herbertherbertson asked: "I hardly ever get properly angry." you know you're low-key Buddhist af, right?

herbertherbertson:

nostalgebraist:

I don’t really know enough about Buddhism to say.

I don’t know all that much about it either (I took one well-taught class on it in college) but I know enough to know that you independently brought yourself to pretty solid restatement of how bad kharma works and how attachment leads to cycles of suffering more generally.  And more than the specifics, the sort of disappointed boredom with “sin” you talk about experiencing is very, very Buddhist.

imo rationalists and their adjacencies should really look into further into Buddhism.  The core premises–rebirth and the possibility of enlightenment–are matters of faith with not a lot of evidence (there is a little, and what’s there is facinating, but it was never enough to come close to convincing me).  Without them it did not make any sense to even consider converting, for me.  But Buddhist thinkers have spent thousands of years exploring fascinations with psychology and ethics, and a lot of what these educated and literate people thought about (most of it, in the case of the the psychology stuff) doesn’t necessarily rely on those core premises.  It’s been too long for me to remember anything specific,* but I recall reading some very old texts that had remarkably sophisticated theories about the mind–and, additionally, getting the strong impression that it was only the tip of the iceberg and that there was far more waiting to be translated or unmasked from jargon.

(* One exception–Buddhadasa’s approach to consciousness/the self was some very interesting shit once I understood all the jargon)

Interesting.  I’ve always wanted to learn more about Buddhism, but I’ve never been able to find sources on it that I enjoyed reading.

Something I’d really like – and this goes for various other religions – is a sense of the religion’s cultural “center of gravity,” the kind of sense I have about Christianity and (more weakly) Judaism.  Like, there are a lot of types of Christianity out there, but there’s enough of a common center that we can casually describe things (attitudes, emotions, moral outlooks, aesthetics…) as “Christian” (or “Catholic,” “evangelical” etc.), and I feel comfortable with this way of speaking.  If someone described a post of mine as “low-key Christian AF” I’d probably know what they meant – or one of 3 or 4 things they might have meant.

Even if some of these meanings might be based in stereotypes, they’re stereotypes that are familiar in Christian circles and that Christians may use themselves.  With Buddhism, even my stereotypes are second-hand.  Each might be traceable to real practice, but might also be an invention of some 1960s mystical self-help writer, and I have no way of knowing.

But if you go looking for writing about Buddhism’s “center of gravity,” you run into the same self-help writers and their ilk.  If you go looking for the most reputable stuff you can find, it’s academic and boring and you’re likely to miss the forest for the scrupulously footnoted trees.

Or that’s been my experience, anyway.  (Recs welcome)