Anon, can you define soul and then define self.
Tent,
That’s an incredibly weak cop-out and you know it. Starting with post-structuralism and then using Daoist language to justify post-structuralism is a very different thing from starting with Daoism and identifying elements that can be understood in a post-structuralist manner. Ames and Hall do the former, which is why they are so problematic.
Rainey,
One isn’t necessarily more desirable than the other, it really depends on what your end-goals are. For example, I vastly prefer American Buddhism that has been stripped of the supernatural elements commonly found in East Asia. A philosophy with religious elements as opposed to a religious cosmology that involves all sorts of ghosts, spirits and the like. My objection to Tent’s position is that he is cribbing from two philosophers with a well known agenda that can muddy and confuse things if that is your entry point. Especially since the language associated with post-structuralism is obscurantist by nature. Because of concepts like dependent origination, we can talk about the collapse of the signifier/signified and other binary opposites in Buddhism. But if someone wants to learn about Buddhism, the last place I’d start is the Buddhist notion of causality because that is esoteric as fuck. It’d be like if someone wanted to learn about Christianity so the first thing you explained was hypostasis and used that to justify Neoplatonism.
Some more on suffering and transcending self…
I made the observation that in eastern thought, there is no being, only becoming. This seems to be the pattern of everything in the universe, whether a mayfly that lives 3 days or a star that lives 3 billion years. All is transformation. If this is even partially true, then even our experiences are transitory and provisional. What is suffering is attempting to “fix” - set in concrete - the universe. If you will, this suggests that the world isn’t a “thing” out there with us passively observing. On the contrary, we create our world as transactional participants. Which leads to…
Desire, emotion, irrationality, finding meaning… Of course! We don’t stop or escape being human. But suffering disappears when we let go of the notion that there are unalterable permanent states of being - whether human or a piece of granite. We don’t enter into non-self, we simply put self in it’s proper place as a continual part of process, not the end result.
Do your best… What is best? Well, it’s all conditional, isn’t it? If I have the flu, my best may be making it to the toilet without filling my pants. 
But no matter the conditions and options available, it is about bringing my best efforts to the day. Nothing more, nothing less.
I like this. Then again, I’m a Whitehead fan, you know.
Wenren,
So answer my first question. Where is your “authentic” Daoism? What is your source? No matter what translation I’ve read, they all require the individual’s life experience to generate understanding of the rather terse language used in each chapter. The meaning isn’t in the words, the words prompt meaning only to the individual. In fact, it just might be the the daoists were the first post-structuralists?
You seem to be claiming that you know exactly what the daoists meant as compared to the post-structuralists. Enlighten us.
I’m a buddhist master because I sit on my ass trying not to think 8 hours a day.
Real Buddhas help people and live compassionately. The rest of it is bulk.
If you like Whitehead, and I love Whitehead, you should be down with Buddhism and Daoism. I’ve got problems with Whitehead as it applies to areas like cultural imperialism, but despite that Whitehead is one of the good ones. Not unproblematic. But one of the good ones.
I suppose when I it gets right down to it, I’m interested in Buddhism (and Taoism) precisely because of Whitehead’s process theology. But it’s a worldview that can be expanded to other theologies as well, notably Christianity. Let’s face it. There’s just not going to be a specific worldview that can encompass it all. This is why my question about authenticity. Interpretation of an original core belief (or teaching) may end up, in the long run, being just as important, if not more so, than the original.
At first I wasn’t sure how to interpret Tentative’s “becoming”, but in a later post he says more and I’d say, yeah, we’re in the same ballpark. I mean, consider the Buddhist “three marks of existence” - impermanence (anicca); suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha); non-self (anattā). Non-self is strongly related to impermanence (transformation), in obvious ways. I’d add that the emphasis on suffering isn’t necessarily to say that we are never happy, or that happiness is atypical - it’s that our lives, as sentient beings, are defined through suffering and happiness. Always trying to navigate towards happiness, suffering seems to be unavoidable. We can’t even sit still for a minute, because we have to move, we have to change something. Something isn’t right, and needs to be fixed. This going 'round and 'round is what “Samsara” is .
Non-self is more than just transformation though, it’s that there is nothing there, in itself, which is transforming. “Becoming” then shouldn’t imply becoming something; nonetheless, “becoming” is a good word in a way. The concept of “emptiness” (sunyata), for instance, is usually interpreted in too nihilistic a manner. It’s hard to translate sunyata well, because “emptiness”, for instance, doesn’t capture the “pregnant” quality suggested by sunyata. Emptiness is used in order to literally impart that persons are empty of selves; objects empty of inherent existence. “Emptiness” isn’t something different from, or somehow behind, “presence”. “Nothingness” has nothing to do with the existential version as far as I can tell. In Buddhism it is just an alternative translation of sunyata. Nothing exists in itself - everything is impermanent and interdependent.
I think both are roughly the same thing, or fall along a spectrum. A sense of self is the sense that there is something about you that is the real you, in contrast to other things about you that aren’t the real you. The soul is the formalized and glamorized version of the same idea - God made your soul (your soul - as if the self and the soul are at odds with each other!) and it is 100% unique and indestructible. Buddhism talks about persons as heaps, aggregates. There are five aggregates. As a sort of Humean exercise and then some, the self is looked for among these heaps, as the totality of the heaps, etc.
Excellent point. Knowing has an active aspect. I think many new Buddhists think that when they’ve quieted the mind through meditation, they have contacted reality as it is or something. I’m glad people are inspired by their sense of success, but I don’t think they realize how vast the Buddhist path is, that it’s pretty much endless. Buddhahood isn’t an ending, it’s a constant opening.
Becoming seems to make more sense to me. The concept of anatta is predicated, is it not, on the idea that nothing is the same from moment to moment. But does this take into account the infinite amount of moments between moments? I like becoming. But putting it all in the same ballpark is probably a good way to characterize the two trains of thought.
Anon, as a practicing Buddhist, I would be interested in your response to the following quote by Joseph Campbell:
“We’re in a freefall into the future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting perspective…Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.”
Let’s talk about Buddhism?
Wouldn’t it be more honest to say, - “Let’s talk about Suicide” ?
Why do you say that?
Because if the whole point of Buddhism is about escaping from the physical world or material reality, - why not just end your own existence altogether and remain internally consistent?
Great quote. What is a bodhisattva after all, if not someone who shifts perspective in exactly this way? I don’t just find myself here, bafflingly. I choose to be here, for the sake of others.
The point is to completely reject “Samsara”, which is a kind of vicious cycle created by ego-clinging. It would be a very dire error to equate Samsara with physical existence. Buddhism talks about the preciousness of human existence.
Rainey,
I’m a little confused. “Becoming” makes more sense than what?
And yes, many Buddhist philosophers have been critical of the idea of a moment as a discrete unit. Moments have beginnings, middles, and ends.
It is about escaping the mindset of materialism, not physically escaping a physical world.
If I understand the concept of anatta, the idea of a “self” is negated by the presumed fact that “selves” (or anything) change from one moment to the next. The self at moment 1 is no longer the same self at moment 2. Is that about right? The problem, though, as I see it, is that moments do not have beginnings, middles, or ends. There are an infinite amount of moments between theoretical moments 1 and 2. In a sense, there really aren’t even moments at all. What you have instead is a very fluid, continuous flow of time, and therefore a self is a very fluid, continuous concept that is making its way through that flow. This is roughly the idea of continuous becoming. Looking at things this way, it seems to me we have more difficulty negating the self.