offers  a 100% money back guarantee or   a free trial.  And finally, make sure you get level-appropriate learning tools that dont deflate your confidence because they are too difficult for your level. Follow up with free French learning tools that will help if  you want to self-study. Or you might decide you need the expertise of a French tutor or teacher via Skype,  in a physical classroom or in an immersion program.   Its completely up to you. Decide on whats best, then establish a plan of action for learning French.