I'm a big Buddha fan. Here we have the over-privileged son of a king, someone the city cleaned the streets he was to walk before he left the kingdom compound, with everyone in their best clothes tossing petals and candies at him, until he started to question the reality of his life. So he left on his own to see how the rest of the people lived and ended up with men who were called "ascetics", living close to nature in denial of modern culture. While living with them, sitting in a circle meditating in a forest clearing, it started to rain. When the other ascetics were starting to get wet enough to want to leave, a giant cobra raised itself behind our prince and spread it's fan to protect him from the rain. Beyond his own behavior, this convinced the other ascetics this man was born to lead his people.
As we now know, almost 2,500 years later, his words resonate with us. Historians think it was over two hundred years after his death before people started carving his image, and his over-weight stylings are more the result of popular admiration, equating that with wealth and a leisurely lifestyle, not the lean and mean ascetic machine he became.
If you want to think about God's world, the whole world, Buddha should be seen as a major prophet. Jesus may have had the tribal ancestry, and as a half-begotten son of God he certainly had a mainline connection, but his miracles and passion have their own resonance, just as all the elaborate and meta-physical expoundings of Buddha explain and discuss topics Jesus did not.
I have a great, and original, question for you. And like all great questions, you need a few small ones to warm up.
What was the first creature Noah let out of the ark when the water started to subside?
I'm always surprised at who says a dove, a white dove, or a dove with an olive branch.
He let a black bird go, and it didn't come back. Where did it go? It doesn't say in The Bible.
Why does every North American tribe and clan, from the Inuit in northern Canada,
through to the natives at the tip of South America,
believe or have a myth about a black bird, raven, Quetzoacotl or starling,
as their creation myth or restoration myth, bringing the sun down from the sky,
quieting the waters and settling the earthquakes?
Hmmm! That's a truly global consciousness thought.
And that's brought to you free, here at Mark Wein's Guitar Lessons.
as always, John Watt