Why People Are Attracted to Buddhism

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Why are more people turning to Buddhism in our modern times? Of course, there’s a great variety of reasons, because there’s a great variety of people and everybody’s an individual, but I think that most people nowadays are turning to Buddhism because they recognize that their lives have more and more problems.

Types of Problems That People Suffer from Today

There are some problems that have been going on for as long as there have been people on this planet, and probably even before that, with animals before there were humans: the problems of relating to each other, problems that come up from anger, from fights, from disputes. These are problems that everybody has been facing almost forever, so nothing special about what you or I experience now. And then, of course, there are more recent problems that just make things even more difficult, like economic problems and problems of wars and so on. So people are feeling these problems more and more. And they are not finding solutions for them, how to deal with them on a personal level, particularly in terms of their emotions, their minds. They’re not finding solutions for these in what is available to them already.

But one of the wonderful developments of the modern time is communication, particularly in what we now call the Information Age, and even more with the Age of Social Media. So that means that more and more information is available to us about many alternative systems. And many great Buddhist leaders, like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, have been travelling around the world. And many people have witnessed, seen for themselves with their own eyes, those who have managed to develop themselves to an extraordinary level so that they are able to have a peaceful, calm, loving mind in the face of some of the most difficult situations, like losing your country. So this has added the quality of inspiration from a living person, which is very important in addition to just information that we can get on the Internet or in books.

So people turn to Buddhism primarily because they are looking for some solution to problems that they face and they are hopeful that Buddhism will be able to offer some way to deal with life. This is the case whether Buddhism is something quite foreign to their society or it might be a traditional system of your people.

Original Audio from the Seminar

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