Killing the Buddha and all his saints being one example, there’s a more esoteric meaning of course, but to the average person who doesn’t understand the meaning behind it might be mortified hearing such.
It basically means that one’s own enlightenment shouldn’t be heavily relied on Buddha or all of his saints as enlightenment is a personal experience of the individual seeking it. One shouldn’t build up too much of a reliance on anything.
I had to think about it earlier because variations of the koan I have heard is Japanese but it first originated in China I think.
It is the most invigorating form of poetry that I know.
My first spiritual path was Zen. I would do a Shaolin kung fu set, then a chi kung set, then a standing meditation. The objective would be to merge my consciousness with reality beyond the distinction of being and nonbeing. It would often take me an hour, but it would work, I would eventually pass through a veil. Then I would stand for hours in that state. It would be pointless to try to describe the experience. But upon coming out of it all being I perceived would be… well even that is impossible to describe. Hence of course, the koan.
I think some here think Buddhism in terms of Schopenhauer, a form of exhaustion, indifference, dullness.
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Yes that has been my default view about it for a while. Although I am thankfully reminded by you of its far more active, intentional and energetic forms. Not merely sitting around thinking about how to not think about anything and dissolve into non-being; but as you mentioned elsewhere, taking one’s enlightenment into one’s own hands, and learning to see through the veils as you noted. In that sense it’s really just a way of doing philosophy. Maybe philosophy + meditation.
Yes, you cant predict when it occurs, but you can prepare the conditions for it - it strikes like lightning - Im quite convinced now that it only occurs on a ground of of fullness, and a perfect alignment of ones elements. I said elsewhere, if gold had a consciousness it would be beyond the veil. So full and perfect that it cant be conditioned by other elements. But thats just one take.
Dogen said: All things are rooted in themselves. Thats a nice way of meditation.
“Bitter–tasting ice —
Just enough to wet the throat
Of a sewer rat.”
(Basho)
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Well yes,
I was pleasantly surprised after working in a buddhist soup kitchen that they are no different from the rest of us and just as impure.
Geez who has time to do that! What a life you lead.
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I didn’t watch tv, no internet.
That is like not having a stereo in a car.
Reminds me when, my car stereo was stolen and I didnt replace it.
When I traded the car in, a couple of weeks later the sales guy called me and said did you take out the stereo?
I told him the story he didnt believe me kept saying how can you not have a stereo in the car?
I can relate to that!
Schopenhauer wasn’t exhausted or indifferent. His pessimism about the world was well founded. Although he preferred solitude, he was intellectually engaged, not indifferent. And his mind was as sharp as a razor.
I did not say the Schopenhauer was these things. I think he had a limited understanding of Buddhism. But yes it is to Bob in agreement with the OP, not to Schopenhauer, that the idea of Buddhism as exhaustion should be attributed. Still I do think Schopenhauer, as an introducer of Buddhism to Europe, is a cause of this misunderstanding.
Buddha’s wisdom is not merely a condemnation of life as suffering, but offers a lot to counteract this suffering. Striving, concentration, giving, appreciation (valuing) to name a few.
From his teaching, many life affirming schools have sprung. Among others, the school of kung fu to which I belong, Wing Chun - Eternal Spring.
Kindly explain why it should be attributed to Bob in agreement with the OP.
Striving, as in “the striving for distinction”?..
"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. "
No. See the eight fold path, it outlines his strivings.
Yeah but these are means to distinction! I can already hear you say. I won’t try to stop you from believing that.
I must say, you lost a lot of consistency since you abandoned outright nazism… I reread large parts of the thread Heil Hitler… there you still understood things like joy (describing joy as meaning to Veronica Franco) and the striving for the Superman as something beyond you. You understood life as the will to power as the will to flourishing… rather than as mere entropy (Satyr said what had been on my mind a long time)… you were a self consistent scholar… and to be that apparently had to do a lot of Jewhating and glorifying the color of your hair.
But then Lampert happened, I suppose… and everything became ‘esoteric’… paving the path for your promotion from Aryan Blond Beast to the Superman himself.
Yes, I thought you’d say that… But that misses the whole point of why I quoted that passage, which I explicitly pointed out in introducing it:
Bob and I then disagreed on that point:
Literally and metaphorically, the central sentence is this (with my emphasis):
“From the perspective of awakened experience, the latter deleterious processes are appreciated as ‘agitations’ of the mind.”
No, that isn’t what I was going to say. As the passage ‘my dharma is lust: […] my tantra is eros—by which I mean my Buddhist practice involves love or lust rather than hate or wrath’ already implied, my path is the Bodhisattva path rather than the Noble Eightfold Path.
Keep denying philosophical esotericism all you want.
“[The philosopher]—much like the Buddhist sage—becomes what he is only by undergoing a wrenching ‘turning around of the soul’ (in Plato’s phrase, Republic 521c), a kind of philosophic ‘conversion’ or ‘rebirth,’ by coming to see the unreal character of the goods on which all nonphilosophic lives are based. Thus, the philosophic life is ‘different’ from other lives, not because it is one alternative among a number of equally valid alternatives, or even because it represents a higher stage of development along the same, continuous path of life. It is the product of a radical break with nonphilosophic life, a discontinuity—a turning around of the soul. In the famous discussion of the cave in the Republic, Plato depicts the philosopher as living in an entirely different world from the nonphilosopher. Aristotle’s account is no less extreme, suggesting that the philosophic life stands to the nonphilosophic as the divine to the human. This is the classical theory of ‘the two lives’: the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the lives of theory and praxis.
Now, whether correct or incorrect, this strong dualism obviously has a number of important consequences concerning the communication of philosophical understanding, especially through writing.” (Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, page 72.)
Oh Okay. Thanks for clarifying that. Schopenhauer was not a Buddhist or a Vedantist in the traditional religious sense. He was deeply influenced by Indian philosophy, particularly the Upanishads but he developed his own philosophical system based on those influences. The thing is, as you are aware, everybody has their own take on Buddhism or Vedanta or Christianity or philosophy. Traditionally practitioners might subject themselves to an authority who would certify their experience and understanding of the teaching so to speak and that would give some credibility to their take on it. In modern times the problem of the unethical cult leader has been well documented. So, independent judgment is clearly inescapable. Think of it in terms of dasein as per Heidegger. Each of us has our own unique inescapable way of being in world. It is also the lens through which we see the world. This is our karma. Our thrown-ness. As consciousness itself, we are unattached to dasein. As such we can view dasein objectively as representation. The world as representation includes dasein. The Bhagavad Gita chapter 13:1 calls it “the knower of the field” and that knower is pure consciousness itself. In the Gita that knower is represented as Krishna.
Although I began studying eastern religions almost 60 years ago, I first felt as though I had entered Buddhist meditation in 1997 though the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh’s methodology which is still with me. Then too the Tao Te Ching is with me. Also the gateway of contemplative prayer of Christianity which I entered spontaneously early in life. I say “gateway” but really these are more ways of symbolizing what can’t be talked about so having rambled I’ll shut up.
Well, that’s the religion… Whether it be the Paramatman, as in Hinduism, or the Dharmakaya, as in Buddhism, it’s a belief and not knowledge. Philosophy can at most postulate an inferential ontology of daseins, consciousnesses, caves, Erotes, wills, valuings, etc.