Religions of the East A few years ago many well-known people came to the East to study the Asian reli- gions. They were curiou

Good morning. The topic for today’s lecture is religious of the East.
  A few years ago the Beatles and many other well-known people left the busy world of entertainment for a few weeks to study the Hindu religion in India. They were looking for ways to put peace, joy, happiness, even wisdom into their lives. Many young people are reading book after book in Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and other religious of Asia.
  What is it about these religious that makes them so fascinating to Western people? Are they really very different from Christianity? Actually religious of the West and those of Asia have the same basic goal: to help their members achieve peace and joy in their relationship with their God. This, for all religious, is true wisdom. But among the Oriental religious themselves, the beliefs and practices used to find wisdom differ from one faith to another.
  Hinduism in one of the oldest Asian religious--over three thousand years old. The word means the religion of Hindu, or India. Hinduism teaches that men are not really happy with pleasure, success, power, or riches; what they really want is to be alive and to be aware of life as deeply as possible. Man has to overcome any imperfections in his life so that he can achieve an awareness of life such as Brahma (the Hindu name for God) has been able to achieve.
  Hinduism recognizes four ways to achieve this goal. The first way is by knowledge, which can be attained by questions and thinking. The second way is through love and adoration. The Hindus have many statues of God, each one different. This is to remind them that no representation can describe God in all his many powers and qualities. Each one, however, concentrates on one quality of God--for instance, power, peaceful-ness, or anger. The third way is through forgetting oneself. The fourth way is through exercises that tame both one’s body and one’s soul. This last way, better known as yoga, is the best known outside India. It requires that the yogi take certain positions (sitting with legs folded or standing on his head), breathe quietly, and concentrate or mediate on eternal truths.
  The Buddhist religion has over 165 million followers. It was begun twenty-five hundred years ago by a man who came to be known ns Buddha ("enlightened one"). Like Martin Luther, Buddha started out to reform the existing religion, but when his ideas were rejected he ended up with his own religious movement.
  The story of Buddha gives us a good idea of the beliefs his followers still practice. It is said that he was a very rich and noble young man who lived in a luxurious palace. At the age of twenty-nine he felt a deep desire to help his people. He left his palace to search for the truth that would bring peace to himself and to India. After six years of searching, he decided to sit under a fig tree (called the bo tree) until he was enlightened. All day and night he mediated until at dawn he began to grasp the meaning of life. For forty-five years he went around teaching and helping people to find this same insight.
  Like the Hindus, Buddha believed that one becomes wise when one is able to overcome selfishness, sorrow, and sin and is able to practice self-control, humility, generosity, mercy, and love for all men. There is no one way to reach enlightenment; each person must search for it himself by examination, mediation, and right living. To this day, before they begin their careers, young men are expected to spend a few years in a Buddhist monastery learning to achieve this insight.
  All of the Eastern religious believe in reincarnation. They believe that the achieving of truth is difficult, and that a soul cannot reach it in one lifetime. So the soul goes from one body to another until R becomes pure enough. It is hoped a person’ s deeds in one life will improve his state in the next life he will have. It may take several lifetimes before the soul is able to be united with God.
  It is possible to see that many basic rules for living are the same in Christianity and the religious of the East. Like Christianity, the Asian religious believe that it is through individuals that the world will be re-deemed. It is also possible to understand why the religions of the East are arousing interest in the West at this lime. In a period when many people no longer find satisfaction in money, success, power, or material wealth, the meditation and serf-discipline of the Eastern religion offer an alternative with perhaps a deeper meaning than many people find in their present lives.