My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you
understand how unstable “the truth”can be.
All these years have made me realise, there are four things in life you can't get too bogged down in: forever, morality, virtue, and life and death.
Insistence can sometimes be a virtue. But if you insist too much on 'forever', your fear of losing someone will blur your vision; if you insist too much on 'morality', it will just become a stubborn obsession, most things are not so black and white; if you insist too much on 'virtue', you will become conceited, and try to change the rules to suit your values; if you insist too much on 'life and death', you're dwelling on the insignificant, and you would just be living a second-rate life.
There are just some things that ought not to be questioned, ought not to be dwelled upon. What's done is done, whether it was right or wrong matters not. Wouldn't you rather think about the future?
The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.
Buddhism differed radically from Shinto in a number of ways. First, it was a
“revealed” religion. It had a definite founder in the person of Shakyamuni Siddharta, a prince of the Sakya clan in what is now Nepal. Second, it was concerned with personal morality, salvation, and the afterlife. Third, it was a world religion, in the sense that its message was deliberately aimed at all humankind, not at a specific nation or culture.
“Do you want to know why it is I wear this crown?”
“I am the first horseman,” he continues, “the one who was tasked with toppling your old way of living. You and your foolish brethren believed you could outpace God. You built and innovated, and in your quest you robbed the earth of its purity and forgot that you all had another master.
“You all turned your backs on God—yes, even you, dear Sara—and I am here to make you remember.
“I am your mortality. I am the ugly truth that your bodies are impermanent, feeble, corrupt. I am the reminder that all men must face a great and fearsome reckoning.” The rain thunders with his voice. “This is who I have always been and will always be—undying, unchanging.”
