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Our dog died last month, and lately I've been doing a five Buddha mandala bardo practice with my four-year-old for him. It's probably dumb to do bardo stuff for a dog but it makes us both feel better and he was a very good boy It's my first interaction with vajrayana stuff broadly speaking, so that's been interesting what with the visualization and all.
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Feb 27, 2020 00:56
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Buddhism thread: Where sinners are forced to swallow the Balls.
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Feb 29, 2020 17:35
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Bhante Sujato has done tons of work in women's ordination (both research and the work of helping bhikkhunis ordained) if you're looking for search terms. This is in a Theravadan context; I'm not sure of references for other traditions
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Mar 11, 2020 02:18
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I am interested in a post about lotus and knee health. I can get in lotus but it's a bit of a stretch on my ankles and not super comfortable. I don't do it much because I don't want to hurt myself, but I'd love to have actual facts!
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Apr 7, 2020 02:34
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The same reason Thai (and other) Buddhists chant the straight-up Pali: that's just what they do Some chant in their own language, some don't. Do whatever you/your sangha wants, it's not going to make a huge difference. I really think most explanation here is going to be more ex post facto justification than principled decision given, you know, what the Buddha said. But as long as you know what it means I'm pretty sure it's fine  I say "gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha" not "I recognize the awakened, the completely awakened, the totally awakened. Amen." It just feels better 🤷♀️
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Apr 17, 2020 03:15
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One of my friends who is a monk is also a magician so I guess so
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Jul 5, 2020 14:47
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Nessus posted:What would the status of individuals whose brains were somehow cross-linked or put together in a Borg Collective kind of situation be, in Buddhism? I feel from a gut analysis that you're basically just creating a much larger composite being and probably visiting a lot of harm and anguish on the individuals if it isn't consensual. You're not going to get an "in Buddhism" answer for this because you're going to be able to square most any answer you come up with with buddhism unless you build in an incompatible metaphysics (eg "humans have direct epistemic access to something") Someone could certainly come up with an answer informed by their practice, but another buddhist could come up with a different answer (and probably did, I'll be surprised if indian buddhist academics from like 1500 years ago haven't said a bunch of stuff about this)
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Jul 9, 2020 00:06
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FWIW my gut goes with "you can call it a new composite being or a linking together of pre-existing composite brings, but either is strictly-speaking incorrect because it assumes permanence or real substance to conditioned phenomena including me, others, and whatever you want to call the set {me, the others}
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Jul 9, 2020 00:11
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Nessus posted:My impression is that if you get to the point of some kind of lord cybertrex 9000 ... but it would still be subject to all the problems of any other sentient being. Word, I agree on both points It's kinda weird - I ended up a buddhist in large part because I have a pile of metaphysical and epistemic commitments that I'm pretty serious about (as in, I'm comfortable saying "this is how poo poo works"). I was reading a bunch of buddhist stuff for funsies and thinking "oh, yeah, this is literally true" whereas pretty much every other religion's commitments were either false or you had to work really really hard to make their sentences not false (and ultimately really do a lot of gymnastics to make it work).
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Jul 9, 2020 00:39
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Ein Zwei Drei Kokolorum
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Aug 2, 2020 04:37
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If you believe the four noble truths, you're a Buddhist. I'm not sure it's a necessary condition but it's certainly sufficient. I don't think you have to take refuge to be a buddhist. Then again, id say that since I haven't formally done so and consider myself a capital b buddhist, write "buddhist" for religion on demographic surveys, etc.
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Sep 24, 2020 03:09
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If having sex with 20 year olds is inhibiting your practice and that bothers you, then probably stop doing that. The second part of your post - jealousy - sounds like a fresh wound. Do your best and give it time, same as all things. I don't think there's a particularly buddhist answer here that's separate from the general answers with respect to clinging. But best of luck to you. E: sorry, just saw the "over a year" part. Real talk, bring this up with your teacher. They'll be able to help, cause it's all just greed hatred and delusion at the end of the day
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Sep 25, 2020 03:18
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Also, from experience, that poo poo can take a _while_ to not be a burning wound. It'll get better. The old standard ex advice of cutting off contact, not looking at them on social media, and doing what you can to not think about them applies. This gets easier as time passes. But none of that is particularly buddhist of course
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Sep 25, 2020 03:22
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...what? (Post/username?)
