/lit/ - Literature

>>13109448
Early Buddhism contained teachings about karma, rebirth, mind powers (siddhis), devas (heavenly beings), hell realms, ghosts and more, but it did not teach metaphysics. You will not find a passage in the Pali Canon that makes a metaphysical statement. Metaphysics indeed became a later concern of Buddhists after the Buddha's death, with the Theravadin Abhidhamma, with the Mahayana ideas of "Buddha-Nature," with essentially idealist schools like Yogachara...etc, because they wanted to seek answers to what the Buddha refused to discuss: metaphysics.
The point is that it is not only possible to have Buddhism without metaphysics outside of white-washed Western 'Secular Buddhism,' but it even appears that non-metaphysical Buddhism is actually what is found in the Pali Canon.
>the buddhist mystify all this and because of this mystification you have the buddhism as a religion
>you pretend to think this dropping of subject-object distinction is some innocent thought without mysticism
Is it "mystical" in the colloquial sense? Yea, of course. Is it metaphysical? No. Is it esoteric? Also no, with the exception of later schools and sects like Vajrayana. I'm not denying that Buddhism has rituals and shit that most people would consider "supernatural," I am just arguing that metaphysics is not an essential core aspect of Buddhism. Later schools developed a variety of metaphysical systems, so it is clear that there is no single unifying "Buddhist metaphysics," and in the earliest texts, the Pali Canon, there are in fact no metaphysics to be found at all.