Karma, Vipaka, Merit, This Life or Next Life. Full Explanation by ex-Buddhist
Read the first part of this blog post
The previous explanation is Buddhist belief, but I am sure that everyone here has lived their life in real life in real world. We all know that bad things happen to good people, and vice versa. Therefore, next life is an excuse if there is nothing happen as the result of Karma. They said, a good person might be bad person in past life, so he was born with serious disease or disability. The politicians with corruption are still rich and happy in their luxurious mansion, but they will go to hell or born poor in next life.
Is this sound like other religions? If there is nothing to prove in this life, they just talk about afterlife or next life. Another thing that Buddhism is similar to other religions is sexism, as you could see in the ranking provided in previous paragraph.
Based on that ranking, the highest in the rank is Buddha, following by enlightened person, partially enlightened person, and male monk. As the result of this, many Buddhists donate a lot of money and gold to monk, or to build golden pagoda, or to decorate church. They believe that they would earn more merit than to give their money or stuff to help the poor.
I have lived like that until I was about 30. After I realized that this ranking could be a kind of marketing, I have never donated my money to temples anymore; unless the temple has a project to save people. A temple, that I still donate my money every year even I am non-religious, provide free places to live for people with HIV and help cure the drug addict. In fact, the particular monk did not do it according to Buddha’s teaching. I will tell you how it is like to be 100 percent Buddha’s teaching.
Some temples I went to when I was Buddhist, the monks accurately act based on Buddha’s teaching. They do not clean their place. They need someone to do so many things for them, like, daily cooking, serving food, cutting lawn, feed their fish, sweeping the dust, etc. This temple has round 10 volunteers or employees working every day. A weird thing is that they cannot store food over a day. Buddha did not want monks to collect food.
For most temples in Thailand now, they have refrigerator, and most Buddhist donates food on weekend. General people have to work Monday to Friday every week. Hence, it is reasonable to keep food for weekday. Even this goes against Buddha’s teaching, but it sounds more reasonable than the first mentioned temple.
Read the first part of this blog post
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