Saturday, April 4, 2020
3 Literary Essay Tips to Produce the Piece of Art in Academic Writing
Literary essay writing is a type of formal writing that students may encounter at different levels of education school, college and university. It is possible to face this task even if your main area of expertise isnt the Literary Studies at all. Adore literature? Look at what careers in Literature are available to you today. But still, lets get back to the point essay writing. Effectively-written essays have become an inextricable component of the academic curriculum. Essays are an important part of school assignments, standardized tests and a form and requirement for a school application. But how does it belong to literature? If you want to know more about literary essay writing, this article is for you. Youll know what a literary essay is and what specifics it has. Proceed with reading it to the end to find out what tips it is worth to follow! And write a good literary essay! What is a Good Literary Essay? In general, a literary essay is defined as a piece of writing that offers the authors point of view based on his/her strong arguments retrieved from a literary work. In other words, it is an academic assignment given to a student to measure a work of literature from various perspectives its structure, form, and content, plot and subplot, theme, characters, images, and so on. The main essence of writing a literary essay is to analyze a specific literary piece of work. Know what belongs to it? Indeed, if you think that literary works are limited with works of literature only, you are wrong. Besides Stephen King and Joanne Rowling, you can evaluate all works expressed in print or writing. As a result, all dramatic, musical, poetic works can be evaluated by you in a literary essay. Lets take an example: youre analyzing a musical drama, Lerner and Loewes My Fair Lady. You know that it is based on play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Its a highly popular book with many reviews all over the Internet. If you read those reviews, youll notice they are all about the way it is perceived by readers. Nobody rejects the fact the originality of writing is considered as a matter of priority. Youre allowed to share your own impressions in a literary analysis based both on a book and play. Remember your literary essay should be written in a structured format with a detailed analysis of all components every literary work has: How Does a Literary Essay Introduction Look? What Does a Literary Essay Body Paragraph Contain? After you introduce the main idea that is related to your literary essay, it is logical to develop it from various angles of a literary analysis regarding the question words what, who, how and why. The part dealing with the development of the central idea of a literary analysis essay is called the body. The term regularly used for the development of the central idea of a literary analysis essay is the body with at least 3 physical paragraphs. Each of the paragraphs youre writing must have: Topic sentence, i.e. the first sentence stating the subpoint of the thesis statement which you have mentioned. So you need to tie all the details of the paragraph together tight so that it will be logically complete; Textual evidence, i.e. the supporting detail relevant to the main point and subpoint you state in the topic sentence. It can be either a paraphrase of content or direct quotation from a book. The latter plays a greater role in accessing your ability to analyze a literary work. Just remember it! Closing sentence, i.e. the last sentence of a paragraph to have it logically completed. Its up to you what way of closing to choose, but dont forget to use transitions. The simplest way is to count your main points with the help of Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly, and so on. But there are many other transitional expressions you can use in your literary essay. How to Draw a Conclusion for a Literary Essay? Eventually, your essay is coming to an end when all the final words are being written. What are these final words in your literary essay? Firstly, you remind your readers of the essay question. Secondly, you provide the main essay argument(s) briefly. Thirdly, make a relevant comment about the literary work you are analyzing it can a comment on liking or disliking it, or the works value or disvalue. Indeed, there are many ways to make a conclusion. Just look them through. Going to switch off your computer or other electronic devices you work on immediately after putting a full point? Stop, stop, stop! Reread a written essay to make sure that everything corresponds to the requirements given to you. Make all the necessary revisions before submitting any of your papers. Remember this once and for all! 3 Literary Essay Writing Challenges to Overcome Beforehand At any stage of writing, a student may encounter some challenges. So writing a literary essay is no exception. Lets look at 3 possible issues you may experience with the most effective ways of dealing with each of them: #1 Reading and Analyzing Processes Without any doubt, you realize that before writing a well-analyzed literary essay, you need to read a piece of literature. Agree that reading and analyzing is better done with a short story, for example, The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, than with a novel, War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy, for example? So, find enough time to accomplish these stages effectively. Its up to you what way of reading to choose, but remember the way of how to read a book has an impact on your final