{"id":2768,"date":"2008-12-05T15:08:33","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T19:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/batesviews.net\/?p=2768"},"modified":"2018-06-04T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T13:37:04","slug":"on-being-raised-buddhist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2008\/12\/05\/on-being-raised-buddhist\/","title":{"rendered":"On Being Raised Buddhist"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Stephanie: <\/em>So the other night I had dinner with two good friends in Commons (the dining hall at Bates- a blast from the past for someone off the meal plan).\u00a0 Our discussion spanned all sorts of topics and of course religion was one of them (you would have to understand the crowd- a religion major and a philosophy major).\u00a0 But anyway, I began to speak about how I felt being raised Buddhist has profoundly shaped me as a human being.\u00a0 And not in a \u201cholier-than-thou\u201d way but in noticeable and (I think) special ways.<\/p>\n

It manifests very much in certain situations.\u00a0 For example, I tend to \u201cget Buddhist\u201d when I lose things.\u00a0 Impermanence man.\u00a0 And usually I can let things go that way.\u00a0 However, this year for the first time I lost something that no amount of Buddhist rationalizing could temper the sense of loss I was feeling.\u00a0 The object that was lost: a fake fur stole.\u00a0 Now this was a fake fur mass that one drapes around one\u2019s neck and it creates a luxurious fur collar.\u00a0 It made me feel about 75 years old and glamorous.\u00a0 In short, I loved it.\u00a0 But anyway, I mistakenly took this fur stole out with me to a show on a Friday night.\u00a0 A tip for all Bates students: don\u2019t bring anything you like out with you on a weekend night.\u00a0 It will be gone.\u00a0 And you will be sad.\u00a0 Like I was when I couldn\u2019t find my fur stole after the show.\u00a0 I lamented the entire night and into the morning.\u00a0 When I woke up still depressed, I decided a simple acceptance of impermanence wouldn\u2019t cut it.\u00a0 Buddhism wasn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 I needed to feel the sweet warmth of that stole around my neck, not find the Middle Way.\u00a0 So I hopped in my car to drive over to the place where the concert was held for maybe it wasn\u2019t stolen and I would find it and could move on with my life.\u00a0 As I was driving there, I saw a mass of fur by the side of the road.\u00a0 It was my stole!\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how happy I was!\u00a0 I leapt out of the car and put it immediately around my neck.\u00a0 It smelled a bit as I had just taken it off the ground and it had been outside all night but it was my stole.\u00a0 It was great. [More…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh Buddhism, you complicate my life in so many ways but you also make it easy to write off bad things that happen. Chalk it up to karma. That spider was obviously some evil-doer in its past life, hence why it got killed by my Raid handling mother. Same with the black fly. However, it gets more complicated when you start to think about human beings. Could the starving people of this world really all have racked up bad karma in their past lives? I don\u2019t buy it. That\u2019s a question I constantly ponder. I hope I\u2019ll come find some sort of satisfactory answer to that question someday. Maybe lying on the side of the road looking like road kill like my fake fur stole. Sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1869,6982,7394,11648,10751],"class_list":["post-2768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batesnews","tag-buddhism","tag-philosophy","tag-religion","tag-religion-and-spirituality","tag-religious-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2768"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62503,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions\/62503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}