I think Buddhism’s true esotericism is that it’s essentially nihilism with some edifying window-dressing (rebirth, merit and demerit, etc.).
All there is are empty phenomena. Compassion is only about furthering insight into emptiness. But even that is window-dressing, because enlightenment is no better than the lack thereof.
Everything is absolutely neutral. Death (lifelessness) is neutral because it’s the complete lack of consciousness and therefore both zero positivity and zero negativity. And life is neutral because it’s a perfectly equal “positive” positivity and negativity:
So why esotericism at all? Well, living beings cannot do nothing, and choosing either to enlighten or to benight would be a completely arbitrary choice. Therefore, enlightened beings do both at the same time: by teaching a teaching that enlightens some and benights others.
My ‘flavor’ is derived from the Lotus Sutra, and how it works on the most phenomenal level is to reboot the insight into how the ‘flow’ of images, evolved analogically with how optical dynamics were formed corresponding inversely to the decline in aesthetic vale, as a form of natural compensation for it’s devalued compendium.
Thea subsisting below that surface is the compendium of non accountability that forms its structural hierarchy over time, and recedes when certain limits are reached.
That this is what the power to will get’s it’s inversive dynamic, is like how a key can unlock the door through the lock.
Or something like , and below that are the living and the dead manifestations of innumerable Buddhas supporting this tremendous efficacy, that only one entity could deliver.
I’m no follower, e.g. I’ve never had a (real-life) guru or been part of a sangha or anything. But I’ve tended in the direction of Mahayana and, increasingly specific, Tibetan Vajrayana and Gelug.
I now see it has neither helped nor harmed me, or (rather) both equally.
That’s a provocative take—and a clever one, too. It seems to hinge on how one interprets core Buddhist doctrines like anatta (no-self), sunyata (emptiness), and the nature of dukkha (suffering). From a certain angle, especially through a Western philosophical lens, it’s not hard to see how someone might reduce it to nihilism: there’s no enduring self, everything is impermanent, desire is suffering—so what’s the point?
But calling it “nihilism with window-dressing” might oversimplify or even miss the experiential depth of the tradition. Buddhism doesn’t assert that nothing matters—it reorients what does matter. It’s more about letting go of false attachments and ego-constructions to uncover a kind of clarity or liberation. What looks like nihilism from the outside could, from the inside, feel like profound peace or liberation from delusion.
That said, your phrasing could spark some intense debates depending on the crowd. Are you coming at this from a philosophical critique, or were you feeling out how the tradition gets interpreted in modern or secular contexts?
I’d say I was rather coming at it from a philosophical critique.
Buddhism, if I may use such a blanket term, is deeply hierarchical in the sense that it distinguishes many levels of understanding and even of potential for understanding (if we discount the rebirth doctrine, according to which every living being is equally capable of understanding and will eventually gain perfect understanding). Gelug certainly does: the Dalai Lama distinguishes three basic levels, and all the ritual and superstition is only there for the lowest of these. I lay claim to a very advanced understanding, of which you’ll hardly find confirmation in what is communicated.
I do assert that nothing matters, period, but also that everything must and does matter to someone or other (some “self”). You speak of “false attachments”. Are there also true attachments, then? I assert that clarity or liberation, the feeling of profound peace or liberation from delusion, etc., only matter in contrast (and even contrast itself only matters in contrast). In my understanding, the following passage is crucial:
“Nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa) entails the foundational extinction or ‘blowing out’ of the processes of unwholesome desire, aversion, and delusion. From the perspective of awakened experience, the latter deleterious processes are appreciated as ‘agitations’ of the mind. In comparative contrast to such agitation, sukha and its cognates are at places in the Pali Canon used to characterize the calm of Nibbāna, the ‘Unconditioned,’ as a bliss”.
The eastern way to explain what happens when a human being reaches the age when his energy level doesn’t let him rebel anymore against all that frustrates him so he reasons himself into believing he has chosen to ‘let it all go’ while in fact he’s just unable to fight anymore?