literary essay writing. It is found that you are more likely to remember content if you read it out loud. Besides it, you can try out: Color marking of the main ideas in the text; Using sticky-notes with the main points of content; Charting character development, etc. #2 Gathering All the Details Essential for the Literary Analysis When you are asked to do a literary analysis in essays, you should think about how and why a poem, short story, novel, or play was written. For that reason, you should collect all the necessary information about a specific literary work. Pay attention to the arrangement of ideas and/or incidents that make up a story, setting, characters, figurative language, imagery, symbolism, etc. How to gather all that? While reading a literary piece of work, it is better to have a pen or several highlighters at hand for: Underlining or copy-pasting direct quotations from a book or any other literary work; Marking each point with the help of corresponding colors on paper; Drawing graphic organizers to show the content illustratively. For example, this graphic organizer shows the main steps in writing a literary essay and its results: #3 Writing a Literary Essay Analysis Itself It would seem as if every obstacle in the path of dealing with a literary essay was overcome. But it isnt worth to forget that after reading a book, gathering all the essential information to do an in-depth analysis, you have to think of words that could make your essay informative, easy to follow and remember. Moreover, all the information given in your literary essay must be well-structured and formatted properly. Here, besides the question, How to write my literary essay?,the question becomes, in turn, How to structure and format my literary essay? Know what comes to help? Outlining or mapping all the main ideas of an essay; Following the Introduction + Body + Conclusion structure; The guide on how to write a literary analysis essay, the guide on writing essays in the English Language and Literature or the guide to an academic writing style; The citation guidelines according to the last editions of the style manuals: Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition; MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition; The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition; The Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 8th edition. Some literary essays are written as good examples of formatting in APA, MLA, Harvard, Turabian or Chicago. Weve just mentioned three main challenges you may face after being assigned a literary essay. However, there are many other obstacles appearing in your way no matter what task is in front of you procrastination, the lack of time, poor time management and writing skills. The list goes on and so on indefinitely Stop putting off the moment when you start getting inspired by the art of your own writing!
Sunday, March 8, 2020
Critical Review of Chapter 1 and 2 of the book Globalization A Very Short Introduction, by Manfred B. Steger
Critical Review of Chapter 1 and 2 of the book Globalization A Very Short Introduction, by Manfred B. Steger The problem The world is facing a rapid growth in economic, social and political integration. Globalisation has resulted to movement of factors of trade among countries. Globalisation has been favoured by scientific invention and innovation of communication and transport networks. Globalization is a process of integration of regional economies and cultures into a global network of trade. In most cases, the term globalization is used in economic terms.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Critical Review of Chapter 1 and 2 of the book Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, by Manfred B. Steger specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Economic globalization refers to the increase in national interdependence of economies through an increment in international trade. It is the process of promoting economic integration between economies of different countries with the aim of establishing a global market. The main issue facing the wo rld is how to manage globalisation and litigate negative effects it brings to humanity (Schulte, 2000). Dimension of the problem Although globalisation has brought numerous advantages to the world, other areas are affected negatively. In the competitiveness of producing, resources have been over-exploited, secondly the availability of goods from other countries have resulted to slow growth of domestic companies especially in countries where the level of technology is lower. Developing countries are seen to be lagging behind because of globalisation since they lack the curiosity of developing means of producing better commodities since what they want can be gotten from the world market. With the differences in economic potential, some countries are lagging behind economically (Manfred, 2003). Evaluating the problem Globalisation is on a high rise with an increasing number of countries accepting to open its borders for trade with other countries. The move has created a larger market o f goods and services in the world domain. With an increased demand, countries and companies are working hard to produce goods that will feed the markets and remain competitive. The demand for goods in the world market have positive and negative gains, it has lead to more customer sovereignty since a customer has a large access to goods and services from different parts of the world. Globalisation started in the form of an F.T.A. (Free Trade Agreement), whereby international bodies like W.T.O. (World Trade Organization) discouraged