HANDOUT Encounter 1 - Philo.pdf

HANDOUT Encounter 1 Buddha is one of the many thinkers of the West emphasizing the importance of transcendence, from Etymologically, Philosophy comes from two Greek its name, Buddha, the e...

HANDOUT Encounter 1 Buddha is one of the many thinkers of the West emphasizing the importance of transcendence, from Etymologically, Philosophy comes from two Greek its name, Buddha, the enlightened one. Buddha, after words Philia which means love, and Sophia which observing the realities of the world, finds his purpose means wisdom. However, academically, Philosophy in meditation. And there are numerous fruits of his is a systematized inquiry of the beginning or cause of meditation but let’s try to orient ourselves with what everything through the light of pure reason. the Buddhist followers called the four noble truths and the 8-Fold Path. Now, the main purpose of these To begin with, it is always necessary to know where principles is to transcend and how to continue living we are coming from. With this, let’s unpack what a amidst the suffering and pain of the material world, human being is as a person who philosophizes and as and here are the 4 noble truths. an object of philosophizing. 1. Life has inevitable suffering: suffering is always part of human existence. It is believed that the human person is constituted 2. There is a cause to our suffering: everything with the body and soul. Let’s begin with the latter; must have a beginning even our suffering. soul. It is the first principle of human life or human 3. There is an end of suffering: since suffering existence. It is the “with which everything exists” has a cause therefore it must also have an and “without which nothing will come into end. existence.” That's why there is human life and 4. The end of suffering is contained in the 8- without which human life cannot exist. Fold Path The 8-Fold Path 1. Right Understanding 2. Right Intention 3. Right Speech 4. Right Action 5. Right Livelihood 6. Right Effort 7. Right Mindfulness 8. Right Concentration Whatever is right is perfection and whatever is not right is either a vice or a sin depending on what school of thought you are believing. In the graphic organizer, it is shown that the soul These were the preliminaries of our philosophy class. gives life, intellect, and freedom to the body that’s Enjoy! why there’s what we call the human being. According to classical philosophy, especially that of Plato, he believed that the soul existing in eternity is perfect, immutable, and all-knowing; it came from the place that he called the world of form. According to him, the world of form is the perfect representation of things in which our world – the world of matter as he called it – is just a replication of it. Now, Plato found the body as mutable, decaying, corrupt, and imperfect. Once the soul finds its way towards the body, it forgets everything. The importance therefore of body for Plato is to experience the reality of the world we live in. As for the soul, Plato believed that a person should struggle, hard enough, to earn the knowledge the soul once had in the world of form to go back to the state of total perfection. The question therefore of the person is to transcend from the material world the person is experiencing into the world of transcendental experience where the soul, though it is still in the body, finds its connection and deep alignment to that of the world of form. It should be remembered that philosophy is a broad discipline not exclusive to the West. That’s why we have what we call the oriental thinkers.