Meditating with Descartes
Karen Parham asks how close Western philosophy gets to Buddhism.
Same with Buddha and Buddhism. Some people have a conscious understanding of them, others do not. And, from my frame of mind [rooted in dasein], some have one conscious understanding of them while others have a different understanding of them. So how, for all practical purposes, does that work in regard to karma, enlightenment, reincarnation and Nirvana? If there is no innate idea linking the teachings of Gautama Buddha to the billions of mere mortals around the globe, how would it not be the responsibility of practicing Buddhists to at least take their own assessment out into the world and to proselytize.
After all, if someone is not even aware of Buddha and his teachings, how can they possibly attain either enlightenment on this side of the grave or immortality [however that works] on the other side of the grave?
Of course from my frame of mind, this changes very little. We can only project into God that which is derived from our own minds. In other words, that which is derived from our own minds. And how is that not rooted in dasein rooted out in a particular world understood from a particular point of view? Whether you come at God or Buddha inductively or deductively, from the East or from the West, there is still the part where your own unique accumulation of experiences, relationships and access to ideas predispose you to embody one subjective/subjunctive account rather than another. And, to my knowledge, no one able to pin down the optimal account.
Until there is a way to demonstrate both intellectually and empirically the existence of an entity that transcends both the minds and the lives of mere mortals, it really comes down to any particular existential leap that any particular one of us are able or not able to make.
More or less blindly as they say.