Buddhism

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
Open in Logseq
    • I'm not a Buddhist, just Buddha-curious. If you have to have a foundational belief system, it might be the best out there. Not that it is properly characterized as a "belief system"; whatever its conceptual content, it is not really separable from its practices, institutions, and lineages of teachers.
    • A basic contradiction

      • Two of this essentials of Buddhism seem to work against each other:
        • Insight into the transitoriness, nebulosity, emptiness of all things, very much including yourself.
        • Compassion for all beings
      • I'm hardly the first to find that these two things don't seem to fit together very well. If things are so flickering and impermanent and illusory, then why should we express compassion for them and what would that even mean, given that that is our own nature as well? It turns out that there's a passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra that addresses this question head on, and with wonderfully multiplying metaphors (quoted at the link).
    • Random dharmas

      • Meaningness sites are a good entry point to Buddhism for the rationalist and postrationalist. Meaningness itself seems to be firmly grounded in Buddhism while getting rid of all the religious machinery. Vividness is more explictly about Buddhism itself.
      • We try to segregate ourselves from the external, and this creates a kind of gigantic bubble in us which consists of nothing but air and water, or in this case, fear and the reflection of the external thing. So this huge bubble prevents any fresh air from coming in, and that is "I" –– the ego. So in that sense there is the existence of ego, but it is in fact illusory. Having established that, one generally wants to create some external idol or refuge. Subconsciously one knows that this "I" is only a bubble and it could burst at any moment, so one tries to protect is as much as one can –– either consciously or subconsciously. In fact we have achieved such skill at protecting this ego that we have managed to preserve it for hundreds of years. It is as though a person has a very precious pair of spectacles which he puts in a box or various containers in order to keep it safe, so that even if other things are broken this would be preserved. He may feel that other things could bear hardship, but he knows this could not, so this would last longer. In the same way, ego lasts longer just because one feels it could burst at any time
        • Trungpa, Meditation in Action, p 76)
    • History and Schools

    • Bewildering! but this map is useful: