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On July 28 2008 10:38 BottleAbuser wrote:
Let's say I find the rewarding aspects of fulfilling my desires to outweigh the unpleasantness of when my desires are not fulfilled. I might be guaranteed a suffering-free life if I quashed all my wants, but...
eh I know what you mean 
but really what is the reasoning for giving it all up if you are not convinced there is a greater state to attain. not much point to spend your life trying to stop wanting and then to just die. if there is no ultimate goal, I agree that it is more worthwhile to indulge in life's distractions and be happy.
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You have to keep in mind that Buddhism is not a singular discipline. There are different strands with different ideas.
In my understanding, there are kinds of Buddhism that are more oriented towards "the masses," and there are more philosophical strands of buddhism. My interest is primarily in Zen, and yes, it is very influential in my thinking. I've never studied it formally, only gleaned bits here and there.
Zen tends to look beyond good and evil (no coincidence here that I am referencing Nietzsche's book, Beyond Good and Evil - there is some real overlap). It emphasizes that good and evil are interpretations. Consider the koan about the zen farmer: a zen farmer's horses run away one day. The villagers remark what bad luck this is. The zen farmer says "maybe." Next day, the zen farmer finds his horses in the countryside, and several wild horses as well. He brings these home. The villagers say "wow, what great luck!" "Maybe." The next day, the farmer's son is riding one of the wild horses and falls off and is trampled. He is crippled for life. The villagers see this as bad luck. The farmer says "maybe." Later on, an army comes through the village recruiting young people to go to war, but the farmer's son cannot go because he is crippled. Later, news comes back to the village that all the men who were recruited died in battle. The farmer is seen as lucky, but again, to this he would say only "maybe."
And see, this story illustrates that good and bad (good and bad luck, in this case) are situational, and that if we are seeing clearly (without imposing our concepts or limitations on reality) we realize that there is no good and bad. What seems good can be the seed that spawns bad, and the bad may in turn be the seed that spawns good. There really is no good or bad. The world simply IS.
So, to the extent that karma is wrapped up in notions of morality and justice, it is wrong - I believe Zen would reject it.
However, I read karma like this: if we put out anger, we foster an angry environment. If we act with love and compassion, we foster love and compassion. This is not a system of justice or morality whereby you will be rewarded or punished in line with your actions, but rather an observation that our motion through this world has consequences.
But we should complicate this view by remembering that we don't fully determine ourselves - the world acts on us, and our way of being in the world is shaped from beyond us (we don't determine our language, we don't determine our culture, etc). Now, to clarify, we aren't fully determined either. Rather we are a dance with the wider world, whereby we create the wider world and that world creates us in turn. (You can get ideas of karma out of this, as well).
Keep in mind, too, that Buddhism is critical of the notion of the subject. (By subject I am referring to the grammatical function "I" in a sentence, such as "I went to the store. I was nice to a person." etc). There is no "I." In the same way that people bracket off certain events in the world, as in the Zen Farmer story, and call them "good" and "bad," we bracket off forms from the wider world and call them "you" and "me." If we clear our vision, we realize there is no "you" and "me" - what we call "you" and "me" are actually nodes within systems of food, waste, and energy. Food comes in, energy comes in, waste goes out, energy goes out. We do not refer to your colon as you, because your colon is part of something larger - a body that we call "you." But that is also narrow minded. "You" are also the world, just as your colon is you.
This is all important to keep in mind when we consider karma, because we are all one, and we all create this world and create each other constantly.
By the way, thinking about things in this way allows us to get a glimpse into a critique of science. This is dangerous to talk about here, because TL.net largely worships science just as people historically (in the West) have worshipped God. But you can see that science is the very process of bracketing and labeling things, looking at things in simple networks of cause and effect. This is the very thing Buddhism, in part, is trying to transcend.
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On July 28 2008 11:01 nA.Inky wrote:
You have to keep in mind that Buddhism is not a singular discipline. There are different strands with different ideas.