All variations of ascetic philosophy spring from that… the aging and weakening of the body and the will to power.
Not true, it can happen to anybody, it is called self-annihilation (Fana’) in Sufism. As Rumi says, “die before you die” i.e. it is ego dissolution. True though, that people working 9 to 5 have no time for it, but there’s always weekends. I guess the drug fuelled weekends on psychedelics were the 80s; and 90s’ answer to it.
The Roman Empire was to politics what the age of the highest testosterone levels is to an aging male. And how rarely did an ascetic philosophy ever arise among a noble wealthy class (except for the faux stoic royalty who did it because it was fashionable)? Neva. Nietzsche knew this.
I’m afraid we are all self-lightening as we age but not for reasons we inagine.
At 40 or so many begin the long philosophical journey of becoming a pussy and finally become buddhists. Me included. See how i just found a way earlier today to make excuses for not avenging myself? That’s the buddha talkin, not promethean. That whole thing was a complex way of saying, “Don’t destroy something that disgusts you”.
What has become of us when we can no longer even enjoy revenge because of those goddamn stoic philosophers? Fuck man, whole empires were founded on revenge. That’s the very thing that keeps us going.
Yes, you’ve been saying this kind of thing for a while now. I disagree. I do think people tend to become less oblivious of death—of what death most probably actually entails—as they age. This heightened awareness then consciously or subconsciously causes a midlife crisis. But most people can never acknowledge death.
I, for one, have learned to accept it, even “embrace” it, though embracing it is no better than denying it to oneself. You’re full of shit if you think I’m a pussy. The acceptance of death does not make life easier. The only “reason” I’ve found to keep going (and suicide is equally irrational) is to strive for distinction out of cruelty towards others (and even toward myself as an other): cf. Dawn 113 and 30.
Wednesday, I broke off all non-essential contact with the sweet, beautiful, and spirited 20-year-old I’d fucked, because she wouldn’t have a relationship with me again for the sole reason that the age difference goes against social norms. Probably for the best, anyway: so-called romantic “love” is all about sex and (sex is all about) procreation; I don’t want to be attached or legally obligated to women and children; and I don’t even need other people for sex (I fucked the ZXY Meiki three times yesterday. Then again, I don’t have much else, except my—other!—workouts, my three work-from-home nightshifts, the things I watch online and the intensive video games I play, and philosophy of course).
My point was that you needn’t worry about my energy levels. And as for how to live, it’s delusion that keeps us going, whether it give rise to lust or to wrath. In fact, delusion gives rise to lust, and lust may give rise to wrath. And, like I wrote in late November, my dharma is lust:
‘Although, like I told her in a voice message I recorded in Kopenhagen, my tantra is eros—by which I mean my Buddhist practice involves love or lust rather than hate or wrath—and although, in Qabalistic terms as I interpret them, I’m thereby cast down into the lower triangle of the Tree of Life and not the middle triangle, I no longer think I’m cast down into that triangle’s central Sephira, let alone the one on the right side (the right-hand path), but the one on the left—literally and metaphorically the sinister one… In fact, I now associate that Sephira with introverted Thinking. Although formerly, I was thinking it might be the sphere of the wrath of lust (the flight response to the non-moral bad—phobia meaning fear as well as hate in ancient Greek), I now think it’s the sphere of the lust of wrath—the enjoyment of one’s hostility, as distinct from the middle triangle’s painful hostility, serious hostility; my hostility is playful!’
Well, you’re interpreting my word “delusion” in a quite specific way here. I think personhood is already a delusion (as in “the person experiencing the lust and wrath”). Still, we might indeed say that lust—and wrath, which follows from lust—is even more fundamental than that delusion:
‘If devotion to a God is good for us, there’s still a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. But what’s really the case is that there’s a need, a desire, an eros, and what’s “good” for this eros is devotion to the beautiful illusion of a good to pursue and a self to pursue it! For it’s only in the felicity this illusion provides that eros can become aware of itself, of its own “activity”[.]’
