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worshiping the buddha statue i'm doing meditation since 21 since age 21 after taking meditation i am i am doing less worship and i feel there's no point in worship since buddha teach me taught me only we can help ourselves i just want to know if it's okay i don't worship

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Well the Buddha said the best sort of worship is practice.

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He didn't use the word worship, although you might translate it that way.

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Yeah, I mean you could if you look at his wording.

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Because when the Buddha was getting ready to pass into final liberation,

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All the angels from all around the universe came and all of the people came and offered flowers and candles and incense to the body, to worship the Buddha's dying body.

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And the Buddha, he wasn't dead yet.

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He said to Ananda, he brought Ananda over and he said to Ananda, you see they're worshipping in this way.

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But he said this isn't how you truly worship or pay respect to someone who is fully enlightened.

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He said the proper way to pay respect to someone is through the practice.

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So the word puja, puja which you could say means worship.

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The highest form of worship is through practicing the Dhamma in line with or for realizing the Dhamma for oneself.

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So, in that light, I would say it's not really proper to say we shouldn't worship, or to say that the Buddha would have us not worship.

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The Buddha said, puja ca pujaniya nang etamang kalamutamang.

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This is a great blessing.

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Worshipping those worthy of worship or paying homage, we often try to tone it down.

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People don't like the word worship.

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Actually, worship is a wonderful word.

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It's just become corrupted or it's been taken hostage by theistic religions.

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Worship means worth-ship, holding someone to be worthy of homage or to have some worth, to put it simply.

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It's actually not such a God-based, theistic-based word.

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Worth-ship, it has to do with worth.

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So it's expressing your feeling of veneration, of something having great worth and great value and great merit.

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Because We do consider the Buddha To be something that has great worth And we do hold the Buddha up very high So we Develop

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When we do practice worship, we develop states of humility and states of gratitude towards the Buddha, which are wholesome mind states, which create peace in the mind, create confidence in the mind, create contentment in the mind.

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When we give ourselves up to the Buddha, there's one monk, he said, when you give yourself up to the Buddha, then when pain comes, you don't have to worry about it.

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You can say, it's not my body, I give it to the Buddha already.

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But the act of paying homage is an act of gratitude and veneration.

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It's not an unwholesome thing.

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What we see as unwholesome, we see other people doing it and thinking that that's practice, that that's of some ultimate benefit, some end in and of itself.

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Having worshipped something,

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high without really knowing much about it, this has some benefit.

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And in a conventional sense, it does.

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It makes one happy, it makes one confident, and can theoretically lead a person to be born in heaven, for example.

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So we might even say that theistic religions have some

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merit to them in the sense that they do teach people theoretically how to go to heaven through this practice of prayer and worship and developing mind states of rapture and so on.

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And of course the negative side is they have these wrong views and the ideas that

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Heaven is permanent, but even beings in heaven have wrong views.

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I talked about this with Bhante Anoma once.

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We were wondering, he was saying, no, no, Christian people can't go to heaven because they have wrong view.

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And I said, well, you know, if you think about it, many devas have wrong view.

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Angels have wrong view.

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So going to heaven, it's difficult, but it's not difficult in the sense that Buddhist meditation is difficult or insight is difficult.

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It's difficult in the sense you have to work hard and you have to develop wholesome states.

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So in a conventional sense, worshipping something has benefits.

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It brings power to the mind.

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It's an objectively beneficial mind state.

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The negative side is the blind faith and the belief that by doing this you're going to somehow go to heaven if you worship a god or you worship an idol or so on.

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People worship trees and in India they worship phallic symbols and so on.

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The idea that somehow it's going to bring benefit.

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This is wrong view.

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And it can lead you to be born as an angel, but you'll still have wrong view.

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So from a Buddhist point of view, we don't look at that.

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We don't pay much attention to it.

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We do...

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customarily pay homage to the Buddha.

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Even Maha Kassapa, when the Buddha had passed away, Maha Kassapa came and paid homage to his feet.

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We do do this.

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He came and, you could say, worshipped the Buddha, expressed his feeling that the Buddha had some worth and the idea that the Buddha was his teacher.

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But he didn't do it thinking that it was going to bring some benefit.

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He just did it out of respect and a feeling that it was the proper thing to do, out of respect and gratitude for his teacher.

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And for the Buddha who was a very special being But we don't consider it to be our practice And this is why the Buddha was very careful before he passed away To say this is not the highest form of homage The highest form of homage is the practice of the Buddha's teaching And so you shouldn't hold such a hard line I wouldn't recommend holding such a hard line stance as Worship is useless and I shouldn't engage in it

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I would harmonize the two views by saying that this is the highest form of homage, the highest form of worship that I'm doing already because the Buddha himself said that.

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And so it keeps the mind from getting overly critical and skeptical and antagonistic because people who criticize things and say this is no good and that's no good as

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As many people do, Buddhists will often do, saying, oh, these people worshipping, they just have all this blind faith, and people who are anti-theists talking about how silly theistic religions are.

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And so this is an antagonistic, a negative mind state.

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A person who engages in this will actually have a lot of unwholesomeness.

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So if you look at many atheists, prominent atheists, they actually have...

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These negative mind states that you can see, some of them are actually angry people and have great unwholesomeness in their mind because they're just all about denying things.

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And of course the fact that they deny the existence of the mind, but that's a whole other issue.

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What I mean to say is that theistic people can actually be really nice people and makes you think that in some senses we have a lot more in common with them and they can actually be more...

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inclined towards meditation practice.

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What stops them, of course, is the wrong view.

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So the wrong view that only this will lead you, only Jesus will lead you to heaven, only Muhammad or only Allah or so on.

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These kind of wrong views are what generally stop them from coming to practice meditation.

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Not the worshipping, the worshipping and the prayer and so on.

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It actually creates benefit, creates wholesome mind states.

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It's the views associated with it that are the problem.