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Oct 26, 2020 01:56
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Goonsay goonsay paragoonsay parasamgoonsay bodhi svaha
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Oct 26, 2020 05:43
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Nah, nobody actually cares what other people think about the English word "rebirth." Like, if you go into a Tibetan sangha and start telling them "WELL ACKSHUALLY science can't prove rebirth!" then you're kind of a dick, but if the lama says "rebirth" and you think to yourself "yeah that's probably not a thing, I'll just take that phrase to mean 'the birth of some being whose causal chain is in some way connected with the event of my death,'" who's going to argue with you? Buddhism isn't like Christianity. Nobody's giving you a faith purity test. It's weird to call yourself a Buddhist and deny one of the four noble truths, but beyond that the metaphysics only matter as much as they matter to you. Buddhism is a religion of empirical practice and results, not the conceptual trappings of that practice and results. It's OK to care a lot about the concepts and to spend a lot of time thinking about metaphysics, but if that's getting in the way of performing the real empirical steps that eliminate suffering here and now, you're doing it wrong. So, Buddhism doesn't require you to believe with mathematical certainty in rebirth or in any particular metaphysical interpretation (though particular empirical practices might care a lot about them - feel free to choose a practice that doesn't). Additionally, I've found that when people get really worked up about "but science can't prove it," they generally don't have the best understanding of how science works, how it progresses, the current state of scientific belief, and so on. Believing in "science" as a set of beliefs doesn't work at all, because our current best science is logically inconsistent. We believe in the method of, roughly, changing our beliefs when the evidence necessitates it. That's the scientific mode of inquiry. We know our current science is wrong, but we don't know how it's wrong (otherwise we'd change our beliefs). We know that it does a better job of prediction than past theories, but is still very wrong. The best we can do is to say "OK, look - at the End Of Science, when All The Empirical Data is in, we should believe in all and only those things that are required in the theory that accounts for All The Data. If there are multiple competing theories that explain All The Data equally well, then maybe we'll use parsimony or smth idk, let's hope we have some really great guiding principles by then." But the important part is that we don't really know what the theory at the End Of Science will look like, and it's massive hubris to pretend that it'll be anything like what we believe now* (though in retrospect, the End Of Science theory will be able to explain the current successes and failures of our current theory, and will be able to reinterpret the vocabulary of our current theory into its own language). So, don't feel so bad. Like yeah, I'm relatively sure that once all the data's in, we won't need a concept of rebirth to explain it. But I'm also sure that the theory won't look all that much like what our science looks like today, so it's not really worth getting too fussed about if you're not the one that's supposed to be coming up with the paradigm shifts that characterize scientific progress. After all, the theory at the end will probably involve SpOoKy AbStRaCt ObJeCtS like "concepts," "functions," "numbers," "consciousness," and "life," might involve things like "good" or "hedons" or "morality," and probably won't involve "Zeus" or "everlasting soul." Whether one concept - that will only retroactively be able to see our current concept of "rebirth" as a flawed prototype of itself - is going to be required-believing at the asymptote of possible knowledge isn't worth suffering over. *of course it's also kind of silly to talk about "science" as a single set of beliefs that people believe right now at all, but denying that makes my point stronger anyway, so let's grant it for the moment. it makes way more sense to talk about a single set at end of inquiry, so just roll with it Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Nov 24, 2020 |
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Nov 24, 2020 01:20
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i got into buddhism by having pretty nuanced views about the nature of truth, knowledge, consciousness and so on and reading some yogacara-influenced things and saying "oh yeah that's true, interesting, what else do they have to say?" anyway i went back to vasubandhu's thirty verses on consciousness-only and it's so good. vasubandhu rules. the translation was connely's in inside vasubandhu's yogacara and was quite good - the best i've read (but i dont read sanskrit/old chinese/tibetan so i can only comment on the readability and the fact that it didn't do anything really weird/heterodox/whatever in the translation). the commentary was pretty good too, def. worth reading if that's the sort of thing you're interested in also little jones has been sitting with me lately and it's awesome
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Jun 22, 2021 18:49
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yeah nessus is right. you gotta kokolorum that poo poo and assume that if it acts like a mind it's a mind. any argument you could make about "but what if it isn't REALLY conscious and is just pretending" also applies to humans (and anything else you wish). descartes was a gently caress about animal suffering - do not repeat his mistakes
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Aug 4, 2021 17:18
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having a mind require physical things to dependently arise does not "disprove rebirth." neither does a physical configuration leading to particular reproducible mental states. and that's ignoring the gross oversimplification of "like a save" when you're talking about something that is firmly in the realm of science fiction anyway.