That young woman soon wants to spend the night with me again, by the way (really tonight, but that was not an option).
This thought caught me immediately upon reading the “whole self (personhood) is taken as a delusion” bit. You’re saying the lust and wrath is already an illusion… being part of the whole delusion of the person.
I say kinda in the same way as Descartes that you can’t even call it a delusion without first being a certainty and being able to imagine nothing is real. So, in fact, we may have the reverse; the only thing that isn’t a delusion is the personhood, the self, the primacy of those drives lust and wrath. Add to this the fact that we can’t know what not existing is like, and in the purest empirical sense, the only thing you can be certain of is that you are existing.
Here’s the basic axioms of the Berkeleyean egoist.
I am more certain of what i want than anything else. Even in thinking about anything at all, i am only certain that i want to know what is the case… not that i do.
I am not able to experience not existing, so it is illogical to say i don’t exist… or rather, me not existing is an incomprehensible affair to me. I am told i will cease to exist, but i have no idea what that means.
If i am only most certain of what i want, that i exist, and that i do not know nonexistence, these three essential points of experience can’t be explained to me as delusional in a meaningful way.
If all i know is that i know something and also not what it is like not to know something, then only what i know can exist. I see no other way around this, Sauwcrates. What say you?
That sounds a bit reductive. While it’s true that rituals serve pedagogical and emotional functions for beginners, they also encode symbolic truths, create conditions for meditation, express devotion, and serve as mnemonic or energetic tools in tantric contexts.
In tantric Vajrayana, rituals are not just for beginners—they’re sophisticated technologies of transformation.
Your reference to “Superstition” also carries a dismissive tone. From a secular point of view, yes, some rituals may appear superstitious. But within the tradition, they often have layers of meaning, including psychological and archetypal dimensions, especially when interpreted from a Jungian or right-hemisphere perspective.
I will interpret your words charitably, assuming they may be pointing to the paradox of insight: that once you deeply see, you also see that no conceptual communication fully conveys it. In that light, claiming “advanced understanding” is less about superiority and more about recognizing that realisation is not easily transferable through language. This echoes Zen koans or the cryptic aphorisms of Dzogchen: what’s seen can’t quite be said.
I assume you are making the point that meaning is not “out there” as a fixed property, but is always relational—to a subject, to a context, to a frame. In McGilchrist’s terms, this is right-hemisphere insight: the primacy of context and lived experience over abstraction.
Your question, “Are there also true attachments?” is a classic in Buddhist ethics. In Mahayāna, especially the bodhisattva ideal, there is room for what we might call skilful attachment—like compassion, love, or devotion—as means on the path. The Zen image is: use the raft to cross the river, but don’t carry it on your back afterward.
Your statement, “Liberation only matters in contrast…” touches on a structural paradox: the very thing we seek must, for us to seek it, be in contrast to something else—but in itself, it transcends all contrast.
The quote on Nibbāna as “extinction of agitations…” is well put and faithful to the Pali Canon’s nuanced take on Nibbāna. It’s not a “thing” but a cessation, an absence—like a fire going out because the fuel is gone. The use of sukha in reference to Nibbāna is subtle—it isn’t “pleasure” in a hedonic sense, but a deep, unshakeable ease or contentment, not conditioned by circumstances. That makes it beyond contrast, though it’s often described using contrast for the sake of communication.
You seem to be dancing with the paradoxes of meaning and liberation:
You question whether anything can ultimately matter yet affirm that things always matter to someone—thus rooting meaning in relation, not essence.
You hint that attachment may not always be false—but perhaps provisional, or contextually true.
You recognize that awakening, while ultimately beyond contrast, requires contrast in its journey.