restrictions to trade. Globalisation has made international trade easier through the removal of trade barriers and tariffs. Globalisation is not a current issue but can be traced from early days. Pre-modern globalization was evident in the 19th century; the era of industrial revolution that utilized economies of scale to produce low priced household goods. During the time, population grew rapidly and living standard reduced drastically; the situation of th e world triggered international and national policy makers to come up with strategies to cure the worldââ¬â¢s economic problem.Advertising Looking for essay on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More With the start of world war one, pre-modern globalization began to break and some economies believed that the financial forces that were as a result of globalization had led to the emergence of the war. In early 1930s, came the great depression that affected economies of many countries especially those which had embraced globalization (Schulte, 2000). Globalisation discourages protection of investors in order to promote their capital investments; it calls for economic integration where good and services, labour and capital find their way in the country where they can be put into maximum use. Today, the global economy has increased to significant levels and all this have been facilitated by trade agreement s. Several factors influence globalization that includes socio cultural, technological, economic and political factors. Globalization can also be used to refer to the national movement of culture, languages and ideas. This paper looks into the history of globalization, international trade, international financing and gives the merits and demerits of globalization (Manfred, 2003). What type of evidence is offered? The two chapters are introductory chapters in the topic of globalisation. They have considered historical trends in the world market and used textual information to explain the trend in the world. The writer tries to connect what was happening in yester years to what the world is going through. The uniqueness of the chapters is how simple they bring out the issue of globalisation in the current context deviating from past performances in the world. Interpolation of the chapters The chapters introduce the issue of globalisation in a starlight forward way, in chapter one, the writer puts much emphasis of macro or general explanation of the world situation and trade. As the chapter unfolds, he brings the trend that the world has come through to reach to the current position. In the second chapter, having given a background of the topic, the writer goes back in time to examine the situation from past occurrences in the world. The writer discusses some historical issues that might have been ignored but in real sense, they contributed to globalisation. Although people have different interpolations, what the chapters are bring out is the trend that globalisation has taken to bring the world to its current level (Manfred, 2003). Conclusion In both chapter one and two, the writer introduced the topic of the book that is globalisation. He creates background information from a macro perspective and explains the topic in a straightforward manner using historical and modern trend in the world. In the chapters, the writer discusses elements globalisation as well as their role in the world current economic, social and political situation.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Critical Review of Chapter 1 and 2 of the book Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, by Manfred B. Steger specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More References Manfred, B.(2003).Globalization: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schulte, J. A. (2000). Globalization: a critical introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Friday, February 21, 2020
The Louisiana Purchase Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words
The Louisiana Purchase - Research Paper Example Initially, France owned huge land areas dotted along the Mississippiââ¬â¢s western area. The area is called Louisiana. France owned and managed the Louisiana from 1699 until 1762. In 1762, France gave the Louisiana land area to its Friendly neighbor, Spain. However, the French Conqueror, General Napoleon Bonaparte, retrieved the Louisiana property from Spain. Thinking of dominating the large Louisiana expanse filled Bonaparteââ¬â¢s initial penchant. As time went on, Bonaparte realized some troubling reasons that holding to the Louisiana land area were not viable. One bothering reason was a French Commanderââ¬â¢s lost in a battle held in Saint Dominque (current Haiti nation). The Haiti war took lots of French soldier deaths. With the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparteââ¬â¢s French army in Haiti, under Bonaparteââ¬â¢s brother in law, Bonaparte was thinking of selling lands to pay for Bonaparteââ¬â¢s continuing European war activities (Fleming 2003). Magdalena Alagna (2004) mentions many of the Haiti ââ¬âbased French troops were dying from Yellow fever during the Haiti war campaign. The same Haiti war drained the French coffers significantly. Continuing to pay for the expenses of the Haiti war would eliminate the connection to the ports of North Americaââ¬â¢s southern shipping lines. Another bothering reason is the increasing American population. Further, France was forced to sell the Louisiana property. With the population growth trend, France felt that it would be impossible to stop the encroaching American population from overflowing into the French territory of Louisiana. Bonaparte decided to transfer the funds allocated to maintaining Louisiana to pay for the cost of invading
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Hospitality Operations of Alltalia Airlines Research Paper
Hospitality Operations of Alltalia Airlines - Research Paper Example The management is in disarray since it cannot possibly determine the source of the problem. The company that had a capital base of more than three million dollars and over two hundred employees has now shrunk to about five jumbo jets and other smaller jets with monthly revenue of six million dollars down from the previous eleven million monthly incomes. The current revenue cannot comfortably sustain the operations of the industry a fact that has resulted in the company retrenching some of its employees. The hospitality industry has a number of challenges and requires an extremely vigilant and dynamic management to process and effect policies that counter the challenges. Some of these challenges include understanding the market. Stakeholder analysis According to Slattery (2008), no business exists in a vacuum. Before setting up a business, one must have an effective understanding of the market and the entire community. Operations in the hospitality industry have a number of smaller co mmunities that must integrate for the business to succeed. The management requires a fundamental understanding of all these communities and effective operational policies that incorporates all of them. These communities are the global community, the industry community, business community and the local community. The global community determines the scope of the business, by understanding the global community in the hospitality industry, the Alitalia airlines will determine the global destinations that have a sizable customer base and the new global destinations to introduce to make the business relevant to the market (Painter, 2012). By understanding the industry community, Alitalia airline stays conscious of its competitions. In analyzing the competition, the manager determines the weaknesses of the current existing companies and majors on their weaknesses to introduce unique products that complement the weaknesses thus grabbing the market from the previous owners. The industry also reveals the stratification of the current market. Through this, the management formulates products that target every segment of the market thus maximizing sales through an increased presence. Understanding the business community is one of the most important determiners of the success of the market. This includes having an effective human resource management. Operations in the hospitality industry rely on the human resource, the employees of the companies require effective management to ensure that there is an efficient flow of information and optimum service delivery to the customers resulting in satisfaction. The management must determine cost-effective ways of hiring the human resource and keeping them highly motivated. Alitalia is currently retrenching its employees a clear indication of the human resource management flaws (Lane, 2005).
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Reasons For Using Jungle Computing Systems Information Technology Essay
Reasons For Using Jungle Computing Systems Information Technology Essay The application of high-performance and distributed computing in scientific practice has become more importance, among the most available platforms such as clusters, grids and cloud systems. These infrastructures are now undergoing many changed due to the integration of core technologies, providing speed improvements for selected compute kernels. As the distributed and high-performance computing is becoming more heterogeneous and hierarchical, complexity in programming is increased. Further, these complexities arise due to urgent desire for scalability and issues like data distribution, heterogeneity in software and hardware availability. These issues force scientists into simultaneous use of multiple platforms (e.g. clusters, grids and clouds used concurrently). 6.1 Jungle Computing Jungle Computing is a distributed computing paradigm. It simply emerged out of the plethora of distributed resources available. A Jungle Computing System consists of all compute resources available to end-users, which includes clusters, clouds, grids, desktop grids, supercomputers, as well as stand-alone machines and even mobile devices. There are several reasons for using Jungle Computing Systems. Firstly, an application may require more compute power than available in any one system a user has access to. Secondly, different parts of an application may have different computational requirements, with no single system that meets all requirements. From a high-level view, all resources in a Jungle Computing System are in some way equal, all consisting of some amount of processing power, memory and possibly storage. End-users perceive these resources as just that: a compute resource to run their application on. Whether this resource is located in a remote cloud or located down the hall in a cluster, is of no interest to an end-user, as long as his or her application runs effectively. Despite this similarity of resources, a Jungle Computing System is highly heterogeneous. Resources differ in basic properties such as processor architecture, amount of memory and performance. As there is no central administration of these unrelated systems, installed software such as compilers and libraries will also differ. For example, where a stand-alone machine is usually permanently available, a grid resource will have to be reserved, while a cloud requires a credit card to gain access. Also, the middleware used to access a resource differs greatly because of using different interfaces. The heterogeneity of Jungle Computing Systems makes it hard to run applications on multiple resources. For each used resource, the application may have to be re-compiled or even partially re-written, to handle the changes in software and hardware available. Moreover, for each resource, a different middleware interface may be available, requiring different middleware client software. Once an application has been successfully started in a Jungle, another aspect that hinders usage of Jungle Computing Systems is the lack of connectivity between resources. 6.2 Jungle Computing Systems When grid computing was introduced over a decade ago, its foremost visionary aim was to provide efficient and transparent (i.e. easy-to-use) wall-socket computing over a distributed set of resources. Since then, many other distributed computing paradigms have been introduced, including peer-to-peer computing, volunteer computing and more recently cloud computing. These paradigms all share many of the goals of grid computing, eventually aiming to provide end-users with access to distributed resources (ultimately even at a world-wide scale) with as little effort as possible. These new distributed computing paradigms have led to a diverse collection of resources available to research scientists, which include stand-alone machines, cluster systems, grids, clouds, desktop grids, etc. With clusters, grids and clouds thus being equipped with multi-core processors and many-core add-ons, systems available to scientists are becoming increasingly hard to program and use. Despite the fact that the programming and efficient use of many-cores is known to be hard, this is not the only problem. With the increasing heterogeneity of the underlying hardware, the efficient mapping of computational problems onto the bare metal has become vastly more complex. Now more than ever, programmers must be aware of the potential for parallelism at all levels of granularity. But the problem is even more severe. Given the ever increasing desire for speed and scalability in many scientific research domains, the use of a single high-performance computing platform is often not sufficient. The need to access multiple platforms concurrently from within a single application often is due to the impossibility of reserving a sufficient number of compute nodes at once in a single multi-user system. Moreover, additional issues such as the distributed nature of end-users, simultaneously comprising any number of clusters, grids, clouds and other compute platforms. Summary For every new technology several research frontiers are to be exploited. So in Cloud computing. Topics of such a kind are effective data protection in Internet clouds, innovative applications on the clouds, data centers and the Internet of things (IoT). The material in the Chapter 1 deals with future trends of cloud computing, next-generation services related to cloud computing are explained. With the emergence of the mobile cloud, more and more productivity applications residing on mobile devices are developed. Chapter 2 details how mobile and cloud computing can be combined and also exploits its key requirements. It is time to design and build computing systems capable of running adjusting to different circumstances and using their resources to handle most efficiently the workloads we put upon them. These autonomic systems combined with cloud computing is called as Autonomic Cloud computing is discussed in Chapter 3. With Web 2.03.0, Internet multimedia is emerging as services. To provide rich services in media, multimedia computing became a promising technology to generate, edit, process, search media contents which includes audio, image, video and graphics. Chapter 4 presents principal concepts of multimedia cloud computing. Energy efficiency is an important aspect IT field. Energy consumption, resource utilization and performances of workloads in Cloud are dealt in Chapter 5. We need a platform which will need speed and scalability in everyday scientific practice and the resources employed by end-users are often more diverse than those contained in a single cluster, grid, or cloud system. Jungle Computing is explained in Chapter 6.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Self-Made Misery in Blakeââ¬â¢s London Essay -- Blakes London Essays
Self-Made Misery in Blakeââ¬â¢s Londonà à à à The poet William Blake paints a picture of the dirty, miserable streets of London in his poem, "London". He describes the wretched people at the bottom of the society, the chimney-sweeps, soldiers, and harlots. These people cry out from their pain and the injustices done to them. The entire poem centers around the wails of these people and what they have become due to wrongs done to them by the rest of society, primarily institutions such as the church and government. Are these people really wronged, however? The poem seems to suggest that the injustices they have been subjected to are of their own making. In Blake's poem he says that as he passes through London he sees a "mark in every face [he] meet[s]/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe." (3-4) He talks about how everywhere he hears cries of fear and suppression. The church seems to be ignoring the cry of the poor chimney-sweep in lines nine and ten. The soldier dies on the palace walls with a sigh. These are examples of the wretchedness of the lives that people lead. The central ide...