In my understanding, there are kinds of Buddhism that are more oriented towards "the masses," and there are more philosophical strands of buddhism. My interest is primarily in Zen, and yes, it is very influential in my thinking. I've never studied it formally, only gleaned bits here and there.
Zen tends to look beyond good and evil (no coincidence here that I am referencing Nietzsche's book, Beyond Good and Evil - there is some real overlap). It emphasizes that good and evil are interpretations. Consider the koan about the zen farmer: a zen farmer's horses run away one day. The villagers remark what bad luck this is. The zen farmer says "maybe." Next day, the zen farmer finds his horses in the countryside, and several wild horses as well. He brings these home. The villagers say "wow, what great luck!" "Maybe." The next day, the farmer's son is riding one of the wild horses and falls off and is trampled. He is crippled for life. The villagers see this as bad luck. The farmer says "maybe." Later on, an army comes through the village recruiting young people to go to war, but the farmer's son cannot go because he is crippled. Later, news comes back to the village that all the men who were recruited died in battle. The farmer is seen as lucky, but again, to this he would say only "maybe."
And see, this story illustrates that good and bad (good and bad luck, in this case) are situational, and that if we are seeing clearly (without imposing our concepts or limitations on reality) we realize that there is no good and bad. What seems good can be the seed that spawns bad, and the bad may in turn be the seed that spawns good. There really is no good or bad. The world simply IS.
So, to the extent that karma is wrapped up in notions of morality and justice, it is wrong - I believe Zen would reject it.
how can suffering not be considered bad? and peace not be considered good?
no other complaint with your post, enjoyed reading it.
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Pointless to say one school is Buddhist and another is not. There is no Buddhism. There is only what people practice and believe. We need to get past the idea of "pure forms." Look at practice. In practice, there are many different Buddhisms. Like BottleAbuser says, some Buddhists worship Buddha. Some Buddhists worship Christ. Some Buddhists are atheistic.
Someone here referred to the laws of cause and effect. In MY undertanding of Zen, cause and effect really don't have a place. Cause and effect is a concept, a gross simplification of reality.
In general, Zen is critical of dualistic thinking, such as natural/supernatural. In this, it has much in common with modern Western philosophy, particularly post-modernism and post-structuralism (I see Zen as having anticipated these developments by many centuries). As to dualisms like the above, to posit a natural and supernatural is to posit the existence of two worlds that bleed into each other. This is nonsense. There is only one world. There may be events that strike us as "magical." But they are still real and still contained within one existence.
As to the "purpose" of Buddhism, well, it is said that the purpose of Zen is purposelessness. This upsets many westerners (as can be seen in this thread). Why would I give up purpose? Well, because purpose comes from desire, and suffering comes from desire. So we give up desire and purpose to give up suffering. BUT - how do you give up purpose - on PURPOSE? We have a paradox. In a very real sense, schools like Zen are teaching us how to escape from prison by not trying to escape from prison. Zen is not about telling you not to fuck or do drugs or make money - it's about learning to "get with yourself." And part of "getting with yourself" is not trying to get with yourself.
I recommend a VERY CLOSE reading of Nietzche's "Beyond Good and Evil" for a more Western explanation of these ideas. He gives the idea there is no singular, coherent subject - "I." Instead, you and I are composed of drives - moral drives, intellectual drives, greedy drives, lustful drives, hungry drives, etc. These are all competing in a kind of interior political system. Now, getting back to Zen, Zen is about learning a kind of harmony in the interior kingdom by not trying to impose order, but also not trying not to impose order.
A student is said to have asked - "how do I give up purpose on purpose?" A zen master is said to have replied "just keep trying for another 5 years."
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Travis asks "how can suffering not be considered bad? And peace not considered good?"
Good question. The answer is they CAN be considered those things, but to do so is to bracket off parts of reality and not see the whole picture. Remember the idea that "suffering comes from desire." It is our desire not to experience events that we label "suffering" that makes suffering bad.
