You're enlightened – now what?

Chanting mantras (???) is not an example of being "non-quietist." Political quietism is the belief that the material world is basically screwed and there's no use in bashing your head in trying to fix it. It means advocating total disengaging from government—including not bothering to advocate for less activist government. That politics will not alleivate our true causes of suffering is a trivial corollary to the First Noble Truth in Buddhism. There are occasional strains of Christian quietism but overall, Abrahamic faiths don't believe you should just sit around while the world is burning. They think you should try to fix government.

Judaism begins as an explicitly political project. There are kings who are "wicked" or not based on whether they oppress the people and worship "foreign" gods. The project of the prophets is to reform these kings. The Jews are sent into Babylonian exile. This isn't taken as a sign that land doesn't matter, you can be Jewish anywhere, what's really important is spiritual worship, or whatever else. No, this is taken as a sign that God is punishing the Jews, so they need to be on their best behavior to get their land back! All of the religions that derive from Judaism take from it the goal that the state works to protect the poor, do justice, and promote true religion.

Okay, Christianity comes along as a reformation/expansion of Judaism. It has some quietistic elements ("render unto Caesar" is quietistic) and emerging under persecution leads to a little bit of fatalism about reforming the state, but post-Constantine, the project is mostly about creating some sort of symbiosis between the popes and the emperors. There are two spheres of influence (secular and religious), but even within the secular sphere, there is an explicit goal of perfecting the state. Even with the Protestant Reformation, while there are some quietistic strains like the Quakers and the literal Quietists, you still end up with things like Calvin running Geneva and the Westphalian settlement still assumes that each territory will have an explicit religious affiliation.

So then there’s Islam. Islam I know the least about, but obviously jihad is a central concern of Islam, and there’s an explicit goal of creating a politicial sphere in which God’s justice reigns. Islam is an explicit continuation of the Jewish/Christian project with the goal of creating a universal kingdom of divinely inspired governance. There are some Suffis and others who think the real jihad is the spiritual jihad, but physical jihad is also a pretty big theme in the history of Islam.

In the Enlightenment, humanistic atheism emerges as another sucessor to the Abrahamic tradition. It drops the supernatural elements and the belief in God, but it absolutely doubles down on political perfectionism. There are a lot of conflicting schools of thought on how to arrange the state to achieve maximum liberty, equality, and fraternity, but everyone is on board with that being the goal. There are essentially no big movements that say “politics is dirty and never helps; your best bet is to just reform youself.” Even movements that seem like they might want to say that, like Ayn Rand-ism, end up swerving at the last second and saying “government sucks and never helps… and therefore we need to put all of effort into creating a political movement to stymie the spread of government and create libertopia.”

Nietzsche’s Geneology of Morality is pretty fanciful as history, but as a metaphor for what happened that made the West different from prior and other cultures, it’s not that crazy. At some point, the Abrahamic cultures decided that we can and should do something to keep the Nobles from trampling over everybody else. This is an important historical change in how we see the world.

Pre-Western Buddhism was just not like this. The political goal of Buddhism is to get tax money for the sangha. That’s it. There’s nothing about trying to reform the state, to get the kings to be less vicious, to get the kings to live by the laws of dharma. It’s just not there. You see political agitation and interventions by monastaries all the time, but the interventions always amount to “give us tax money, so we can afford to do our Buddhism stuff on our own!” They never make demands about reforming government qua government until after Western contact. (NB Islam is absolutely a part of the West, and any schema that doesn’t put it in the West is garbage.) Even Ashoka, who kinda felt bad about all his conquering, didn't actually stop doing violence after converting to Buddhism. He just started sponsoring a bunch of monasteries and councils and whatnot. And this was not considered a sign he was a "fake" Buddhist. It was just assumed that being king is bad for your karma because inevitably you get sucked into doing a ton of violence. The king's best bet is to give enough money to monks to balance all this bad karma out.

If you look around today, you can find various ethnic groups using “Buddhism” as the name of their cause, but look closely at what’s going on with them. Even after Western contact, the goal is still not “let’s get rid of the Burmese generals because they’re oppressing the poor”. It’s “let’s get rid of the Karen because they’re not like us.” It’s just a classic case of seeing religion and ethnicity as two names for the same thing, and then trying to stamp out other ethnic groups. This sucks, but it doesn’t bear on the historical nature of Buddhism or whether Buddhism typically is more quietistic than Abrahamic religions. It just means that genocide is a common impulse in the modern world, and when it arises, it often latches onto "religion" as the name for the group it's trying to eliminate.

The blog Love of All Wisdom has some good posts on the historical/philosophical implications of quietism in Buddhism: http://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/category/applied-philosophy/...

Apparently, just as I thought, the author doesn't know about enlightenment. No, that doesn't imply that I am more "woke" than anyone else, or anyone else is more "woke" than me. Even if it does, so?

Enlightenment, if you know it, you know it. You want to change the world, go ahead. You give no f* about the world, you do you.

(Critically) Questioning enlightened people about what they will do for themselves or the world won't make a difference, it doesn't make the author more enlightened, more clever or sounds superior.

I will gladly ask after he finishes his words, so?

I can't change the world, so?

I can't change people to learn, so?

You aren't happy with me enlightening, so?

I enlightened, or not, so?

I will change the world, and so?

Now you are enlightened in this moment, so?