The Buddha saw the puthujjana as a person hard to convince or change, given the strength of craving and views. Nationalism, ethnicity and religion, for instance, push groups towards violence. They form ego-feeding, identity-creating creeds which are hard to break down. The craving for power over the material world and over other people; the wish to protect self and judge other groups as inferior; the clinging to one ideology whilst condemning all others. The result of tanha, mana and ditthi is papañca, the proliferation of ideas which turn the so-called perceiver into the victim of obsessions bearing little relation to the empirical. The analysis given earlier about the effects of papañca and the process of perception is relevant here. In such situations, empirical evidence shows that some who try to show the alternative force of metta become the victims of violence, at least in the frame of their present life.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 12:22:50 +0000
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