I interpret it as: “If you explain away the teachings and experiences using your system II, you will not ascent the plane of eternal suffering.” Then again, that would be an overly generous understanding, so here are some additional probabilities:
1. The religious survival game favors blind faith in supernatural stories and concepts to compete t in the memetic environment. If you only teach meditation in a cold logical manner, the number of adherents to your school of thought will be limited to those who can achieve sufficient understanding, by consequence its impact on society will be minimal. This can explain why all major religions have supernatural elements that appeal to a deeper, instinctive layer of the mind. This can be further broken into: a. Buddha never made those claims, and it’s actually the followers who created the religion of Buddhism, built on top of the mental techniques of self-exploration and self-modification. Those people had a vested interested in perpetuating their own flavor of competing religions in the geographical proximity. b. Buddha himself did the above to protect the good parts from perishing. 2. The guy is just another religious leader who’s power driven, or an insane egotistical visionary.
This comment is a bit vague, and I’d appreciate constructive criticism.
It sounds a bit like all (or most of) the Buddhists are wrong about what Buddha meant, only you understand it correctly. While technically possible, it is suspiciously tailored to the modern Western audience.
I think a more likely hypothesis is that the historical Buddha and his followers believed in supernatural. Almost all people in the history did.
Do you have any evidence for Buddha not believing in supernatural, besides “it would make Buddhism more cool from our perspective”?
You were correct. Buddha didn’t just believe in the supernatural, he argued for it against the skeptics and atheists, some of whom were early materialists and moral nihilists (Ajita Kesakambali completely rejected the notion of afterlife). It seems extremely unlikely that he wasn’t believing in the supernatural.
I was interested in what LWers have to say about Buddhism. Recently, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of what seems the perfect religion with minimal negative parts. After reading this post, and reading your response I discovered that I deluded myself, I have started adopting a metaphorical understanding, not very dissimilar to Christians interpreting their holy texts in insane ways.
The labyrinths of complex texts with easily extractable and molded meaning, is a big challenge.
(I am new to LW, if this comment seems low quality enough that it shouldn’t exist, please let me know)
People changing their minds is exactly the kind of comments LW exists for.
I had similar expectations about Buddhism as a “rational religion” in the past. I guess what helped me was seeing how Christianity is shown in anime, e.g. the Pope is a young guy riding a dragon, and then I started to suspect that our idea of Buddhism might be just as wrong, for similar reasons.
Also, the statements about wonderful effects of meditation remind me of Silva Method that used to be popular here when I was a kid. I spent some time doing that, but didn’t get any supernatural powers. Meditation doesn’t seem much different.
Wikipedia says it was over 400 years from the death of the Buddha, until the scriptures of the “Pali Canon” were written down. It would almost be miraculous if anything factual survived 400 years of being told and re-told by the spoken word alone.
It strikes me as false to equate low likelihood of factual validity, and any information in the scriptures is warped to the point of being false. Is this fallacious reasoning?
I think the arguments of the dissidents and contemporary critics would be warped by necessity, but their central arguments would still be expressed. A refutation cannot satisfy majority of the targeted audience if it doesn’t contain enough of the proposition’s truth.
I interpret it as: “If you explain away the teachings and experiences using your system II, you will not ascent the plane of eternal suffering.” Then again, that would be an overly generous understanding, so here are some additional probabilities:
1. The religious survival game favors blind faith in supernatural stories and concepts to compete t in the memetic environment. If you only teach meditation in a cold logical manner, the number of adherents to your school of thought will be limited to those who can achieve sufficient understanding, by consequence its impact on society will be minimal. This can explain why all major religions have supernatural elements that appeal to a deeper, instinctive layer of the mind. This can be further broken into:
a. Buddha never made those claims, and it’s actually the followers who created the religion of Buddhism, built on top of the mental techniques of self-exploration and self-modification. Those people had a vested interested in perpetuating their own flavor of competing religions in the geographical proximity.
b. Buddha himself did the above to protect the good parts from perishing.
2. The guy is just another religious leader who’s power driven, or an insane egotistical visionary.
This comment is a bit vague, and I’d appreciate constructive criticism.
It sounds a bit like all (or most of) the Buddhists are wrong about what Buddha meant, only you understand it correctly. While technically possible, it is suspiciously tailored to the modern Western audience.
I think a more likely hypothesis is that the historical Buddha and his followers believed in supernatural. Almost all people in the history did.
Do you have any evidence for Buddha not believing in supernatural, besides “it would make Buddhism more cool from our perspective”?
You were correct. Buddha didn’t just believe in the supernatural, he argued for it against the skeptics and atheists, some of whom were early materialists and moral nihilists (Ajita Kesakambali completely rejected the notion of afterlife). It seems extremely unlikely that he wasn’t believing in the supernatural.
I was interested in what LWers have to say about Buddhism. Recently, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of what seems the perfect religion with minimal negative parts. After reading this post, and reading your response I discovered that I deluded myself, I have started adopting a metaphorical understanding, not very dissimilar to Christians interpreting their holy texts in insane ways.
The labyrinths of complex texts with easily extractable and molded meaning, is a big challenge.
(I am new to LW, if this comment seems low quality enough that it shouldn’t exist, please let me know)
People changing their minds is exactly the kind of comments LW exists for.
I had similar expectations about Buddhism as a “rational religion” in the past. I guess what helped me was seeing how Christianity is shown in anime, e.g. the Pope is a young guy riding a dragon, and then I started to suspect that our idea of Buddhism might be just as wrong, for similar reasons.
Also, the statements about wonderful effects of meditation remind me of Silva Method that used to be popular here when I was a kid. I spent some time doing that, but didn’t get any supernatural powers. Meditation doesn’t seem much different.
Wikipedia says it was over 400 years from the death of the Buddha, until the scriptures of the “Pali Canon” were written down. It would almost be miraculous if anything factual survived 400 years of being told and re-told by the spoken word alone.
It strikes me as false to equate low likelihood of factual validity, and any information in the scriptures is warped to the point of being false. Is this fallacious reasoning?
I think the arguments of the dissidents and contemporary critics would be warped by necessity, but their central arguments would still be expressed. A refutation cannot satisfy majority of the targeted audience if it doesn’t contain enough of the proposition’s truth.