Saturday, January 11, 2020
The Buddhist Concepts of Rebirth and Release
Buddhism begins and ends with Buddhaââ¬â¢s enlightenment experience, for this the ultimate source of Buddhist teachings and there are a mean towards moral and spititual development culminating in a Buddha like experience. At his enlightenment, the Buddha gained direct knowledge of rebirth, karma, and the four holy truths (Harvey, 1990, p. 32).In the first public teaching (known as the ââ¬Å"turning of the wheel of dharmaâ⬠) Siddhartha Gautam, the historical Buddha is said to have set out the fundamentals of Buddhist doctrine and practice and then proceeded to outline the four noble truths- the kernels of Buddhist doctrine which are duhkha, trsna, nirvana and the way to achieve nirvana. Birth, old age, sickness and death which give duhkha (sadness) are unsatisfactory, and the cause of this unsatisfatoriness gives rise to craving (trsna). End to this unsatisfactory state of mind can be achieved through nirvana.The eight steps to the path of nirvana involve the development of a ppropriate view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and finally appropriate meditative concentration. This Buddhist doctrine constitutes the essence of the Buddhist world view and provides the basis and context of all subsequent Buddhist philosophical reflection (King, 1999, p. 76). After six years of meditation, Buddha attained spiritual enlightenment or nirvana. Budha preached for forty five years and died at the age of ninety years.Buddhist enlightenment is related to the attainment of the five supernatural powers, but their attainment is not, the Buddha concluded, in itself the realisation of enlightenment (Iizuka, 1995, p. 151). The action and interest of those who attain nirvana are completely detached from all images and sound. However, internally the mind is in a condition of most intense activity. Since the person has reached the fullest stretch of his mental and spiritual capacity, and at a level of highest transcendental consciousness, he is infini tely at peace with himself (Iizuka, 153).According to Buddha, duhkha happens everywhere all the time because nothing is perfect in this world. Every life has the kamma (force) from the personââ¬â¢s previous lives, and being reborn means that everyone always suffers from the force of their previous lives. This means no life is perfect and only when people have reached nirvana will they be able to overcome duhkha. Duhkha according to Buddha is caused by selfishness and all our sufferings are caused by this selfishness. The ultimate goal of the people should be to break from this never ending cycle of rebirth.By stopping greed and selfishness, one can break out of the rebirth cycle, which brings perfect freedom in the form of nirvana (Penney, p. 14). The Buddhist believe that the ultimate goal of meditation is nirvana, liberation from samsara, liberation from the ever repeated cycle of death and rebirth conditioned by Karma, in which all deluded beings are caught up. The doctrine of rebirth formed an essential part of the world view which the Buddha inherited. Thus, the Buddha accepted that the goal of all spiritual striving was nirvana, release from rebirth.Consequently, he interpreted his own experience of enlightenment as the attainment of that goal (Bucknell, and Fox, 1983). Rebirth in Buddhism is seen both as a process which takes place after death, and also as a process taking place during life. This means, we are constantly changing during life, ââ¬Ërebornââ¬â¢ as a ââ¬Ëdifferentââ¬â¢ person according to our mood, the task we are involved in, or the people we are relating to. We may experience ââ¬Ëheavenlyââ¬â¢ or hellish state of mind depending on how we act.According to Buddhist philosophy, it is reasonable to suppose that this process of change, determined by the nature of our actions, does not abruptly stop at death, but carries on (Harvey, p. 45). Our present form and circumstances of life are part of an uninterrupted series of se parate existences that streak back into the distance past and will continue on into the interminable future. A constant and uninterrupted flow of beings living in the different stratified levels and passing on from one to another was the very essence of the world view called samsara.The schemes of things, rewards and punishments, human conditions in high or low states, all had their reasons for existence in this cosmic flux of inter-connected events and states. The conclusive evidence of Sakyamuni Buddhaââ¬â¢s supreme enlightenment confirmed and endorsed the essential elements of the processes of samsara and rebirth (Cheetham, 1994, p. 9). Rebirth is a casual link between one life and the next, and not a soul reincarnating. Only a casual connection links one life to another, so our karmic accumulation conditions our next life.Contemplating rebirth helps us accept our own death without falling into the two extremes of eternalism or nihilism. The positive side of this