Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Buddhism................?

The Han dynasty believed in buddhism, how do you think the influence of religous beliefs has on society.|||The influence of Buddhism during the Han dynasty was very limited, so that's probably not one of the clearer examples. Confucianism had a much deeper impact in the society, especially since it is mainly about the organization, attitudes and behaviour on the societal level (whereas Buddhism is more about inner transformation of the individual). Beside Confucianism, Taoism also had a profound impact on China and its population since long before Buddhism arrived as the "third religion", even if Taoism was far less concerned with society and governance than Confucianism was.





The influence of religion on society of course depends very much on how much it actually affects the individuals of the same society. In many countries (like Saddam's Iraq and Bush's America), religion seems to fail to affect the ethics of the society in a positive way, and thus becomes more of a deceptive veil over underlying driving forces like the struggle for might, power and wealth (through war, capital punishment, moralism etc). On other countries like Tibet and India, the deeply penetrating influence of religion on all levels of society are hard to deny.





Just to take Tibet as an example, the adoption of Buddhism in Tibet in a short time changed a fast expanding, powerful warriors' empire, almost defeating the Chinese empire itself in the 9th century, into a Buddhist, decentralized country without an army, with thousands of monasteries, where a significant part of the population became monks and nuns (one sixth of the men, some claim), a vast religious literature (one of the richest in the old world) and religious art totally dominated the culture of fine arts, the law system was totally based on Buddhist teachings (on karma, compassion, and respecting every sentient being, including animals and criminals). There was virtually nothing in the Tibetan culture or society that wasn't deeply influenced by Buddhism, at least until outside rulers like Mongolians and Manchus started to export some harsh methods of punishments that was hardly Buddhist in flavour (and thus firmly abolished by the 13th Dalai Lama as soon as Tibet declared itself independent after the fall of the Qing dynasty in China in 1912).





A sound religion, regardless of which religious tradition, should affect a society primarily on the ethical side: how to help the weak and poor, how to protect life (war and death penalty?), how to counter greed, power-hunger, violence, racism and discrimination, and so on. Sometimes the religions seem to do this, sometimes it doesn't seem to. The reason behind that difference is another question.|||Buddhism isn't a religion. Buddhism is a philosophy; a personal spiritual journey. It doesn't have dogma or leaders that force a belief system on a society, so it's impact would be strictly voluntary and, by the nature of the philosophy, benignly non-judgemental.

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