Woebot
Well-known member
seeing as how it occupies a considerable amount of my thought.
best to start what's wrong with it.
it's massively confused! - so incredibly antique that its strategies have become almost wholly contradictory. like chinese (indian?) whispers down the ages.
my theory is that around 1000 AD it got folded back into the older models Bon, Taoism and the Vedanta. it's well-documented that the Buddha was a reformer of the Vedas - and that as a method it is essentially about the positive ego and integration - but that this was gradually corrupted to the degree that almost no-one understands this any more. even the "Anatta" doctrine to my my mind - so crucial to Buddhism is in my view a Vedic corruption - straight out of the Hindu playbook.
my view (and this is born out by a respectable amount of scholarly research) is that the Buddha understood all the psychic higher-order stuff but took the sensible perspective that to acknowledge it didn't mean one had to be fixated on it. it seems like very few people get this aspect of the middle way.
Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism do tend to be all about the annihilation of the ego.
the Hinyana "little vehicle" - gets a lot of stick for cleaving to the Pali canon (which is the most antique transcriptions of the buddha's words) - where the Mahayana "greater vehicle" makes sense as a method for not just understanding what the Buddha said, but crucially, what his life represented. so while the Hinyana makes a mistake with its monastic idea of the arhat (the Buddha was not some guy stuck on his own in a monastery) the Mahayana nails it with the concept of the bodhisattva (the person who passes over his own release into nirvana to help other sentient beings)
in my view - Tenzin Gyatso the current 14th Dalai Lama - although he emerges from Tibetan Buddhism absolutely smashes it with his unswerving emphasis on compassion. on kindness. he is a really magnificent fellow. (even if sometimes i think that he overemphasizes the importance of nagarjuna's ideas which are a bit like Heidegger - nothing has its own essence - nonsense! - and broadly silly)
best to start what's wrong with it.
it's massively confused! - so incredibly antique that its strategies have become almost wholly contradictory. like chinese (indian?) whispers down the ages.
my theory is that around 1000 AD it got folded back into the older models Bon, Taoism and the Vedanta. it's well-documented that the Buddha was a reformer of the Vedas - and that as a method it is essentially about the positive ego and integration - but that this was gradually corrupted to the degree that almost no-one understands this any more. even the "Anatta" doctrine to my my mind - so crucial to Buddhism is in my view a Vedic corruption - straight out of the Hindu playbook.
my view (and this is born out by a respectable amount of scholarly research) is that the Buddha understood all the psychic higher-order stuff but took the sensible perspective that to acknowledge it didn't mean one had to be fixated on it. it seems like very few people get this aspect of the middle way.
Tibetan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism do tend to be all about the annihilation of the ego.
the Hinyana "little vehicle" - gets a lot of stick for cleaving to the Pali canon (which is the most antique transcriptions of the buddha's words) - where the Mahayana "greater vehicle" makes sense as a method for not just understanding what the Buddha said, but crucially, what his life represented. so while the Hinyana makes a mistake with its monastic idea of the arhat (the Buddha was not some guy stuck on his own in a monastery) the Mahayana nails it with the concept of the bodhisattva (the person who passes over his own release into nirvana to help other sentient beings)
in my view - Tenzin Gyatso the current 14th Dalai Lama - although he emerges from Tibetan Buddhism absolutely smashes it with his unswerving emphasis on compassion. on kindness. he is a really magnificent fellow. (even if sometimes i think that he overemphasizes the importance of nagarjuna's ideas which are a bit like Heidegger - nothing has its own essence - nonsense! - and broadly silly)