/lit/ - Literature

>>11346773
Yes.

>>11346773
yeah

>>11346773
Yes.

Yyyyyup.

>>11346773
Yes.

No.

>>11346839
Your mom

>>11346776
>>11346777
>>11346785
>>11346791
>>11346794
ok, how?

>>11346776
>>11346777
>>11346785
>>11346791
>>11346794
>>11346845
Based
>>11346839
Cringe

>>11346846
It’s not except in crude interpretations.

1.) Many Buddhist traditions are meant to help us appreciate life more, pay attention to the beauty of every moment. As such, it is profoundly life-affirming.
2.) Enlightenment is a state of mind which can be gained during life, not something that has to happen after death. You can be enlightened right now. And life doesn’t become meaningless thereby, you don’t just give up living. You keep living, and live joyfully.
3.) Buddhists (particularly in Zen, I think) have a formula hat Nirvana is samsara. Nirvana (the state of enlightenment) is samsara (the wheel of rebirth and suffering). It’s all dependent on perspective. Buddhists don’t condemn material reality. They say that it is paradise if viewed rightly.

>>11346773
Whole point is to escape the self.

Life is an ego-trap. The self swarms to it like flies to honey.

>>11346865
Isn't enjoyment and happiness a form of attachment?

>>11346865
ok thanks
and how can a material reality be viewed "rightly"?
what are some books i can read to educate myself on buddhism, i am very uninformed on it.

>>11346773
it says that life is suffering because sometimes we are suffering and sometimes we are content. ie. being content is fleeting. but the suffering is also fleeting so what the fuck

clearly life is both suffering and fulfilment, clearly you are a fag that wants everything to go his way if you cant deal witht this. the Buddha was some rich beautiful guy right and never went outside, hes like an eternal child, so he makes up random shit about the ultimate nature of reality because he wants to have his cake and eat it too

absolutely no sympathy for this gayness

Daily reminder if you don't believe in reincarnation then you have no reason to be a Buddhist

>>11346883
Those are just words. It depends on how you use the words. People have a misguided view of Buddhism. There is bliss and then there’s bliss. One bliss is the chaotic, fleeting, and self-destructive one, the other the more abiding and clear-minded one. In fact, if you actually read Buddhist texts, you’ll be surprised how much talk you find of “bliss” and “joy”. Getting more and more enlightened, you perceive things more and more blissfully.

Not in any way. I would say that Buddhism wants you to keep in touch with your life as much as it is possible, explaining that nothing exists except this moment. It wants you to understand the nature of existence, not to separate you from it. This notion that "buddhism is completely detached from life" must have arisen while looking at Tibetan monks, living in complete isolation, practicing celibacy etc.. On the other hand Zen monks are free to have families, they also practice musicianship, painting and writing poems, so it's all really relative.

>>11346913
>nothing exists except this moment. I
solipsistic gayness as well god i haet this faggot. the only thing the eternal thisness of the moment proves is that you yourself are just this moment, your own personal identity

to jump from that and say that everything is just this moment has literally nothing backing it

>>11346901
Well yes they are words I don't see the problem with it, what would you say is the end goal of budhism?

>>11346888
Q: How can material reality be viewed rightly — A: Detachedly.

Q: How to educate self on Buddhism
A: Read anthologies and introductory books of it from your library. The danger of learning about Buddhism is that if you come at it historically and/or philosophically, you can kill it. It’s not something for scholars, even if scholars can have fun with it. In such a case, you’re just trying to see what concepts of it you can fit with Western philosophy or learn about its history so you can feel smart. This is studying Buddhism from the outside instead of the inside. I liked the Dhammapada, I liked reading Chogyam Trungpa, D.T. Suzuki, sections from the Pāli Canon, and collected Zen writings. The Buddha was saying really simple stuff and it’s funny how it split up into a bunch of schools and complex squabblings about little niceties of metaphysics and epistemology when he’s expressly recorded as saying such philosophy doesn’t matter compared to the question of becoming enlightened.

>>11346933
>what would you say is the end goal of budhism?
Buddhism is against the idea of an end goal.

>>11346942
i could see this nonreply coming from nondistance away, how is enlightenment not the goal of buddihsm?

there is no difference between life and death in buddhism

>>11346945
Striving for anything is the complete antithesis to Buddhism

>>11346971
on a grand level yes, but there are methods and ideas to reach that lack of strive, therefore a goal

Buddhism is reconciliation with the void/sunyata/pleroma in life as best as you can do it, before death forces the encounter

>>11346971
so you achieve the goal by not striving enlightenment is still the goal and distinct from non enlightenment isn't it?