rebirth conce pt is focussing an individualââ¬â¢s attention and energy to the present and make the most of oneââ¬â¢s life. This constructive aspect of Buddhism while makes one realise about the transient nature of life, give them scope for improving the same to be able to rise to a higher realm (Halls, 2003, p. 54 ). The realm a being is born is determined by karma which is a ââ¬Ëbeingsââ¬â¢ intentional actions of body, speech and mind, whatever is done, said or even just thought with intention or purpose.Though, rebirth in the lower realms is considered to be the result of relatively unwholesome or bad karma, rebirth in the higher realms is the result of relatively wholesome or good karma. Correspondingly, the lower the realm, the more unpleasant and unhappy is oneââ¬â¢s condition; the higher the realm the more pleasant, happy, tranquil and refined oneââ¬â¢s condition is. This rebirth hierarchy does not however constitute a simple ladder to climb and passing out at the top into nirvana or release.Nirvana or release may be obtained from any of the realms, from the human to the highest of the pure abodes and the four formless realms but not from the four lowest realms. Yet, rather than attaining nirvana or release, human beings generally rise and fall through the various realms which are precisely the nature of the samsara, i. e. wandering from life to life with no particular direction or purpose (Gethin, 1998, p. 119). The cycle of rebirth is thus seen as involving innumerable lives over vast stretches of time.If the cycle only involved human rebirths, it would have been difficult for a Buddhist to explain the population explosion. However, the cycle is seen to involve many other forms of life, such as animals so that readjustments between populations are made possible. This introduces the idea of different realms of rebirth. The first two of these realms are those of humans and animals kingdom. The latter includes sentient creatures as simple as insects. Plants are not included, although they are seen as having a very rudimentary consciousness, in the form of sensitivity to the touch.There are also realms of beings that are not normally visible, such as the realms of ââ¬Ëpetasââ¬â¢ or departed. As these are seen as having made of ââ¬Ësubtle mattersââ¬â¢, such a rebirth does not involve re-incarnation, that is getting a gross physical body again. In Buddhist painting of life cycle and rebirth, petas are seen as frustrated ghostly beings that frequent human world due to their strong earthly attachments (Harvey, 1990, p. 33). The Buddhist although believe in rebirth, do not accept that there is any substantial entity of self (atman) being reborn in this process.There is simply the process itself. Buddhist philosophical texts tend to represent rebirth using analogies of dynamic and ever changing processes, such as the flowing of a river or the flickering flame of a candle. Thus to talk about identity or the difference betwee n life in this Buddhist cycle of rebirth is inappropriate (King, 1999, p. 81). Nirvana is a difficult concept but traditional Buddhist understanding of Nirvana is quite clear. Literally nirvana means ââ¬Ëblowing outââ¬â¢ or ââ¬Ëextinguishingââ¬â¢, although Buddhist like to explain it as ââ¬Ëthe absence of cravingââ¬â¢.When a being reaches a state of nirvana, the defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion no longer arise in his or her mind, since they have been thoroughly rooted out. Yet, like the Buddha, any person who attains nirvana does not remain thereafter forever absorbed in some transcendental state of mind. On the contrary, he or she continues to live in this world, with the difference that his thoughts and deeds are completely free of the motivations of greed, aversion and delusion and motivated instead entirely by generosity, friendliness and wisdom.This condition of extinguishing the defilement can be termed nirvana with the remainder of life. Eventually , the reminder of life, like all beings, such a person must die. But unlike other beings, who have not experienced nirvana, he or she will not be reborn into some new life. Instead of being reborn, the person attains parinirvanas, which means that the five aggregates of physical and mental phenomena that constitute a being cease to occur (Gethin, 1998, p. 75). Persons with various deluded mind will not attain nirvana or release and these views are called prapanca.When one gains insight into and realises the dharmakaya, which in effect is the noble truth of cessation with respect to any or all form of prapanca, or self view, one attains the Buddha nature. It is the theories of self and attachment to self that bind us. Buddha nature thought, like the rest of Buddhism, aims to release us from this bondage. The Dharmakaya or Buddha nature, as the truth of cessation represents the active releasing from bondage that constitutes the Buddha way. Hence Buddha nature is not a substantive enti ty, not a self mind, but the cessation