Buddhism Decisively Superior to Christianity and GAY Hellenism

Oppressed Bulgarian Philosopher Friday 28 Jun 2019

Buddhism might be a myth of the Far Right and European Orientalism. Believe me, you’ve never seen one Asian do anything religious.

spigot Friday 28 Jun 2019

Kulturkampf this is very interesting, thank you. Where does Gombrich make this point? I had thought that due to the absence of a strong, centralised authority the schools of Buddhism would probably have as much in common as Orthodoxy and the prosperity gospel. But yes, my "Buddhism" is largely the product of an overactive imagination and an urge to get into fights.

I really meant to say it's my personal favourite bit, and should be everyone's, but it seems as though any thought concerning the ultimate ground or groundlessness of things would be the hard core of whatever doctrine you're considering. eg. As in the Heart Sutra https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/heartstr.htm

spigot Friday 28 Jun 2019

And I'm the reincarnation of Edward Conze. Everything is there: My problem with Polacks, my charming demeanor, my brash retardation - it's all there.

spigot Friday 28 Jun 2019

As for what is specifically and actually Buddhist about my "Buddhism", ie. what cannot be reduced to a sexed-up scepticism: Western philosophy's techniques of achieving certain states of mind are inferior, at least since living practice of their Christian equivalents largely ceased, ie. Meditation is good, and everyone should do it, and it could be Christianised without any trouble. But yes, its total super-Humean scepticism is "true" (remember the subtleties...), and in any case we should be more familiar with the history of the religion.

I heard someone say, and make of this what you will, that the beauty of Hinduism (of which Buddhism is a branch, indeed an avowed revival) is the indistinction of the religious and the philosophical; that even the most abstruse concepts have personal aspects which can be worshiped by the laity. It may have been Sri Aurobindo.

Kulturkampf Friday 28 Jun 2019

@mirglip asked "Can *an* authentic Buddhism be extracted from the Pali Canon?"

That's a great question, and I literally sat and thought about it for a couple hours.

The answer is... Yes, you could get one. It'd be:

Theraveda , with room for a Madhyamika Buddhist schoo l of thought. This school would probably inevitably develop. But it would be Madhyamika without a massive emphasis on gurus & teachers , leaving far less room for very divergent traditions, "Tantric" practices, the "secret" knowledge stuff that plagues the Tibetans and some of the Mahayana guys. And from Madhyamika you'd still have something like the Zen guys going on, but they'd be rooted still in the Pali stuff, so they'd basically just be guys making the Buddhist version of the Philokalia on the side.

@spigot It was in What the Buddha Thought by Gombrich - - the core of the book was basically trying to figure out what the authetnic Buddhist thought was because of the divergence of the many schools. It's really a great read. I think that it is the best book on Buddhism that is under 300 pages and not a source text.

That makes a lot of sense. Perhaps the reason that it could flourish in different countries is that it can be so syncretic and detached from a core dogma at points.

Irkutyanin Friday 28 Jun 2019

I saw a number of paintings and depictions of Mahakala who the Tibetans call Nago Chempo during my time in Mongolia and Siberia. It’s never left my dreams ever since. Periodically my mind conjures the image of the bodhisattva as I sleep. I’ve been to many Datsans, and besides seeing the goat sacrifice to Chinggis Khan, nothing else in the monasteries stays with me except the fleeting picture of memory. Not so with Mahakala. The monks chants, candles and painted, gilded, flames never let me forget.

Being honest I sometimes think I am living through some sort of facsimile time it sent me to. America coming back was never the same, foreign, weird, a parody of itself that had exacerbated with the advent of popular social media and my first experience of IRL pozz campaigns. Entire years of time and the events in them feel fake, compared to my time in Russia and before, which I’m certain was real and not some demiurge accusatory trial by dream. I think of this as perhaps some sort of yellow shamanic curse I triggered somehow.

spigot Friday 28 Jun 2019

Kulturkampf do you have a read on Conze and Coomaraswamy as sources on Buddhism? And yes, Hindu/Vedantic syncretism in the 20th century and beyond is very interesting, although I'm not well-versed in it. Also, I meant to say Buddhism was an avowed revival of ancient Vedic knowledge, rather than Hinduism. Thank you for answering all these questions. And yes Irkutyanin , I'm particularly fond of the gold-on-black style of Tibetan Buddhist art, of which I've seen nothing equivalent in any other tradition... voluptuous.

spigot Friday 28 Jun 2019

Another comment on the fakeness and gayness of any Westernised Buddhism: This is once again true of any religion. It's interpreted in terms of what's known and it will be fake for some time to come - shallow roots. Conze describes the process quite well in Buddhism: A Short History:

China was the first large country to be penetrated by Buddhist thought. As in Japan and Tibet later on, Buddhism went through five stages, which will act as our guides for the arrangement of our material.

1. There was first a period of consolidation, marked by translations of the basic texts.

2. This was followed by a preliminary attempt at coming to terms with the material. Buddhism did not move into a spiritual vacuum, but everywhere it encountered people formed by some previous tradition – by Taoism and Confucianism in China, Shinto in Japan, Bon in Tibet.

3. After this, the next, or third phase, is marked by a more mature assimilation of the doctrine, but still largely in dependence on Indian models. In China, for instance, this took the form of either numerous, generally brief, commentaries, or of original doctrinal treatises which were passed off as translations from the Sanskrit. Two of these are very well known. The one is the famous “Awakening of Faith”, wrongly attributed to Asvaghosa, and the other the so-called Súrangama Sútra, said to have been brought from Nalanda, but actually written in China by Fang Jong.

4. We now come to the fourth phase, which is perhaps the most important of all and normally took 600 years to reach. A truly Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism, which no longer did violence to the national character, asserted itself – in China with the Ch’an sect, in Japan in the Kamakura period, in Tibet with the Kahgyudpas and Gelugpas.

5. Then finally there is the period of decay. The first phase, as we saw, was one of bare copying; in the second one asserted one’s independence, somewhat wilfully, as a child in its second year; in the third one attained some true independence, without however quite daring to, as in adolescence; in the fourth phase the native genius at last fully asserted itself. This child had grown up. The creative manhood of Buddhism lasted for several centuries. Manhood is followed by old age, and after a time the creative powers of Buddhism waned.

9th century Nestorian T'ang figures of Jesus

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Sutras_on_the_Origin_of_Origins_of_Ta-ch‘in_Luminous_Religion_(detail).jpg

Kulturkampf Monday 1 Jul 2019

It's been a while since I have done anything with Buddhism, and even a bit longer since I was dealing with stuff that was outside of my area of focus (which was actually engaged Buddhism and a lot of the ethical questions for Buddhism). I know I had seen Conze's name many times and probably read at least portions of his translations. But I cannot say that I am familiar with his individual theory's.

Coomaraswamy's idea that Buddhism is just a revival of Vedic knowledge and is merely a form of "Brahmanism" is really radical to us but I think it is actually super typical of Indian attitudes towards things (but I'll get to that in the end). Obviously, it comes off as radical because it requires you to believe that Buddha's negative language about the soul and his ignoring of the gods, his disdain for caste and many of the distinctions which Hindus found important (whose absolute importance and rigidity during the life of the Buddha would be debatable) etc. all as manifestations of some deeper, hidden form of Hinduism... When, the consensus tends to be, that both the Buddhists and the Jains were radically rebelling against lines of thought that were Hindu & Vedic.

Let's put it this way...

If we are going to say that Buddhism is a vedantic revival and thus it is chiefly Hindu in character, then we are coming into a position where we are saying that a Korean or Japanese or a Taiwanese Buddhist is doing something like Hinduism daily, but it just isn't the case at all. Korean Buddhists wear wooden prayer beads around their wrist, focus on sitting in prolonged meditation, perform ritual bowing ceremonies to a statue of the Buddha; if they are devout, they recite the Prajnaparamita sutra once a day, the language of which is understood exclusively through Chinese characters -- a sutra in which the only things recognizable as having Indian origin are the words "Banya-bara-mil-da" (Prajnaparamita). The only other word that is related to India in the sutra is Avalokitesvara, a deity exclusive to Buddhism that doesn't appear in Sanskrit until the 7th century... His name in Korean is "Gwan-sae-um Bo-sal," which is based on the Chinese version of the name. "Bo-sal" means Bodhisattva.... Point being, there are very few Indian root words even in Korean Buddhism, and which ones exist are sometimes not easily recognizable. The concepts of these words are even exclusive to Buddhism, and often exclusive to Buddhist traditions rooted outside of India... Everything about the religion has passed very, very thoroughly through the filters of other cultures, and what remains that is Indian only remains insofar as it is directly relevant to Buddhist doctrines which have only tenuous connection to vedantic stuff.

None of this makes me think of Hinduism.

Sure, we need to recognize that Buddhism grew out of a Hindu world view and has concepts and a knowledge base that grow out of that. Yet, to go any further than that might be stretching it and just trying to claim some credit.

Let's also remember Dr. B. R. Ambedkar led hundreds of thousands of Dalits into Buddhism to escape the Hindu caste system, and viewed Buddhism as a sort of local antithesis to Buddhism. Now, I will not say that Amedkar is an impeccable scholar -- he was not -- but plenty of peopel in the Hindu world themselves do not see Buddhism as an affirmation of Hindu principles.

... And this attitude of Buddhism being actually just a form of Hinduism or going back to some great root religion of India is a very Indian thing to do, so in a sense, it is radical scholarly, but not radical in terms of what Indian culturalists often do. Americans aren't the only exceptionalists. Indians are easily satisfied -- they want to feel like everything goes back to them, and they have a very low threshold for evidence. Everything can be put back into some nebulous of their old Vedas, and because their canon is so huge & their traditions are so diverse, they will find a way to twist everything together until Romuva pagans in Lithuania are absolutely & totally their co-religionists because of the word "fire" and every god is every other god.

It's a great topic, though.

helmuth von frog Tuesday 2 Jul 2019

In my eyes Buddhism is to Hinduism as Stoicism/Pythegoreanism is to Hellenism.

Note the Meditation on Large Numbers

Christianity began the "acceptance of diversity, breakdown of ethnic kinship relations" chain by uniting Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean. After failing to homogenize the Nordics with the Meds, it just spawned Protestanism, Puritanism, etc. to better homogenize Nordics within each other.

The effect of Prots, Puritans, Quakers and the like on how the "globohomo" came to be is discussed many times over in this website as well as other places.

This is correct.
Wonder why Moses is a leper? Because leper means "heretic" in Egypt.
Moses the hero-baby saved from the river? A classic Egyptian story just inverted.
Moses initially has no qualms with the Pharaoh other than worshiping a single deity. We know this kind of struggle a lot from Egyptian history.

Buddhism Decisively Superior to Christianity and GAY Hellenism

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