Another angle: when people are talking about good and bad, they usually mean Good and Bad, meaning something absolute and universal. But again, the zen farmer story illustrates how what seems to be Good is really a setup for what is Bad, and what is Bad is a setup for what is Good. So we say there is no Good and Bad, only experience. Only reality.
Think of this: a baby is born. Beautiful and sweet. He grows up to be Hitler.
Think of a case from an early episode of Lost: Locke says "see this cocoon? There is a baby moth in there. It will have to struggle for days to get free. I could cut it out of there right now and set it free, but it would not survive. Struggling to get out of the cocoon gives the moth the strength to survive. Struggle is nature's way of making us stronger."
People today are worried about sustainability in an environmental sense. They say we are doing great injustice to each other and to the environment. But consider that if we did find a truly sustainable way of life, so many more people would live to suffer and die. So many more wars might be fought.... Etc.
Consider that the die-off of the human race might mean a glorious paradise for many other lifeforms that would grow up in our place.
In other words, we make judgments on good and bad from a point of reference. Zen is about learning to see beyond "me" and "you." Learning to stop isolating bits of the world from the rest, and instead seeing the big picture, seeing the unity and beauty in all things, even suffering. Remember, death is part of life which is part of death. One does not exist without the other. You cannot isolate beauty from ugliness. Indeed, beauty and ugliness are just interpretations of what IS.
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On July 28 2008 11:26 nA.Inky wrote:
Travis asks "how can suffering not be considered bad? And peace not considered good?"
Good question. The answer is they CAN be considered those things, but to do so is to bracket off parts of reality and not see the whole picture. Remember the idea that "suffering comes from desire." It is our desire not to experience events that we label "suffering" that makes suffering bad.
Another angle: when people are talking about good and bad, they usually mean Good and Bad, meaning something absolute and universal. But again, the zen farmer story illustrates how what seems to be Good is really a setup for what is Bad, and what is Bad is a setup for what is Good. So we say there is no Good and Bad, only experience. Only reality.
Think of this: a baby is born. Beautiful and sweet. He grows up to be Hitler.
Think of a case from an early episode of Lost: Locke says "see this cocoon? There is a baby moth in there. It will have to struggle for days to get free. I could cut it out of there right now and set it free, but it would not survive. Struggling to get out of the cocoon gives the moth the strength to survive. Struggle is nature's way of making us stronger."
People today are worried about sustainability in an environmental sense. They say we are doing great injustice to each other and to the environment. But consider that if we did find a truly sustainable way of life, so many more people would live to suffer and die. So many more wars might be fought.... Etc.
Consider that the die-off of the human race might mean a glorious paradise for many other lifeforms that would grow up in our place.
In other words, we make judgments on good and bad from a point of reference. Zen is about learning to see beyond "me" and "you." Learning to stop isolating bits of the world from the rest, and instead seeing the big picture, seeing the unity and beauty in all things, even suffering. Remember, death is part of life which is part of death. One does not exist without the other. You cannot isolate beauty from ugliness. Indeed, beauty and ugliness are just interpretations of what IS.
Ok I agree with everything you say, but I have to ask. Doesn't taking a truly objective view like that make one callous to the suffering of others?
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It's all well and nice that we can say "labels are just labels - they describe imperfectly the state of what is." But we use them for a reason - they're useful, they save time, they help us function more easily and simplify problems into tractable decisions.
They also lead us into erroneous (hm... kind of dangerous word to use here) decisions. So we keep trying to refine our labels and classifications and reduce the error rate. Then someone comes along and says "the labels are inherently flawed, as they cannot completely capture what is." But the proposed alternative is... what? We can't consider everything in a reasonable amount of time. Or go the opposite direction, just do anything because nothing is truly "bad."
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I don't think it makes one unfeeling to quantify others' suffering. There's an incredible amount of tragedy out there, and expanding our limits instead of being saturated very early at "how horrible. That's unthinkable" allows us to contemplate more accurately the state of the world. Am I still making sense?
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On July 28 2008 11:34 BottleAbuser wrote:
I don't think it makes one unfeeling to quantify others' suffering. There's an incredible amount of tragedy out there, and expanding our limits instead of being saturated very early at "how horrible. That's unthinkable" allows us to contemplate more accurately the state of the world. Am I still making sense?
who are you replying to
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nA.Inky I enjoyed your posts very much and will take a look in the book you recommended. 
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I don't know any more. I suppose it started with "doesn't an objective view make you callous to others' suffering?"
Maybe you won't go crazy emo whenever you see something bad happen any more if you're more aware of the shit that's out there, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I believe myself capable of making moral decisions, which take into account others' suffering as equal to my own interests, despite not being emotionally involved.
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Travis asks if the intense relativism in strands of Zen might make people callous.
Good question too! I can't answer for anyone but myself. What do you think?
In my view, in this context, zen teaches humility. Can you see how this might be so? Again, consider the zen farmer story. Notice particularly how humble the farmer is. Something as (deceptively) basic as good and bad, and he admits he doesn't know which is which.
This humility causes me to try to see things from more than just my perspective. I also see that because of how small I am, and how the world works, I can never live in such a way that I cause no pain to others. But I better understand the pain and suffering of others, and I better understand my own pain and suffering. So I try to live with compassion (which is acting towards others as if they were yourself - and again, part of the "logical" conclusion of Zen thinking is that we are all one - you ARE me, and I AM you). But I also live with an attitude of acceptance - there will always be pain and suffering in the world, and I can choose to see that as evil, or I can learn to see it as beautiful. To some degree, I can choose how I respond to pain and suffering).
People who have the enlightenment experience (via meditation or via psychedelic drugs) report a feeling of pure peace and the sense that love flows through all things and that the universe is a manifestation of pure love. I won't claim that I've felt that exactly - I've felt similar things, though - but it is something of a project for me. (Do note that I'm not a Zen Buddhist or a Buddhist at all, I just borrow from it and respect it greatly).
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Reminds me of Heinlein's Pantheistic Solipsism. Ah this is getting way over my head; I'm a simple guy who plays games and only questions the world when stuff gets in the way of that.
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Thank you BuGzlToOnl. I wish you luck with the book. I recommend the translation by Walter Kauffman. On the subject of Zen, I recommend books by Alan Watts. Some of his texts can be found online. He is very accessible.
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BottleAbuser says: It's all well and nice that we can say "labels are just labels - they describe imperfectly the state of what is." But we use them for a reason - they're useful, they save time, they help us function more easily and simplify problems into tractable decisions.
They also lead us into erroneous (hm... kind of dangerous word to use here) decisions. So we keep trying to refine our labels and classifications and reduce the error rate. Then someone comes along and says "the labels are inherently flawed, as they cannot completely capture what is." But the proposed alternative is... what? We can't consider everything in a reasonable amount of time. Or go the opposite direction, just do anything because nothing is truly "bad."
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Ok, but it could be pointed out that "useful" and "erroneous" are themselves provisional perspectives. What is useful? Why?
You acknowledge the danger in your words. Good for you!
To many people, this Earth is useful. Slaves are useful.
We also fall into dualistic thinking - nature/artifice good/evil useful/worthless innocent/corrupt pure/impure us/them. These ALL have done great violence at one time or another! Think about it!
Our dualistic thinking has the effect of disintegration on the world. It is part of a process that you can call "othering" in which one comes to see themselves as separate from "others," and in a sense, in opposition to others.
Think of how nature is used (this is a good one to use with you, Bottle, because you recognize that there is no artifice - ALL is nature.)
Nature is seen as that which is good (the fallacious appeal to nature). So homosexuals are labeled evil because they are "unnatural." Capitalism is justified because it is seen as "natural:"
Nature is seen as that which is bad or inferior. "We must rise up above nature - we are not mere animals!" So this lends itself to the most insane of imperial tendencies. We must CONQUER nature, and TRANSFORM it to that which is good - Human Reason must improve upon the natural world.
Etc.
I say all this, but bear in mind that I too use labels. The best I can say - keeping in mind again that I'm not a Zen practitioner - is that we must be humble and careful in our thinking. Nietzsche does a lot to deal with dualistic thinking, and the more recent philosopher Derrida - who is very difficult to read - deals with language in this sense even more thoroughly.
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Hong Kong20321 Posts
hi this blog has been very intersting thank you travis bottleabuser and na.inky most of all !
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United States22883 Posts
Out of all "religions", I'm likely closer to Buddhism than anything else because it's more of a way of life than anything. With that said, don't get any holy misconceptions about its practitioners either. The people that created it and practiced it throughout history abused it for their own political purposes, just like every other religion.
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United States22883 Posts
Inky, Zen Buddhism isn't about complete relativity like that. In some ways it is, but it still follows closely with dharma. Suffering is real, but to move further towards enlightenment you must not crave an answer to suffering. There's also a code of ethics in there as well, so good and bad exist.
Zen meditation is about concentrating on not thinking, so philosophizing about it gets you nowhere.
If you want real relativity of good and bad, you should look at Confucianism but that was crafted and abused for political purposes probably more than anything else besides Hindu.
EDIT: I also think it's a bit silly to get advice or "commit" to religions without actually practicing it. By that I mean most Americans who call themselves Buddhists only understand select bits and pieces and while it may help them in their lives, they're really not practicing Buddhists. They're picking and choosing what they already feel is accurate, which means they're using a completely separate code of morals or ideas. In that way, they could just as easily call themselves Zoroastrians or Sufi or anything else.
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if you do good things in this life - your next life reincarnation will be better
at least that's what i got out of the Journey to the West
for example the monk Sanzang was the reincarnation of 10 lives of cultivating his conduct.
the other common type of karma that occurs in one's lifetime is insignificant really - although it does affect the Positive and Negative levels, etc.
i'm not buddhist but in china if u pass a monastery or anything you will worship the statues and light incense no matter if you are buddhist or not
i think buddhist is one of the most sensible religions - it has a much better 'track record' than the other ' Tumultuous Three ' lol christianity judaism and islam
in the old times people did pray to buddhas and bodhisattvas, arhats, etc. but nowadays in its modern form most people are just taking lessons out of buddhism just like confucianism - etc. although buddhism has some religious elements while confucianism is mostly composed of philosophivcal elements
But as the Monkey King Victorious Fighting Buddha Sun WuKong said (fictional btw), and which illustrates the peaceful nature of buddhism and it's sensibility:
"I hope that you will combine the three teachings by honouring both the Buddhist clergy and the way of Taoism, and also by educating men of talent in the Confucian tradition. I can guarentee that this will make your kingdom secure forever."
And if applied to modern day it would probably include all religions and make the world secure forever
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United States22883 Posts
Karma within your lifetime can be a healthy concept, although you shouldn't be doing the right thing because you fear it could bite you back. You should be doing the right thing because you feel it's the right thing.
Karmic reincarnation is fucking stupid. You can believe in it if you'd like, but it was designed as a tool to keep slaves as slaves and aristocrats as aristocrats. And it was damn effective. Just like Scientology was created as a scam to steal celebrities' money.
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Jibba, of your comments directed at me, the only criticism I will concede to you is that Zen is indeed a focused discipline that aims to get past conceptual thought via meditation (I'm not sure, though, that this is quite the same as not thinking), and so in that regard is less philosophical in the way that I have been in this thread. Still, implicit in the practice are all the things I have spoken of.
With regard to your comment about a moral system within Zen, I will again bring your attention to the Zen Farmer koan that I recited above. There are further koans that you might search out that specifically speak of reaching a state of mind where one stops perceiving good and evil. True, in practice, certain behaviors will be encouraged and others not, and in this sense, you could say there is a moral system to it. Still, though, even beyond the example I've already given, you must admit that morals are conceptual in nature, and given that Zen is largely about transcending conceptual thought, it is also simultaneously about transcending morality.
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EPT