And you see Nibbāna not as a metaphysical “thing,” but as a kind of peace through absence—which echoes deeply with the right-hemisphere’s receptive mode.
“Vanished the veils of light and shade,
Lifted every vapor of sorrow,
Sailed away all dawns of fleeting joy,
Gone the dim sensory mirage.
Love, hate, health, disease, life, death,
Perished these false shadows on the screen of duality.
Waves of laughter, scyllas of sarcasm, melancholic whirlpools,
Melting in the vast sea of bliss.
The storm of maya stilled
By magic wand of intuition deep.
The universe, forgotten dream, subconsciously lurks,
Ready to invade my newly wakened memory divine.
I live without the cosmic shadow,
But it is not, bereft of me;
As the sea exists without the waves,
But they breathe not without the sea.
Dreams, wakings, states of deep turiya, sleep;
Present, past, future, no more for me,
But ever-present, all-flowing I, I, everywhere.
Planets, stars, stardust, earth,
Volcanic bursts of doomsday cataclysms,
Creation’s molding furnace,
Glaciers of silent x-rays, burning electron floods,
Thoughts of all men, past, present, to come,
Every blade of grass, myself, mankind,
Each particle of universal dust,
Anger, greed, good, bad, salvation, lust,
I swallowed, transmuted all
Into a vast ocean of blood of my own one Being!
Smoldering joy, oft-puffed by meditation,
Blinding my tearful eyes,
Burst into immortal flames of bliss,
Consumed my tears, my frame, my all.
Thou art I, I am Thou,
Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!
Tranquilled, unbroken thrill, eternally living, ever new peace!
Enjoyable beyond imagination of expectancy, samadhi bliss!
Not a mental chloroform
Or unconscious state without wilful return, Samadhi but extends my conscious realm
Beyond limits of the mortal frame
To farthest boundary of eternity
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in me.
The sparrow, each grain of sand, fall not without my sight.
All space like an iceberg floats within my mental sea.
Colossal Container, I, of all things made.
By deeper, longer, thirsty, guru-given meditation
Comes this celestial samadhi.
Mobile murmurs of atoms are heard,
The dark earth, mountains, vales, lo! molten liquid!
Flowing seas change into vapors of nebulae! Aum blows upon vapors, opening wondrously their veils,
Oceans stand revealed, shining electrons,
Till, at last sound of the cosmic drum,**
Vanish the grosser lights into eternal rays
Of all-pervading bliss.
From joy I came, for joy I live, in sacred joy I melt.
Ocean of mind, I drink all Creation’s waves.
Four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light,
Lift aright.
Myself, in everything, enters the Great Myself.
Gone forever, fitful, flickering shadows of mortal memory.
Spotless is my mental sky, below, ahead, and high above.
Eternity and I, one united ray.
A tiny bubble of laughter, I
Am become the Sea of Mirth Itself.”
Note this part:
The storm of maya stilled
By magic wand of intuition deep.
It is not extinguished by exhaustion, it is not a mere old mans fatigue, it is the domination of illusion by the cosmic strength of truth. A mastery (for that is what it is, not an exhaustion, nor an intellectual model) very few men ever attain.
Yogananda’s death illustrates his perfect mastery;
“It is not extinguished by exhaustion, it is not a mere old mans fatigue, it is the domination of illusion by the cosmic strength of truth”
Here’s the thing, though. Unless a buddhist could argue that unless he wills his own asceticism, he will live, suffer, and die again - in which case self denial, resignation, is a win - he has no reason not to indulge in life this time around. What would he lose?
So, in order to make sense of the rationality of asceticism (in buddha’s case) he has to be implying that unless he does, he’s more fucked in the long run. So he engages his will to deny his will to save him the trouble of having to do it again.
On the other hand, if buddha just said “life is a meaningless illusion but it makes no sense not to induldge in it unless that indulgence gets me into karmic trouble”, that would have been more reasonable.
