Of course it would. Buddhism teaches karma, the law of strict retribution from which there is no escape. And because there is no loving creator God in Buddhism, there's no one you can appeal to for mercy, grace, or forgiveness. A perfect fit.
Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
201–210 of 423 posts
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but Buddhists are not "people of the book" like Abrahamic religions are. You mean modern Buddhists aren't. Early Muslims considered the Buddhists they encountered as "people of the book." Source: https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2018/14...
Shahrastani, whose book Kitab al milal wan nihal is sitting in front of me right now, had a lot of things to report about Buddhists, and not only that verdict. Have you read him? Furthermore, Biruni on this subject alone is notoriously unreliable, relying on secondhand sources.
> had a lot of things to report about Buddhists
Would love to know more ...
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
"majority" and "minority" are not about raw numbers but power dynamics in this context. "colonialism" refers to extracting whatever idea or artifact is seen as valuable from a culture or a land without consent and/or without respecting the moral rights of who invented or made it. Additionally, you can read the wikipedia page. (edited for clarity: different people use majority/minority differently depending on the con…
> "majority" and "minority" are never about raw numbers but power dynamics. So the concept "minority rule" is a contradiction in terms, since if a group rules it's per definition the majority?
If you are talking about power, it is an oxymoron.
If you are talking about numbers, it is not.
In this context it's the first.
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#204>It feels anti human. Because it is. The zeitgeist on the left (so, academia) is consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing, and a great deal of intellectual work has been done to post hoc rationalize these feelings and package them in catchy phrases. Terms like "cultural appropriation" and "privilege" or "systematic racism" or "toxic masculinity", may have some technically useful meanings to anthropologist…
While I find some parts of your sympathetic, conflating the left with academia is not really a valid approach. That some (on the left) have picked up on academic usage of some words or models is perhaps more accurate, and the misuse of words and terms. Which is far more prevalent in my experience. There was an interesting article about some social inequalities where when we talk about something more -is actually maki…
Remember that academic findings compete with divine truths. Reality has a known liberal bias.
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sutta central is the main Pali canon English translation source nowadays, also access to insight is mainly home of Thannisaro, not Bodhi Sutta central has it https://suttacentral.net/an8.51/en/sujato?layout=plain&refer... As for that sutta, the Pali canon is absolutely huge, the Mahayana sutras even more so, the majority of the latter haven’t been translated into English even. Most Buddhists, even historically, do no…
Quoted post unavailable.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: can you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments in general? It looks like you've been doing that repeatedly, unfortunately. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#206For Hindus, Buddha was just one of the 10 avatars of Vishnu and he came for a time and purpose. It was never meant to be a separate religion but just took Hindu teachings on meditation and enlightenment and got adapted into another "ism". All the core teachings lie in Hindu scriptures, including Yoga, Meditation etc.
> For Hindus, Buddha was just one of the 10 avatars of Vishnu The Bhagavatam mentions 22 avatars of Vishnu. The arbitrary selection of 10 which sometimes include Buddha is a later day invention. > never meant to be a separate religion but just took Hindu teachings on meditation and enlightenment and got adapted into another "ism". This is revisionist nonsense.
There are many more avatars but the dashavatars are considered most well known.
Ah the revionist calling out revisionism , the irony of the comment on isms
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#207For Hindus, Buddha was just one of the 10 avatars of Vishnu and he came for a time and purpose. It was never meant to be a separate religion but just took Hindu teachings on meditation and enlightenment and got adapted into another "ism". All the core teachings lie in Hindu scriptures, including Yoga, Meditation etc.
For Hindus, claiming everything in the subcontinent as their own seems like a favorite passtime. Jainism, Buddhism are not part of Hinduism and never were.
There are thousands of sects of Hinduism and most still list themselves as such until the British came in
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#208I’m a Catholic (so I have … my own view on Buddhism) but I lived in SEA for a long time. I want to say, this article is very good. The buddhism as practiced in the west has very little to do with actual practices in the east. But, Buddhism is also very confusing, and it’s hard to say “what is the true buddhism” (mahayana, therevada, vajrayana and zen buddhism in Japan (formally mahayana) are all very different)
What makes you think what goes on in SEA today is the actual Buddhism? This is so wrong. The current practices in SEA is so far from what the Buddha actually taught.
That's the opposite of what the comment said.
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#209In the 21st century, in the West, "Buddhism" is treated as a set of stress-relief techniques and slogans. This isn't strictly limited to the West: at least two of Taiwan's Four Great Mountains (i.e. schools of Buddhism) are similarly inclined, with additional cultish elements thrown in for good measure. The cultish elements had already developed independently within corporate cultures, but adding Buddhist slogans and…
> Except Buddhism is also a philosophy of action, and a set of guides for correct action. Acting rightly entails seeing rightly, and so Buddhism includes an appreciation for and guide towards empirical inquiry. This was always terrifying to authority figures, and Asia only didn't develop modern science first because Buddhist logic and experimentation were among the casualties of The Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars.
Marcus Aurelius' Meditations includes a sentence that, in a translation I read long ago and no longer have, read something like:
"You can pass your life in calm flow of happiness—if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way."
It took me way too long to realize that the "think the right way" is, by far, the easier part, and how dangerous it can be without the "act the right way". It also feels better. Fresher. Trendier. The "act the right way" looks and feels an awful lot like following all the advice your grandpa gave you. Very "gods of the copy-book headers" stuff. And isn't as immediately gratifying as the "think the right way" bit.
Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation
#210An entire piece on Buddhism and corporations doesn't use the word "suffering" once.