of all self views (King, 1991, p.95). The Buddhaââ¬â¢s noble eighth fold path to liberation from suffering emphasized practical discipline and direct experience to countermand the human tendency to theorize about spiritual life and reify rather than to encounter it directly. The eight member of the noble eighth-fold path termed ââ¬Å"samyak Samadhiâ⬠consists of eight stages of meditative practices known as jhana in Pali, for the purpose of transcending individuated consciousness and leading to enlightenment or nirvana (Whicher, 1998, P. 313).One of the central images of Buddhism is that of crossing the ocean of samsara and arriving at the other shore of nirvana or enlightenment, which is journey from the troubling world to the world as Buddha land. In Buddhism, this path or crossing to nirvana is the most difficult one, and there is no guarantee of completion of this path. The ocean of life is full of turbulence and this turbulent nat ure of lifeââ¬â¢s ocean is an intimate function of our own intentions or karma which we create through actions motivated by our likings and disliking.Since these troubles are our own creation, we must undo the trouble as well. Buddhist salvation is not breaking away from the world but about freeing all things by undoing the dualistic knot of our karma and the stranglehold of our habitually held likes and dislikes (Hershock, 1999, p. 111). In Buddhism, denial of the reality of the self in man is called absolute anatta. The anatta doctrine of the Buddhist philosophy has been from early times a pillar of Buddha dogma, together with all pervading impermanence and suffering.This doctrine is consistently propounded by orthodox Buddhists as one of the most outstanding characteristics of their system. The anatta doctrine raises many questions such as the reality of the moral agent and the existence and nature of moral responsibility, the continuity of individuality in the rebirth cycle, the nature of kamma, and the way it works and the relation of nirbana to the individual who attain it. However, Buddha refuses to answer the question whether the liberated man exists or does not exist after death.However, most of the Buddhist text implies that the liberated man is the personification of all reality (Ramon, 1980, p. 1-2). To conclude, the essence of life according to Buddhism is karma. Karma is called the law of cause and effect, which means every action we undertake creates a cause that will have in some point of time- even in rebirth have an effect. Our bad action in life will bring negative results and good actions will be rewarded with positive results. This is the ethical way how karma operates. This will keep in check our negative traits, and help us behave mindfully.The wheels of life in Buddhism signify through different symbolism the causes for this cycle of rebirth. Three animals at the center of the wheel symbolises endless cycles of sufferings with one ne gative action causing the next. The pig depicts the erroneous perception about the world and cock signifies ignorance about our own existence, giving rise to craving, lust, and desire. The ultimate negativism arising out of wrong perception of life is hatred and anger, symbolised in the wheel in the form of snake.The picture of Buddha at the top let of the picture symbolises liberation from ignorance, desire and hatred which are causes of all our sufferings. Thus liberation of the soul can be realised by following Buddha path and the ultimate attainment of nirvana (Halls, 2003, p. 50). References Bucknell, R. S and Fox, M. X (1983) The ââ¬Ëthree knowledgesââ¬â¢ of Buddhism: Implications of Buddhadasa's interpretation of rebirth, Religion, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 99-112 Cheetham, E (1994) Fundamentals of Mainstream Buddhism, Charles E Turtle company Inc, USAGethin, R (1998) The Foundations of Buddhism, Oxford University Press, NY Halls, G. F (2003) the Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Buddhist Wisdom, Octopus Publishing Groups Harvey, B. P (1990) An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, Cambridge University Press Hershock, P. D (1999) Reinventing the wheel: A Buddhist response to the information age, Sunny Series of Philosophy and Biology, Albany, State University of New York Press IIzuka, T (1995) The Quest for life: Zen in business and life, New York University Press.King, R (1999) Indian Philosophy: An introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, Edinburg University Press King, S. B (1991) Buddha Nature, Albany State University of New York Press Penney, S (1995) Buddhism, Core edition, Heinmann Educational Publishers, P. 48 Ramon, J. P (1980) Self and non-self in early Buddhism, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, N. Y. Whicher, Y (1998) The Integrity of Yoga Darsana: A reconsideration of the classical yoga, Sun series in religious studies, Albany, State University of New York Press
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)