In the first week, I was planning on reading about Buddha in
the Life of the Buddha because I wanted to explore other religions this year.
While the stories were foreign to me, I resonated with many of the values. Coming
from a Christian background and reading through two of the Bible units so far,
I was surprised by so many of the similarities with the origins and teachings.
There were plenty of differences as well, but that I was expecting.
Some of my favorite stories were Maya’s Dream, Birth of Siddhartha and The Tree of Knowledge. I think I chose these because they
sounded so close to Bible stories that I initially wanted to compare and
contrast them.
This goal was pleasantly surprising because like Jesus,
Buddha came from God or the gods in a vision or dream. Mary the Mother of Jesus
received a vision from an angel that informed her that she would give birth to
the Messiah. In Buddha’s story, his mother, Queen Maya, had a dream from the
gods that informed her that she would be giving birth to a son. She felt an
overwhelming peace about it all, which gave her hope for her son’s purpose in
the world.
This unit doesn’t really fit seamlessly into my overall goal
for this class in terms of my final project, but for my life outside of school,
I wanted to learn more about Buddha. My project ideas for this class are
surrounded by religion (mainly by Bible women and different creation stories),
so this unit doesn’t fit under either one of those subjects. I am sure Buddhism
has a creation story of its own, but this unit did not touch on that aspect of
Buddha’s life.
There wasn’t anymore background I really wanted or need to
know to be able to comprehend the stories, but like I said in the earlier paragraph,
it would have been nice to know more about the creation story connected to the
religion centered on Buddha.
No comments:
Post a Comment