Buddhism book chapter summary

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Buddhism
The book "Our Religions: The Seven World Religions" is authored by Arvind Sharma and it constitutes a collection of works documented by different scholars on religion. The book investigates such major world religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, from both historical and contemporary viewpoints. This paper seeks to explore and summarize Buddhism as discussed by Masao Abe in chapter 2 of the book.
In the contemporary times, Buddhist terms such as zen have found their way into the political discourse in countries such as the United States that are far flung from the predominantly Buddhist regions. The Buddhist word zen has evolved over time from the Vedic Sanskrit`s dhyana and Pali`s jhana, to the Chinese chan and eventually Japanese form zen, which is the English adaptation. In Buddhism, the term zen denotes the meditative stance or the Buddhists` culture of meditation. Additionally, its transformation and evolution over time and across societies, clearly illustrates the long history of the Buddhist religion. The religion has spanned for over three thousand years travelling through space and time from the Himalayas, through central Asia, China and Japan, to the United States and the rest of the world (Abe 71).
The chapter also employs the analogy of a net and the network to illustrate a key Buddhist doctrine. According to the doctrine, Buddhism is based on the interpenetration of a series of interconnections of conditions and causes beyond which nothing exists. At the intersection of these series of chains is a teaching which has religious significance in a dissimilar context. Consequently, each part of the Buddhist teaching is connected to all the other parts of the religion, and the entire religion to each of the different Buddhist teachings (71). Similarly, the interconnected nature of the Buddhist teachings, enable the religion to project and sustain the same flavor across nations. This characteristic is well portrayed in the words of Buddha, the originator of Buddhism, who observed that "as the great ocean has one flavor, the taste of salt, so does the doctrine and the discipline of the Buddha have but one flavor, the flavor of emancipation" (72). This distinguishing attribute of the Buddhist religion contributes significantly to its diversity, thereby enabling the religion to appeal to diverse communities.
Compared to chief missionary religions such as Islam and Christianity, the diversity in Buddhism is quite remarkable. While Christianity and Islam are based on Jesus Christ and Quran respectively, Buddhist religion is based on the story of the realization Buddha. Likewise, while Islam and Christianity promoted God`s message as offered by Prophet Muhammad and the figure of Jesus Christ respectively, Buddhists had offered Buddhist teachings or "the gift of dharma" to whichever community that was ready to adopt it in their own culture and language. Unlike Islam and Christianity, therefore, Buddhism lacked such fixed events as resurrection and crucifixion as well as a fixed language such as Arabic, thereby allowing communities to incorporate Buddhist teachings in their own culture and languages. As a result of its adaptability to different cultures and languages, Buddhism is extremely diverse compared to other world religions (72).
Diversity in Buddhism is propelled by the upaya-kausalya doctrine, which is the "skillful means". The doctrine emphasizes the need to preach Buddhism in accordance with the intellectual, moral and spiritual levels of the listeners (72). This enables Buddhist preachers to attend to the specific conditions of the audience in order to appeal to their religious needs. Similarly, the doctrine intends to call attention to the individual differences of the listeners. This ensures that the teachings of Buddha resonate with the audience (73). New skills are devised and reorganized to assist in delivering of the Buddhist teachings in varying climes and times. This propels the recipients of the message of Buddha towards the enthralling experience of Nirvana. Therefore, skillful teaching or preaching is at the core of Buddhism (128).
Buddhism is entrenched in four chief truths. The four gracious truths are the essence of Buddhist teachings. The first Buddhist truth is the "truth of suffering" which identifies the reality of suffering, ...