I don't think so. Not in any simplistic sense. It's a more complex question than it appears to be.

ask 180 Proof about how pessimism is the only realistic attitude to adopt.
— TheMadFool

Dear 180 Proof,

How is pessimism the only realistic attitude to adopt? — praxis

@TheMadFool

Looks like either 180 has chosen not to be your personal secretary or you should fire him for being an inattentive minion. Whatever the case, no one can make a successful argument for you that the Four Nobel Truths are factual. In fact, the genius of them is in their fallacious expediency. If a potential follower can deny their own reason and experience right off the bat, and accept this doctrine on faith from an authority, then the rest of the Kool-Aid will be easy to swallow.

Do you consider other alternatives? It's still possible that religion was based on a philosophy for example. Secular Buddhism is a good argument in favor of this idea. All books were written long after Buddha's death after all.

One may think of a physical theory and it might not gel right, it might feel off. But it might be the truth of what is our there for the reason that our minds might not be naturally fit for full scientific exploration

What I'm saying is that you have to realize what you want to live for. To live for the feverish will cause more suffering than enjoyment but the moments of passion are fully real as they last. To be a Buddhist is not as spectacular but there is less suffering. You have to know what you live for

Surely that would vary with each individual. Not having experienced what others do, and having only anecdotal evidence of a vanishingly tiny fraction of humanity's experience, how could you possibly justify such a claim? — Janus

How is pessimism the only realistic attitude to adopt? — praxis

Pessimist or Realist? — Roy Davies

To the three of you: I'll attempt a simple proof of why we should be pessimists and why life is suffering.

Happiness is, by and large, associated with order and sorrow with chaos.

The entire enterprise of building a society that's conducive to happiness is centered around the notion harmony - the smooth interaction between the various parts of the social machine that ensures, if not anything else, the optimum environment for happiness to take root and thrive.

In the event of disharmony, happiness is the first casualty then. Everyone has seen on TV what happens when law and order breaks down - neither our lives nor our property are safe. Note that chaos needn't be as extreme as a riot - it can take the simpler but still painful form of breaking your favorite cup, losing your wallet, having to spend the day with a person you don't like, etc.

Entropy says that disorder is always more likely than order for the simple reason that there are more ways to be disordered than ordered - there are more ways your favorite cup can break and there's only one way it can stay whole.

Ergo, it must be that, on average, we suffer more than enjoy in life. At the very least, a great deal of energy must be expended to maintain order, our preferred state, and that's exhausting work.

Given the above, we should expect things to go wrong more often than go right. Hence, pessimism is the most realistic attitude to life.

While not claiming to speak for any Buddhist....

My take is that Buddhism is an experience which transcends philosophy and religion. The philosophy and religion parts are props people are using to try to talk themselves in to the experience.

The same might be said for Christianity for example. Jesus said, "Die to be reborn". Die is a verb which suggests an act of surrender. An act. An experience. All the other junk piled on top of that is supposed to help people make their way to the experience, though I'm guessing the piled on junk is as much obstacle as asset. — Hippyhead

It's possible that the objective of Buddhism is not just plain old comprehension of logical arguments like in math or science. From my encounters with Buddhism I sense it has cabalistic overtones.



The practice of Buddhism can find appeal only when its core tenets make sense. At least that's how Buddhism is advertised - as a completely rational philosophy/religion based on hard facts.

Do you consider other alternatives? It's still possible that religion was based on a philosophy for example. Secular Buddhism is a good argument in favor of this idea. All books were written long after Buddha's death after all. — Skeptic

I want to investigate the philosophical aspects of religions. Buddhism seems to stick out like a sore thumb on that score.

To the three of you: I'll attempt a simple proof of why we should be pessimists and why life is suffering. — TheMadFool

Is this you summarizing the Buddhist argument? To me it doesn't sound like Buddhism. Buddhism may or may not be correct. I haven't argued that it is wrong. It also seems like you are saying that Buddhism is pessimistic and that is not what most Buddhists think. And there are many presentations on line by Buddhists for what this is not a correct interpretation. In some ways it is wildly optimistic.

The practice of Buddhism can find appeal only when its core tenets make sense. At least that's how Buddhism is advertised - as a completely rational philosophy/religion based on hard facts. — TheMadFool

That's how some people advertise it, trying to draw a distinction, generally in the West, between Buddhism and other religions. But there is, as I said before, a very strong push for one to engage in practices and that this should, in the religion, dominate over rational thinking, argument, thinking in general, emoting and following desires. The idea is to set aside cognitive habits. Philosophical positions center themselves in thoughts, expect criticisma and active on verbal levels. (of course people check their experience within philosophical interactions, but the extreme emphasis is on words, dialogue, essays, argument, criticism, and verbal thinking. Buddhism does present philosophical positions. We don't have a binary or trinary choice. There is a Buddhist philosophy and sets of philosophical texts. But I can't see a reason to make this the primary descriptive word for Buddhism, GIVEN much of what it presents as facts: that the mind is problematic, the things it suggests one focus one's time on, the actual behavior of the Buddha, the behavior or the experts (as decided in the various branches) and the admonitions about what one should and should not do and what to prioritize in Buddhism if one wants to succeed. And all that is radically different from philosophical interaction. There are also implict and explicit criticisms in Buddhisms of folk and other philosophies of language. And that one should not get fastened onto what is a fact or not. Not that the word fact is tossed around much in Buddhism I don't think.

Philosophies tend to be about reality, about what is. Here we have a program of activity and one that runs in parallel to normal society, with the goals of changing things like the structure of perception, the way other parts of the brain relate to the limbic system, to states of mind not centered in words. And once one is trying to be an expert in Buddhism, one engages in non-verbal activities with specific practices for very large periods of time. Try to be an expert in Hegelian philosohpy, or Western philosophy,or existentialism or.....pretty much any philosophy, and you are engaged in mental verbal activities, with a strong focus on critical analysis, mental verbal processes, the trying to get a grasp, through mental paraphrase on concepts the philosopher has come up with, argument, counterargument....thinking, thinking, thinking........Which is why, despite my acknolwedging that Buddhism also includes a philosophy, it makes much more sense to say it is a set of practices that also have a supportive philosophy, and a religion.

The mind is problematic, despite what Descartes or Aquinas thought. Thought itself can be the problem

I think it’s closest to a psychology book that is so successful that people started chanting it. Most Buddhist scriptures are arguments based in experience. Someone experiences anger then tries to figure out what caused it. Then he proposes a hypothesis on how to fix it. Buddhism is the Newtonian mechanics of not suffering. It’s not the first but it is the most successful. The main point of Buddhism is that belief in it is never dogmatic. There is a saying in Buddhist (or zen? I don’t remember) circles “If you see the Buddha by the road, shoot him” which just basically means don’t just follow authorities blindly.

Buddhism is a theory among many. Hinduism, Zen, Daoism are the other major theories in this “field”. I find it interesting though that nothing like this is in the west. We are just beginning to make something like it with psychology and biology recently. The closest western field to Buddhism and Co is I think psychoanalysis. Both try to describe what goes on in the mind starting from the mind, rather than to try doing it starting from how the world works.

Well Schopenhauer was from the West and he proposed that Spinoza was correct all along, although the former thought a way to eternal existence is possible. Schopenhauer's psychology lesson started with explaining that matter itself is incorpereal

Happiness is, by and large, associated with order and sorrow with chaos. — TheMadFool

Perhaps a tangent, but it depends on the order and also the degree. Chaos is a generally a pejorative term and order generally is considered a positive term, especially with no context. But spontenaity, surprises, new experiences, diversity, non-repetitiveness, variation could all be called chaos by someone who wants everything to be strictly patterned with no unexpected experiences. And most dystopias have as their central problem too much order. In fact the move from rigid societies, where one was born into both permanent class and profession, where there was a tiny range of behavioral options and tremendous pressure to conform, to modern society with much less order, more variation, wider ranges of behavioral options, is often seen as positive. That we are moving in a direction towards something more life enhancing. We wants elements of expected and repeated events and behavior AND we want variation, change, surprises.

Is this you summarizing the Buddhist argument? — Coben

More or less, yes. Pessimism, in fact it's actually being realistic, is an underlying message in Buddhism. All philosophies that recommend making changes internally, within one's self, rather than externally, in the world outside, smack of a tacit admission that we really can't control the world we live in - basically adapt or die seems to be the motto prescribed.

I'm not denying that Buddhism has features like praying, rituals, gods, views on moral matters, etc., practices, that lend it a religious character but all these are extraneous to its core doctrines and have come about through its interactions with other religions, mainly Hinduism as far as I can tell. I stressed on the existence of logical arguments in Buddhist scripture because no religion can make a similar claim. In Abrahamic religions if there's an argument in them at all it's one of appeal to the authority of a supreme being viz. god and we all know the bad rep this particular kind of argument has. Though the Buddha is revered, even worshipped as a god, Buddhism's appeal does not lie in his person as an infallible perfect being but in the strength of his arguments.

Read below:

There is a saying in Buddhist (or zen? I don’t remember) circles “If you see the Buddha by the road, shoot him” which just basically means don’t just follow authorities blindly. — khaled

Thanks Khaled.

The closest western field to Buddhism and Co is I think psychoanalysis. Both try to describe what goes on in the mind starting from the mind, rather than to try doing it starting from how the world works. — khaled

Interesting. I beg to differ though. As I said above, the existing dynamics of mind-world interactions has one rule - adapt (to the world) or die. The mind, capable of imagining a better arrangement with the world, must eventually learn that the world isn't a person in which case we could negotiate the terms of our relationship with it. I drew some comfort initially that though we can't bargain for a good deal, reality is, all said and done, indifferent to our plight but that isn't true. Reality, entropy given due consideration, actually stacks the odds against us, making it almost a foregone conclusion that life will not be as enjoyable an experience as one would've liked or hoped. To make the long story short, Buddhism's journey begins outside - the world - and ends inside - the mind.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, seems to be about how our minds are constructed - what features it possesses, how they interact with the world and shape our attitude, mood, and behavior. There's a superficial resemblance with Buddhism given that both are about how well our minds are adapted to the world but the difference begins to show in the way the problem is dealt with.

In psychoanalytics, people are treated like animals and are trained like them using positive and negative reinforcement and other tricks of the trade. In Buddhism a person's higher faculty - reason - is engaged, arguments are presented for examination, and people are encouraged to think and decide how to behave rather than practise a particular behavior until it becomes a habit like in psychoanalytics.

Perhaps a tangent, but it depends on the order and also the degree. Chaos is a generally a pejorative term and order generally is considered a positive term, especially with no context. But spontenaity, surprises, new experiences, diversity, non-repetitiveness, variation could all be called chaos by someone who wants everything to be strictly patterned with no unexpected experiences. And most dystopias have as their central problem too much order. In fact the move from rigid societies, where one was born into both permanent class and profession, where there was a tiny range of behavioral options and tremendous pressure to conform, to modern society with much less order, more variation, wider ranges of behavioral options, is often seen as positive. That we are moving in a direction towards something more life enhancing. We wants elements of expected and repeated events and behavior AND we want variation, change, surprises. — Coben

You're probably conflating variety with chaos. The similarity is that in both cases there are more options (this you saw) but the difference is that in chaos all options are unacceptable while in variety they are (this you overlooked).

Reality, entropy given due consideration, actually stacks the odds against us, making it almost a foregone conclusion that life will not be as enjoyable an experience as one would've liked or hoped.. — TheMadFool

Close enough to the first noble truth (life sucks). The point is though that in Western philosophy there have been much fewer explorations about what to do about this internally. The closest western philosophcal doctrine to buddhism that I can think of is stiocism. Stoicism actually tries to do the same thing so now that I think about it maybe IT was the first rather than psychoanalysis but phsychoanalysis is definitely closer in terms of "methodology". It tries to figure out what to do about being in such a terrible world in terms of what you should do with your mind.

Other than that the west seems to have largely tried to deal with this issue by changing the world itself. That is the key. The East tries to deal with this problem by configuring our minds so as to deal with it best. Just look at the second noble truth, to the East the problem is in the mind not the world. The West tries to deal with the problem by "fixing" the world (results vary from crusades to scientific revolution, handle with care).

I think that's part of the reason why the scientific revolution showing how insignificant we are, and the weakening of the belief in God caused such a massive void in the West which existentialists, absurdists and Co tried to fix. You hardly hear of existentialism in the East. That's because in The East there was no belief that the world needs to be fixed for us to be able to live in it, no need for mankind to be the centrepiece of the world for it to be worth it, it was always believed that the world is fine and we should just fix ourselves to deal with it. Notice how most Eastern religions don't have any sort of afterlife or "great quest" or purpose or destination baked in unlike most Western religions and myths. You can argue Nirvana is that but a Buddhist will never tell you "You must seek Nirvana". Nirvana is a state of enlightenment but there is no pressure to get there unless one personally thinks it's worth it. Unlike heaven where the only altenative is eternal damnation.

In psychoanalytics, people are treated like animals and are trained like them using positive and negative reinforcement and other tricks of the trade. In Buddhism a person's higher faculty - reason - is tapped, arguments are presented for examination, and people are encouraged to think and decide how to behave — TheMadFool

I don't think it's that simple. If I remember correctly reinforcement learning came way after psychoanalysis. At least I don't think it's about training people like animals anymore rather it is about explaining to them how their minds worked, and what they should do to deal with whatever issue they are having. For Buddhism though this is just false:

rather than practise a particular behavior until it becomes a habit like in psychoanalytics. — TheMadFool

Medidation. Meditation in Buddhism is either perscribed as medicine or is used in order for one to make their own conclusions. There are meditations designed to alleviate stress, deal with insecurities about X or Y, etc. The main thing a Buddhist hopes to do by meditating is to understand how his/her own mind is constructed. But as he/she understands more about the mind they become able to perscribe people certain meditations that help alleviate their stress just like a personal trainer perscribes a workout schedule. It will work regardless of whether or not you understand why.

That's the same as psychoanalysts giving people certain habits. They have enough of an understanding about how the mind works to give them a habit that will help them regardless of their own understanding of themselves.

The main difference is that a psychoanalyst is primarily a doctor while a Buddhist is primarily a scholar who knows enough to likely be able to help if asked. And psychoanalysts mainly get their knowledge from what the previous generation has found while Buddhists try to come to their own conclusions.

Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy?

I think it depends on what side of the Lotus Flower you find yourself sitting on.

It can be both, and it can be neither, at the same time and in the same respect.

Buddhism IS like that.

Or maybe I'm mixin' it up with Zenism. Or Jesusism.

Buddhism doctors us out of the idea that we have to die to find "God" in the ultimate way

Stoicism — khaled

I think stoicism is missing something viz. doctrine of impermanence and thus, in a way, fails at the get go. The legendary stoic calm doesn't arise from understanding a cold hard fact of reality but is rather a policy based on the impression that emotions are destructive. I have no clue why they thought that.

East [and West] — khaled

By my reckoning, the west got it right. We can tinker around, add/delete features of our world to suit our needs. I might even go so far as to say that the first noble truth - that life is suffering - will probably become untenable at some point in the distant future considering the pace of medical and technological progress. We might find a way to defeat entropy. You never know.

That said, even if we were to eventually bend nature to our will and create paradise on earth it still feels wrong to completely indulge our senses. Perhaps this felt need to control our passions needs to be put under the microscope.

massive void — khaled

I've heard that a lot about this so-called "void" but how about looking at the whole issue a little differently. I personally feel that religions, the ones that are around, are, at their core, a business deal - you purchase a ticket to paradise with good deeds. In the future, once utopia becomes a reality, this product can be made available in the market for real. In other words, what religion offers without a guarantee can be sold as actual goods with a warranty to boot. It seems therefore that the so-called "void" left by religion's departure from our lives can actually be dealt with in a satisfactory manner without abandoning the principle therein contained.

At least I don't think it's about training people like animals anymore rather it is about explaining to them how their minds worked, and what they should do to deal with whatever issue they are having. — khaled

I'm not sure about this myself. It was just a shot in the dark but I sense that I haven't strayed too far from the truth about psychoanalytics. After all, the subject seems to isolate the mind for study, disassembling it as it were, something not that different from putting animals in a lab and learning how their minds work.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is about how the world works and making necessary adjustments to our minds so that our lives don't end up being a tale of tears [of the pointless kind].

All in all, psychoanlytics seems to be about mind manipulation but Buddhism is about understanding the world we live in.

Medidation — khaled

Meditation, to my reckoning, only serves to calm our minds to the point where it becomes possible to reflect deeply about the nature of reality, a prerequisite if one is to gain any degree of understanding on the matter. It's quite different from giving a dog a treat everytime it does what you want it to. If a dog starts meditating it would be the first step it takes to an understanding of its behavior - what role the dog-treat has in shaping its habits and so on.

Buddhism seems to stick out like a sore thumb on that score. — TheMadFool

You may be interested in Leo Tolstoy's work then. He was able to find quite solid philosophical foundation behind the Christianity. He even wrote his own translation of the Bible to show possible original philosophical context of the text.

In fact, life is not chaos and disharmony. It requires order and chaos.

The main point of Buddhism is that belief in it is never dogmatic. — khaled

Granted I’m no fan of dogma but the cessation of suffer’n is a bit more appealing, to me.

There is a saying in Buddhist (or zen? I don’t remember) circles “If you see the Buddha by the road, shoot him” which just basically means don’t just follow authorities blindly. — khaled

What religion doesn’t have this take it or leave it attitude? If you decide to walk away from Christianity will they nail you to a cross or something? In any case, you're mixing metaphors, the 'kill the Buddha' thing is about transcending intellection and in that way very zen.

needs to be put under the microscope. — TheMadFool

The best aid to meditation for me has been cigarettes. There is no evidence it causes cancer. There could easily be a gene that makes certain people smoke which also causes the cancer. Tobacco has been used as medicine since ancient times. It's a myth that it smells too. What passes for "science" these days is not much of anything. If you have a theory that they think is 60 percent likely to be true, then toss it out for an 80 percent, the 80 percent really isn't 80 percent because the 60 percent wasn't true. I think scientists misuse statistics in attempts to prove their own theories without taking into account a holistic understanding of all scientific studies in human history

actually contain logical arguments aimed at proving Buddhist doctrines — TheMadFool

Buddhism seems to be both a Religion for the masses, and a Philosophy of life for the few. Admonished by his critique of their current decadent society, his earliest followers (Bikkhu) simply withdrew from society to become navel-gazing monks. But over time, some of his disciples became evangelical, and spread the "word" throughout Asia. And that "word" eventually became doctrine and dogma. The Buddha's simple rules for living a good life eventually became entangled with local traditional religious notions, deities, and demons. Thus, a philosophy of individual morality evolved into formalized religious Faith for the general population.

Christianity also evolved in a similar manner. Jesus preached revival of defunct Jewish traditions & morality to his own people. His "sermon on the mount" teachings were primarily philosophical, in that they were aimed at personal improvement. But again, his disciples generalized his Jewish message of moral redemption, and adapted them to the the religious traditions of Gentiles. The, perhaps unintended, result of such evangelism was to convert his simple moral rules, tailored to a specific vernacular, into a worldwide religious dogma. In the process of institutionalizing Jesus' uplifting message for his own downtrodden people, he was transformed (apotheosis) from a man into a god --- suitable for a world-dominating political religion.

In his recent book, Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright notes that the Buddhist message of personal salvation from suffering has now morphed back into a personal philosophy of self-improvement. In its Westernized form, Buddhism now seems to be similar to the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks. It doesn't promise salvation in an afterlife, but merely peace of mind in the midst of the world's evils and suffering. The key to his message was self-reliance, instead of praying to invisible gods for supernatural succor. Of course, the Buddha didn't present syllogistic arguments in the Greek manner of philosophy, but Wright traces the logic of his aphoristic teachings to our modern understanding of human psychology. The rationale of his methods is reflected in the modern secular Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. :smile:


Buddhism Is Logical : This book is not recommending conversion to one of the various Asian religions that evolved from the Buddha’s teachings. Instead, he sees secular Meditation as a viable technology for taking command of our lives, and for avoiding or alleviating the psychological suffering — mostly Freudian neuroses — that plague many people today. Wright sees a need for such ancient techniques, even in the light of the European Enlightenment, which was focused mainly on controlling the outer natural world, but not on mastering the personal demons within.
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page51.html

If you decide to walk away from Christianity will they nail you to a cross or something? — praxis

Not anymore but they used to as far as I know. Especially if you cure too many sick people. And in Islam the punishment is in fact death. And in both it is thought that anyone who doesn’t think like you do is wrong and will burn in hell forever so forcing people to adopt your beliefs at any cost is a good thing. Both place pressure on following their doctrines while Buddhism emphasizes that it is strictly optional.

the 'kill the Buddha' thing is about transcending intellection and in that way very zen. — praxis

I don’t see how it would be so I don’t think so.

By my reckoning, the west got it right — TheMadFool

Neither side negates the other. It’s not a dichotomy it’s an attitude. In the west people try to fix the problem of life by fixing the outside world while in the east they try to fix themselves. That doesn’t mean that in the east it is thought that scientific advancement is impossible nor does it mean in the West that being able to bear life is not valuable. Both methods lead to a better life. Nowadays both are finally being used in tandem slowly

In the future, once utopia becomes a reality — TheMadFool

I don’t think it ever will

It seems therefore that the so-called "void" left by religion's departure from our lives can actually be dealt with in a satisfactory manner without abandoning the principle therein contained. — TheMadFool

People aren’t sad because they haven’t been able to find heaven in the sky. People are sad because without an omnipotent god telling them what to do exactly and why exactly they were made they can’t figure out what their purpose is and they can’t handle being in such a hostile world for no reason. Maybe a corporation will reach so much influence so as to take the position of God eventually but I’m willing to wager that would be a dystopia. Though I don’t think any corporation or person will ever get to that point.

making necessary adjustments to our minds — TheMadFool

Which would require us to:

isolate the mind for study, disassembling it as it were, something not that different from putting animals in a lab — TheMadFool

So that we may understand how it works to make said adjustments. Which is done by meditating

Meditation, to my reckoning, only serves to calm our minds to the point where it becomes possible to reflect deeply about the nature of reality — TheMadFool

I don’t think so. Some forms of meditation are FAAAR from relaxing. Meditation plays a much bigger role than you give it credit I think.

Human life is negentropic, because it is not a closed system. Sure it can descend into disorder, but that would be the result of mismanagement, human indifference and greed, and not an entropic inevitability.

Both place pressure on following their doctrines while Buddhism emphasizes that it is strictly optional. — khaled

To be clear, dogma can be a take it or leave it (optional) proposition. On the other hand, you know what they call someone who tries to reform Buddhist doctrine? Not a Buddhist.

the 'kill the Buddha' thing is about transcending intellection and in that way very zen.
— praxis

I don’t see how it would be so I don’t think so. — khaled

I think that the wise nugget you were thinking of is from the Kalama Sutta:

Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

Take it or leave it (no corrections allowed).

There is no evidence it causes cancer. — Gregory

oof

The best aid to meditation for me has been cigarettes — Gregory

Me too but I'm not sure whether I'm meditating when I light one up.

Leo Tolstoy — Skeptic

I'll take a look. Thanks.

It doesn't promise salvation in an afterlife, but merely peace of mind in the midst of the world's evils and suffering. — Gnomon

This makes sense only if it's true that the suffering people have to go through is severe enough that it weighs heavily in our minds and hearts, a vindication that entropy is wreaking havoc in our lives.

the Buddha didn't present syllogistic arguments in the Greek manner of philosophy, but Wright traces the logic of his aphoristic teachings to our modern understanding of human psychology — Gnomon

This I must disagree with. At this point let's take a look at how psychology and Buddhism deal with a certain known neurosis.

Take phobias.

One technique employed in psychology is graded exposure in which a person with a phobia is made to face the object of his/her fears in slow incremental steps of intensity. The idea behind this is simply, "get used to it". No arguments are made about the nature of fear itself. Why we fear? is left unanswered.

In Buddhism, the method of overcoming fears, phobias included, is not by "getting used to it" but by coming to an understanding on why we fear anything at all. We fear, Buddhists might say, because we're clinging to existence like an infant monkey clings to its mother and this happens when we fail to recognize the truth of impermanence, the truth that nothing lasts as long as we'd have liked. Fear then is a reaction to existential threats and we wouldn't be in its grips if only we knew the truth of impermanence.

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

In other words: come to your own conclusions. At least that’s what I meant when I said it. I don’t think what you sent is saying “Transcend intellectualism” I think it’s more like “don’t just become a Buddhist because an old guy told you to”. Anyways I don’t care to debate this detail anymore because we can at least agree that the Kalama Sutta applies.

On the other hand, you know what they call someone who tries to reform Buddhist doctrine? — praxis

Where did this come from? Who’s trying to reform Buddhist doctrine?

Both methods lead to a better life. — khaled

:up: What if you were offered a choice between Eastern thought and Western thought but not both?

People aren’t sad because they haven’t been able to find heaven in the sky. People are sad because without an omnipotent god telling them what to do exactly and why exactly they were made they can’t figure out what their purpose is and they can’t handle being in such a hostile world for no reason. — khaled

Why do they need a god? As a guarantor of paradise, no?

Meditation plays a much bigger role than you give it credit. — khaled

:ok:

What if you were offered a choice between Eastern thought and Western thought but not both? — TheMadFool

I would tell the guy that posed the choice wtf he means because it’s not like Chinese people can’t conceive of scientific theories or British people can’t conceive of meditation. It’s not like these discoveries are inherent in the geographic configuration of a bunch of rocks. If I look from the opposite side the East is the West and the West is the East.

I think a better question would be “Do you think the answer to our suffering is primarily fixing the world or primarily configuring our mind?” To which I would answer “I don’t care which one is “primary” just do both as efficiently as possible”

Why do they need a god? — TheMadFool

Because they want to know that all their suffering has some purpose behind it, that there is someone or something that will make everything right at the end, that world is not just a bunch of floating rocks indifferent to their suffering. Heaven is a bonus. Idk about Christianity but at least in Islam it is emphasized that one shouldn’t follow Islam for the Heaven but only do so when they can have full faith in its teachings. It is said that if you’re just a Muslim because you think you have to be or else you’ll suffer that you’re not a real Muslim and that God would rather see you continue questioning the faith until you’re convinced rather than harbor doubt in your mind which you muffle because you want to get into heaven.