🪆Why’s Buddhism So Negative?

I remember a Q&A session in Dhamma Earth with Bhante Mangalam, where a university student asked, “Why is Buddhism so negative and complicated? In other religions like Christianity, you believe in God, confess your sins, and everything is done.”

“We’re just describing the science that we can see.” I remember Bhante’s reply was something along those lines.

In many lineages of Buddhism, there are stages of meditation.

Often, the first key is to stabilize the mind in meditation without craving or attachment.

💡 My understanding is that without “stabilizing without craving,” it’s easy to create illusions that are not rooted in reality. I’ve heard many past-life regressions filled with grandiosity — “I was once a king! Now treat me as such.”

Then, after a few other series of practices, practitioners train the mind to trace back to earlier and earlier memories.

At some point, the mind can reach memories of our birth, and even how the previous lifetime ended.

From there, one begins to see how various outcomes in this life are often traced back to causes we planted in the past.

Anyone with enough time and patience can meditate and experience the above.

In that sense, it’s a science.

💡 The process above may take much longer for some than for others. Hence, there are various paths given by the Buddha in his teachings.

This stability of mind and the ability to see causation bring many beneficial impacts and consequences:

• We’ll stop engaging in activities that yield no benefit to our future.
• We’ll likely stop doing things we wouldn’t want done to us. If we see that when we steal, we are creating causes for our own belongings to be stolen — we stop. Period.
• Some war leaders believe they are maintaining sovereignty by waging war. When they realize they may be reborn as someone from the very race or country they’re destroying, it would likely make them think twice about their actions.

If they further see that they might not even be reborn as human in future lifetimes, their attachment to this current life would shift greatly — and there would naturally be a much stronger focus on benefiting others instead.