McCall Olson Different Paths Review:
I must candidly state that I wish I had read this book PRIOR to reading the book from the same Author entitled “Sources”, also for this course. This book gave me a keen understanding of crucial background information regarding Buddhism that would have aided me greatly in my approach toward the original ‘sources’. I guess there is method within the madness of a syllabus! Perhaps, then, Bradford— you ever so enlightened one— you should follow it! Buddhist forfeit the world in order to gain enlightenment through silence, solitude, and meditation, as this text descriptively notes— three things of which are in sore need for the mass of men in America today. Indeed, the Buddha was insistent upon the creation of monasteries, explicitly for men, and if you follow the popular opinion as told in chapter 6, also for women. I was enthralled with the background information regarding the life of the Buddha— prior, that is, to him becoming the ‘enlightened’ Buddha. It humors me how we mortal men commonly exalt other mere mortal men to deity, which depicts how we as humans invariably worship something— if not the God of heaven and earth, then the god of our minds and making. I was taken aback at the notion that ‘Buddhism’ is actually a Western term placed on this method of beliefs arbitrarily, and has thereafter become assumed as true.
I found it to be absurd that Buddhist teaching asserts that there are multiple (i.e. innumerable, 18) ‘worlds’, as our modern scientific enterprise has distinctly determined that life (at least as is knowable by science) is no where else possible in our solar system, and probably also in the universe (our conditions are uniquely ‘suited’ downright designed for life as we know it, note). Moreover, the notion of a cyclical world is stupendous to me, and is a pronounced stumbling block for me to find very much truth at all in Buddhist teachings, bluntly. Indeed, it reminds of the dude from Greek mythology who rolled a stone up a hill every morning, only to roll it back down the hill afterward, and thereafter repeated the cycle ad infinitum. Pointedly, then, both the Buddhist conceptual notion of a cyclical universe, as well as the Greek mythology dude, are in essence marked by both futility and vanity. I find both of those characteristics to be inadmissible for life abundant.