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Christian Priest to Atheist to Buddhist
#22
RE: Christian Priest to Atheist to Buddhist
(May 8, 2014 at 1:08 am)Kitanetos Wrote: Rasetsu (am I spelling that right?) might have a sentence or multiple paragraphs to state about Buddhism.

Personally, I have always viewed Buddhism as more contradictory than most religions. For everything that Buddhism usually claims, it tends to always make the opposite claim as well.

It's a Kantian dynamic, IMO. And as much as I hate the "Kantian Triangle" of "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis," (because Kant never actually described it as such in any of his works, to my knowledge), there is an element of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic that seems to be part of reality.

Atheism only has meaning as a word, because Theism has meaning as a word. It's descriptive because it is opposite to another force, and the characteristic definition only necessary because of the dichotomy. Things are not so simply Black or White, but rather Greyscale, so we have varying gradual degrees from theism to atheism, and wherever the individual aligns themselves on the spectrum is the synthesis of two polar opposites.

A lot of things in life are like that, and Buddhism, particularly Zen buddhism, seems to be aimed at divining truth out of seemingly contradictory ideas -- to the point of absurdity -- as seen in Zen koans, and from Beginner's Mind to Zen Mind, back to Beginner's Mind.

There's a Linji school of buddhism responsible for the "Zen Slap" that was more or less referenced in I Heart Huckabees.

As part of the iconoclastic tradition, Linji Yixuan would instruct a student to meditate. They could be at this for hours, or days, and Linji would run up, and start beating the everloving fuck out of his student with a cane, or a horsetail whip. Most initiates would continue meditating through the beating, which would continue by surprise attack, until the student either took the whip, hit him back, or shouted at him to stop. The point being, that the student had not achieved enlightenment by tuning out the beating, but by responding to stop it, eroding the distinction between the student and the master.
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RE: Christian Priest to Atheist to Buddhist - by Rampant.A.I. - May 8, 2014 at 8:51 pm

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