Can we illustrate the use of different styles to emphasise what kind of point we’re making?

A bit of light relief:

There is a Buddhist story about one of the Zen masters that goes something like this:  A student monk asks the Zen Master, “What is it like to achieve enlightenment?”  In Buddhism this is the highest mental state, which can take decades or many lifetimes to achieve.  We paraphrase a bit because we don’t know the actual words (and they would have been in old Japanese anyway).  The Master replied:

“Before Enlightenment, I worked in the fields and shovelled shit; after Enlightenment, I worked in the fields and shovelled shit.”

We need to cite references for this story.                                                       .                      

We need to show the evidence for our beliefs, particularly those based on science or history.  Examples also help understanding.

The Zen Master example may not be the best one, but at least we’re trying.

It’s not enough just to say something and hope that everyone understands the implications.  People can draw different conclusions from the same facts.  Here, we try to link it all together explicitly, so that what we mean is easier to understand and so there is less room for misunderstandings.

We’ll discuss in another section what the Zen master referred to above may have meant.  We put it here as a kind of joke because it shows that even if you finally do understand “it all” you still probably need to go about your daily activities, and it may not really change your outward behaviour much.

But it could make a profound difference to your life.

There are often many ways of looking at things and some other interpretations, that we may not favour, cannot be simply explained away as being wrong, because they are not bad, and they are consistent with the evidence.  We need to acknowledge these and explore them, modifying our understanding, until we resolve any differences.

We can be impressed with the Buddhist way of looking at the world, and try to reconcile it to contemporary science.

The Dalai Lama is also trying to reconcile Buddhism with modern life.  He is more famous than we are, but we’re not sure even he has the answers we need.

There are many alternative explanations offered which can easily get confusing.  We need to understand enough to be able to work out which ones are wrong, which can be shown to be false, because they are inconsistent with the evidence, or self-contradictory, or simply bad.

Even though we can be impressed with Buddhism, reincarnation does seem to be inconsistent with the evidence, so we don’t believe in it.  The apparent evidence for it needs to be explained another way – we discuss this elsewhere.