天気：曇り
Hurting all over from yesterday’s practice… Getting up at about 9, I spent the morning doing homework, before getting to uni for my 12 o’clock class. Staying in the same class for Religion, I got the homework done, and then chatted with Julie before class. Today, we continued with Buddhism, looking at the ways you can be reincarnated and the concept of Karma. Basically, depending on your Karma, which can be the positive or negative actions of this life or any of your previous lives you can be reincarnated as – a god (deva); a demi-god (asura); a human; an animal; a hungry ghost (preta); or a being in hell. In order to reach Nirvana, you’re actually best off being a human, a wealthy man living in a Buddhist country to be precise; you have the most opportunity to become a devout Buddhist monk. If you’re reincarnated as a god (which will last for about 50,000 years), you’ll find your life too comfortable and not worry about learning the Buddhist teachings until it’s too late; if you became a demi-god, you’ll just be angry and war-like the entire time; if you become an animal, you do have a slight chance of reaching Nirvana, but it’s more likely that if you’re a good animal you’ll get reincarnated into a human close to Buddhism (pets are the luckiest); if you’re reincarnated as a hungry ghost well, you’ll wander around unseen in the human world, never able to slake your insatiable hunger (they can’t swallow as their necks are too thin) and; if you’re sent to hell then you’re going to have a pretty rough time for the next 30,000 or so years.
Buddhist hell is quite different to Christian hell. Firstly, you get taken to the king of hell (閻魔王 – enma o), who’s there to judge you, and make sure that everything’s running smoothly. You’ll be shown what you did in your past life, and then by punished appropriately. Now there are many, many different types of hells, cold hells, hot hells, each with their own elaborate tortures and finite period of time the punishment will last for; they were very specific. One that the professor described to use was – drowning in a river of burning faeces while being pecked at by a bird (I later found out from Biancha that this was called the “blazing cock” hell). Now you could say well, I guess you’d get used to continuously dying after a while; it is a long time. But no, every time you experience the torture fresh, as the previous time is erased from your mind; of course, when you are finally reborn into another existence you won’t remember it anyway. The most interesting thing to note though is that, the Buddhist hell isn’t a physical place, it’s a mindset; you are punishing yourself. The torturers and even the other beings being punished are just extensions of the mind; I don’t know where enma o fits in though who incidentally is also a reincarnate. You keep on experiencing that same, appropriate punishment until all the bad karma is used up. So yeah, that was Religion. Afterwards, I rode back home, had lunch, and then spent the rest of the afternoon, updating my blog and watching episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog on YouTube; that was very “natsukashii” (nostalgic).
I also got started planning the trip to Hikone, and I’m really excited about it now; there’s a lot of great things to see. One thing I especially want to do is take the ferry out to 竹生島 (Chikubu island) right out in the middle of Lake Biwa; it looks really beautiful. And of course, we have to see the castle; it’s still in its original form like Himeji castle. At around 6, I went to Sanko to pick up a few things. Getting back, I chilled in the kitchen for a while, before actually cooking; it was nice just to talk with people. I ended up cooking a chicken pasta bake, and made so much that I have some leftover for tomorrow. Sitting with Ash and Rachel, we absent-mindedly watched a detective/drama show on TV, while Yuji and Natsuki were making bandanas out of a red cloth for the Seminar House 2 sports team. I had to go over and investigate, and since most of the team was in the kitchen, pretty soon we all had them on, and were posing for the camera; that was fun. After helping with the washing up again, I spent the rest of the night in Katie and Ash’s room, watching Hetalia and AMV’s on Ash’s laptop; Rachel joined us too. Katie and Sarah were working on their skit, and they are portraying characters from Lord of the Rings; I think it’ll be hilarious. Well, hopefully I’m feeling a bit less sore tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment