/lit/ - Literature

>>15120976
Horse shit, Buddhism first has to explain why impermanence and non-existence creates any kind of moral imperative to do anything or refrain from doing anything. It matters little to me that the world is a burning building, it is burning so slowly that I'd have to be psychologically unstable for decay to injure my enjoyment of it.

If anything, death, impermanence and non-being give me an imperative to have a party. Not an immoral party where I do everything contrary to society's morals just for the sake of it, that doesn't seem justified. But I should -- knowing I will grow old and die -- enjoy a degree of licentiousness, drunkenness, and gluttony, to the extent that I enjoy it, and while I can enjoy it. Soon I will be old, and too much food and drink will make me sick, and sex will throw out my back and be gross in the old-age home.

I don't mean of course to always chase external happiness, but I reject the dichotomy between internal and external happiness which technically isn't Buddhism, but is nevertheless ascetic. If I had no internal consolation at all, no relationship with God, then I'd be miserable, but if I had no external pleasures, I'd be less miserable than a person without God, but miserable nonetheless. Therefore I reject the dichotomy; between chasing pleasure in the world and chasing the pleasures of asceticism. Abnegation and indulgence are both pleasurable, or asceticism would not have any popularity at all. This fact that pleasure can be found in refusing pleasure so obvious that there are sexual practices wherein mixing pain and pleasure denied with the actual external pleasure itself is the whole point, and is said to make the pleasure greater by lengthening it with obstacles. Could there be a better metaphor for everything that happens in life as a whole?