By Genevieve Wong,

“I come from a very multireligious family. My family shares at least five different religions, though we are all Chinese.
All the members of my family enjoy freedom of religion. One of my grandfathers is Taoist while my other is Catholic. One of my grandmothers is Buddhist but we celebrate Christmas because all my other cousins are Christian. Also she crosses herself when she sees the Pope on TV.
The other grandmother is a firm believer of Confucian ideas on the average, Buddhist when she feels pretty good and atheist when she’s hit a rough edge. I don’t really consider her having a religion; it changes every day. My cousins went to a Jewish private school, but my uncle still feels the need to celebrate Christmas since he claims that he grew up with it. I had a uncle who had no religion but one day, after setting his eyes on a nice Catholic grave site, he quickly got baptized.
The next month he died. We had a Buddhist and a Catholic funeral for him, because we weren’t sure what to do.
Pretty confusing, right? But, it didn’t seem confusing to me when I had to choose my religion. After hearing about each of my relatives go on and on about their religions at our family feasts, I wanted to tell them mine just so that I could finally talk.
I was tired of the fact that many of my relatives were so last-minute on choosing a religion. Was death the only thing to remind them to become religious? To me, religion is a lifetime commitment. I can’t wait for my death to come rolling around before I have made up my mind. I finally an-nounced after much research that I would declare myself Buddhist.
My uncle’s reaction was, “You’re be-coming a vegetarian?” (Buddhists are not supposed to kill or eat meat, according to some.)
I never really thought about how I would overcome that obstacle. Talk to anyone that knows me and you’ll find out that I love food. I didn’t know if I could live without meat and fish and I began to have second thoughts. Then I spoke with my Buddhist grandmother and she told me that becoming vegetarian is not an immediate requirement. She said that it was okay if I was only vegetarian on certain holy days.
To be honest, there are practically no holidays. On a quick estimate, I would count one holy day a month which isn’t too much to ask. Besides, it is healthy to be vegetarian. Nowadays it’s considered fairly politically correct to do it.

Every being has the spirit of life
I’m not just mostly vegetarian because of my religion. I believe that all animals and humans should be treated equal, just like the religion states. As a big believer in reincarnation, who knows what my next life will be? Every living thing possesses the spirit of life. If I were reincarnated into a cow, I’d hope not to be on some guy’s plate for dinner. If I were a sinner then I would be a dog and if I were a good person I could even reach enlightenment and never become a human again.
The whole thought of going to Hell scares me. I have a huge phobia of organized churches. I know friends who belong to them and have tried to convert me and tried to scare me. It obviously didn’t work. I ended up converting myself. I don’t believe that God is going to send me to Hell. I think that God loves all of us and is trying to teach us a moral lesson by making us humans. There’s also nothing in the religion that says that I can’t believe in other gods.
As I was saying, trying to become enlightened is a big deal in Buddhism. Unlike Christianity or Judaism, there are no set rules that I need to specifically follow. The great thing about Buddhism is that I don’t need to go to temple everyday to prove my devoutness. Although there is no God in Buddhism, I choose to believe in God. As long as I believe in God and I am a good person, that’s all that matters.

Buddha was not a God
That is not to say that there are no rules of conduct I need to follow. You see, Buddha, who founded the religion, never proclaimed that he was a God. He was an oral teacher and left no written body of thought. His beliefs were later written down by followers. Buddhists worship him not as a God, but as a wise man who reached truth early in his life. Somehow, people think that I think he is God, which is a total misconception.
The purpose of Buddhism is to achieve enlightenment. To do this, one must follow the Four Noble Truths:
(1) Life is suffering. This is more than a mere recognition of the presence of suffering in existence. It is a statement that, in its very nature, human existence is essentially painful from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Even death brings no relief, for the Buddha accepted the Hindu idea of life as cyclical, with death leading to further rebirth.
(2) All suffering is caused by ignorance of the nature of reality and the craving, attachment and grasping that result from such ignorance.
(3) Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance and attachment.
(4) The path to the suppression of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path which consists of right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right mindedness and right contemplation. These eight are usually divided into three categories that form the cornerstone of the Buddhist faith: morality, wisdom and samadhi, or concentration.

Buddhism is a great moral code for me
I love my religion because it serves as a great moral code for me. Honestly, I don’t have these things memorized like the Ten Commandments. I looked them up. do have a small shrine at home. That makes it easier to observe my religion, since the closest temple to my house is 45 minutes away.
To make a long story short, I haven’t reached Nirvana, an enlightened state in which the fires of greed, hatred and ignorance have been quenched. I hope that I have time to do it, maybe 50 more years or so. If I can’t, I know that I’ll just need to go through the whole cycle again: rebirth. But that’s what life is about, learning from your mistakes and correcting them.”