>>11346986
Doesn't pleroma imply something a bit different? In gnosticism it's the ultimate God we've become separated from, very different to Buddhist views.

All religions are

>>11346945
>>11346984
I’m not >>11346971. Conventionally, yes, it seems there’s a goal to reach by performing certain practices. But the goal is really to realize there is no goal and nothing to attain whatsoever. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything. Buddhism is not paradoxical and mystifying for the sake of it, it seems so because it’s talking about experiences beyond duality and the constraints of ordinary thought and language.

Goal implies there is something in the future to be attained. However, there is no future, only right now. But even right now passed away the second you try to touch it. Buddhism negates everything so as to baffle the rational mind, make it be quiet and still so that you can hear the humming which is in the background of daily life always. Buddhism negates both negation and non-negation, both for and against. But it is not fundamentally negative or life-denying. It neither affirms, denies, non-affirms, or non-denies. I hope that helped to clear it up.

>>11346988
Enlightenment doesn’t exist and is not distinct from non-enlightenment. Enlightenment also exists and is distinct from non-enlightenment. Enlightenment also doesn’t exist and is distinct from non-enlightenment. Enlightenment also does exist and isn’t distinct from non-enlightenment. Consider each of these propositions, and that should help clear it up.

>>11347053
>that should help clear it up.
yeah fucking crystal clear now thanks m8

>>11347053
why do you have to be such a fucking sophist

>>11346995
It doesn't really matter, its a reconciliation with nonduality and the return to noumena or at least the collapsing of that distinction, basically the popping of the recursion bubble that differentiates the organism from its environment and produces the transcendental conditions for self-awareness and cognition.

Reality is a difference-engine. Boundaries playing against boundaries. "Life-denial" takes the form of the rejection of this arena. Buddhists become radically immersed in the fact that they are a negativity and suffering is a production of attachment to what is finite, to basically what resists this eternal production of form. Everything is process and substance ontology just reifies the now.

Is the West in denial about this? Who knows

>>11347032
so there are just some moments that are enlightened and others that are not? but are there actually multiple moments in the first place? and if there are are they related in a time-like way or is it something more arcane? and do the enlightened moments contain the non-enlightened ones and vice versa?

i find the entire train of thought sort of interesting but also basically incoherent

>>11347070
Universality of the Now is guaranteed by the distinction of its moments. Time is negation. Time is a restlessness at rest.

>>11347070
The proposition that enlightenment is real is true, false, both true and false, and neither true nor false. The proposition that non-enlightenment is real is true, false, both true and false, and neither true nor false. The proposition that enlightenment is distinct from non-enlightenment is true, false, both true and false, and neither true nor false. This is the standard Buddhist teaching. The point is that philosophizing gets you nowhere and all that matters is direct experience. Zen is one of the most attractive forms of Buddhism because it seeks to directly tear down all conceptual thought and lead to an immediate realization of emptiness. However, this is a problematic statement, because, according to Zen teaching, Zen doesn’t exist.

There is ideality in existence because there is beauty in it, so Plato thought intelligibility came from a higher place. As if matter is just the base for beauty to come to itself. But Aristotle disagreed and thought you couldn't differentiate beauty from the sensible. Because so much of beauty comes from this base itself. Hegel twisted it a third time: actuality is divine ideality AS the dialectic unwinding of sense-certainty, sensuous understanding. Buddhism twists it a fourth.

>>11347110
i take your point that you simply can't make dualities, like i get what you're saying. but how can you say anything at all about anything if this is true, like why is life suffering, how do they explain this if you cant create a duality between suffering and non-suffering?

you seem to be saying this thread is totally pointless though bceause language cannot explain this but only wordless experience

>>11347120
Pretty much.

>>11347120
The point is we have to negate language and conceptuality, because language and conceptuality negated the nescience of the womb - as it should have.

>>11346888
This is a good start.

>>11347120
Look at the moon, not the finger pointing to the moon. The finger can be as disfigured, ugly, spiteful, paradoxical, and nonsensical as you want, but it doesn’t negate the suchness of the moon. The finger makes a distinction between suffering and non-suffering.

>>11347120
>you seem to be saying this thread is totally pointless though bceause language cannot explain this but only wordless experience
nail-head, meet hammer.

>What an affirmative Aryan religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Manu.(The deification of the feeling of power in Brahma: interesting that it arose among the warrior caste and was only transferred to the priests.)

>What an affirmative Semitic religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Mohammed, the older parts of the Old Testament. (Mohammedanism, as a religion for men, is deeply contemptuous of the sentimentality and mendaciousness of Christianity— which it feels to be a woman's religion.)

>What a negative Semitic religion, the product of an oppressed class, looks like: the New Testament (— in Indian-Aryan terms: a chandala religion).

>What a negative Aryan religion looks like, grown up among the ruling orders: Buddhism. It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed.

>>11346865
>1.) Many Buddhist traditions are meant to help us appreciate life more, pay attention to the beauty of every moment. As such, it is profoundly life-affirming.
this is your brain in boomer addled 60s pseudo buddhism

gas the hippies, forest tradition now

>>11346773
Yes if you're a novice.
Not if you're an adept.

>>11347155
That being so, many Buddhist traditions often call attention to the beauty of the moment. Far from making us hate life, Buddhism helps one to appreciate life more.

>>11347133
Conceptuality functions as an ignorance of this nescience, because it reifies what are fundamentally empty processes, subsists as its difference from unqualified immersion in its wholeness to become enlightened is to return to this original state clarified by the movement of having detached from the condition of being that is its negation - the samsaric thirst of trying to hold onto things in the rush, mainly your self.

>>11346883
This anon gets it, in order to be happy about something you have to care about it!
>>11346901
>Those are just words
>there is bliss and then there's bliss
Take your catch phrases elsewhere you vapid brainlet, you aren't fooling anyone.

>>11346773
>The Buddha said that a person cannot be free of suffering until they acknowledge several things about life. The gratification, the danger, and the escape. You must actually acknowledge that there is gratification in existing and experiencing things. You shouldn't deny it at all, that's not the Middle Path and is in fact one of the opposite extremes (self-mortification). The Buddha simply said that one shouldn't seek gratification in life because one will be left unfulfilled. This doesn't mean that we can't experience pleasure and appreciate it, we just have to also see the danger in it and not cling to it. The danger is impermanence and equating those experiences with our self, essence, soul, etc. The escape is simply non-clinging. Let pleasure and pain arise and cease, but don't try to grab onto these experiences and make them last after they've ended or make them happen before they've arisen. To me that is life denying. You're ignoring the sensations and perceptions of life that are in reality the only things that exist (the present moment) and seeking something dead and gone or unknowable and thus, cannot possibly exist (the past and future).
unironically for reddit
for non-Orientalist opinions on Buddhism, i refer you to oxford's essential texts on buddhism, compiled by William Edelglass

>>11347171
Buddhism doesn’t say you shouldn’t care.

>>11347174
*from reddit not for reddit

>>11347162
perhaps as a tactic. the end goal is liberation.

>>11346900
Easterners don't care about "belief" the same way as retarded christfags.

"At first, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. Then, I saw mountains were not mountains and rivers were not rivers. Finally, I see mountains again as mountains, and rivers again as rivers"
- Qingyuan Weixin
In short; it is not life denying in the slightest. Think of it as Hegel's dialectic, and not like the dialectic at all.

>>11347176
It says you shouldn't attach. Caring is attachment.

Wew lad, you can't make this stuff up

>>11347232
No, desire isn't extinguished all at once but modulated by the desire for this extinction. You can't detach from everything all together, its impossible, even satori is momentary. I'm tired of you larpers who just regurgitate new age buddhist homelies

Wowzers, wonder why eastern thought always attracts so many faggy tryhards. Accept that buddhism requires a completely different frame of mind than the one modern western people have and move on with your lives. All this enlightenment talk is beyond embarassing.

>>11346900
what is everyone's interpretation of reincarnation?

from what i've read and from my understanding, buddhist reincarnation means that while humans have souls, our souls are more like occurrences than objects, in the same way a small spiral of water occurring in a riverflow can be defined as something by itself, but still inevitably a part of the water. and when we die, any distinction we had from the river vanishes, though our soul is still considered a part of the river.

hindu reincarnation, from my understanding, believes that souls are immutable, and though they transfer from body to body, they remain unchanging and eternal.

am i correct?

>>11347255
lmao why try to understand anything just turn your brain off

>>11347255
>just dont think about anything and shut up, i am so oversocialized and cant handle seeing anything i find embararassing
absolutely non-enlightened post my friend