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Aug 5, 2021 02:30
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mind is one way of talking about observable systems. i can best make sense of you by saying "zhar is minded." anything i can articulate, though, is ultimately incorrect (some utterances are closer than others to correct, but good luck figuring out which ones). this includes whatever i mean by "mind," "zhar," etc. i do not make good sense of my computer by calling it "minded." same with my socks. for my dog, well, he's minded in certain capacities and not in others. he's dog-minded. what you're describing as the buddhist view seems to be pretty classic cartesian dualism, and while there's some language that sorta pushes that way i don't think it's really accurate
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Aug 5, 2021 02:37
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the buddha was right about ending suffering. he wasn't some magic omniscient being that never made a mistake and if he was all that just call it "skillful means," gives you a good out of you want it. "tathagata teaches in mysterious ways"
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Aug 6, 2021 05:46
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"buddha, what happened when you were enlightened?" "i saw all the effects of karma, all my past lives, all my future ones. i know the outcome of my actions" "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE LIFECYCLE OF THE HOUSEFLY???" i'm being silly of course, but the short answer to your question is "nah." if somebody showed that meditating is bad for you or that clinging doesn't lead to suffering id be with you, but for poo poo that doesn't matter to the important bits of the path, you don't have to care. if you want to you can do the scholar "reconciling the texts" thing but you don't have to if that sort of thing isn't just fun and/or compulsory for you. if it is compulsory for the way your brain works, try to fix it. i'm not joking - my brain does the same thing. it's important to engage with the teachings. it's ok to reject some of them. some of the teachings you can't reject, but not being fully on board with everything is how it's supposed to work. one of the following will happen: 1. you'll figure out a way around it. write this down, it can help other people. this is scholarship. make good arguments with citations please 2. you'll come to accept whatever version of "orthodox" that you're having problems with. this is fine too 3. you'll find somebody else that has solved your problem and will become more interested in some other school/branch/whatever of buddhism. this also is no problem! people have been doing this poo poo for 2500 years. there's a lot of disagreement. there's a lot of ways to interpret texts. figuring out the way that works for you is half the point. and of course at the end of the day, there's not a huge amount of difference between "rejecting the [naive interpretation of the] teaching" and "reinterpreting the text" as always there are limits to things, but in general as long as you're not rolling into the sangha all trying to well-actually the monks and nuns nobody's gonna care if your understanding of the storehouse consciousness is different. or if you have 21st century views about maggots (they all do, too)
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Aug 6, 2021 06:03
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oh if you're talking narrow AI it's easy. you just show it stuff outside of its applicability. then it clearly reacts in a non-minded way and we say "mindedness is not a good way to interpret what i'm observing about this thing" and we're done what you're describing is still incoherent. if the trump facsimile reacts to things just like the real trump would, why would you say that you haven't created consciousness? if the facsimile can react to all the things in a minded way, why would we say it's only weak AI? the only thing you're doing is saying "i make something indistinguishable from consciousness, except I say 'nuh uh it isnt consciousness' in the setup." If you can't articulate a way in which the thing you're describing is different from consciousness - and no, the words "magic algorithm that isn't consciousness" don't't do the trick - then you're just begging the question in a pretty blatant way regardless of how "laughable" you find things. trying to draw a sharp distinction between "born with" and "learned" is gonna be pretty fraught, too. the world doesn't actually work in that simplistic way.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:32
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if you can't think of how to tell a cartoon character's script from a mind, or a puppet from the puppeteer, there's not really anything i can do here. the whole point is that there are reasons why mindedness is a better explanation for humans than puppets. same with the robot. you keep saying "x is kinda like a minded thing," but so what? lots of things are kind of like other things. hydrogen is kind of like helium when oxygen is the contrast case. there is a difference, though. the difference is a proton (and the resultant behavior we observe). i bet you can think of what differences there are between cute little robots and minds. this is going in circles, though. i won't be responding to you any more. e: I couldn't agree more with laocius below Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 00:30
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agreed, nessus. and on a purely practical level, it's generally good IMO to be kind to robots and chairs and stuff because it gets you in the habit of reacting kindly/lets you practice the activity of being-kind. i almost wrote "not 'practice' in the sense of buddhist practice, but 'practice' in the sense of practicing being kind" and then of course it hit me that those, if not the same thing, at least have a lot of overlap on the ol' venn diagram. if we're doing the virtue ethics thing (and i very much think we should), it's good to be kind to robots and chairs because this cultivates the virtue of kindness/makes us the type of person that will be kind. doesn't matter that the robot or chair can't (yet) suffer, doesn't care one way or the other, etc - important thing is to fix the virtue/develop the habit/live skillfully. and since i want to be the type of person that is kind, it's of secondary (at best) importance whether or not the robot is sentient or sapient or what-have-you. what matters is that i'm sowing beneficial seeds. just throwin em out there, yeeting compassion into the void.
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Aug 7, 2021 03:16
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+1 to the big fluffy dog we're all suffering from greed hatred and delusion. some of us are also suffering from starvation, discrimination, sickness, and so on. if we eliminate the latter suffering, those people are in a better position to eliminate the former suffering. moral luck is real. it's easier to be good when you don't have occasion to want to do bad. it's easier to follow dharma when you aren't starving to death or just trying to make ends meet. the more we can help people live comfortably, the better they'll be situated to do The Buddhist Thing so yeah, feed the hungry and clothe the naked and heal the sick and don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
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Aug 10, 2021 04:11
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did you act perfectly? probably not, i'm sure there was something to be done better. maybe you were stereotyping along some dimension. maybe it was just your sketchometer picking up a sketchy situation. maybe you should have really figured out that they wanted money and given that. maybe they wanted a conversation and wanted to talk. maybe they really just wanted to have something to eat and not have to talk for a little, so your actions (ignoring your mental state for a bit) were precisely what would help them most. don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. it's next to impossible to act perfectly without first achieving enlightenment. look back at what you did (only you were there in the first person, so only you have the requisite access to do this) and learn from the bits that were imperfect, but also don't throw out a partially- or mostly-right act because it was only 95% or whatever. the main thing here is that someone asked for food and got it.
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Aug 10, 2021 06:15
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eSporks posted:Do we have a thread for Taosim, is Taosim allowed here? taoism with the magic, or nah? i don't know much about it either way - just curious
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Aug 31, 2021 16:55
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taoism as practiced is basically inextricable from chinese folk religion*. clearly you can decide that you just care about particular texts, but you're not gonna be taoist-ing in a way that's recognizable by most other practitioners. it sounds like youre reading the texts which is cool and all, but thats not all that goes into a religion (unless youre doing a protestant reformation type thing but thats gonna be a tough sell) * sure this is hyperbole but only a little like you wouldn't read the bhagavad gita and say that's all there is to being hindu (considering "hinduism" a single thing is its own hilarious can of worms of course), similar things can be said wrt. abrahamic texts, guru granth sahib and sikhi, etc reading the texts is cool but as with buddhism, youll want to find a temple
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Sep 1, 2021 01:41
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it's not the temple you need, it's the people who go there and know poo poo about taoism
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Sep 1, 2021 05:10
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i remember thinking "wtf they were clearly dying, why did those dumb emperors think they were becoming immortal when they drank mercury?" and then somebodys like "dude chinese immortals arent fuckin highlander theyre wispy spirit things that can fly and stuff" and then i looked up xian and it made way more sense
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Sep 1, 2021 22:20
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holy poo poo horse paste is turning maga chuds into immortals
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Sep 1, 2021 22:21
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I did not know that, thanks! Makes good sense, tbh!
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Sep 1, 2021 23:48
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:There is no part of you which is consistent. except my posts 
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Sep 24, 2021 02:15
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spacegrass if you believe that you are prophesying please speak to a mental health professional
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Sep 26, 2021 17:41
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there's literally over a thousand years of indian buddhist philosophy that uses what's also called aristotelian view of contradiction. i doubt this is unique to the indian tradition
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Sep 27, 2021 05:17
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the more arms you have the more snacks you can eat at once. little debbie is a bodhisattva idk why theyre not limited by number of mouths, maybe thats part of enlightenment gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi starcrunch
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Oct 17, 2021 02:33
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im moving next month and it turns out the new place is less than two miles from a local buddhist center for the first time in my life i might have an actual sangha. im so excited
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Oct 17, 2021 02:41
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i've heard that story as well (with a strawberry instead of nectar); i heard it as a kid in martial arts classes. the takeaway was basically living mindfully and enjoying the strawberry without letting the inevitable destruction ruin it (nb parallel with aging, general worries, etc) idk what tolstoy was on about but id recommend reading tolstoy as telling his own stories for his own reasons than as an authorarive interpreter of buddhist parables. i just looked it up and the interpretation i give seems to he the standard one
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Dec 15, 2021 06:24
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yeah, generally agreed with nessus, fluffy dog et al. it kind of depends in the telling if the person is mindfully enjoying vs. trying to escape from their predicament into sensual pleasure etc etc
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Dec 15, 2021 20:05
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