/lit/ - Literature

>>22896994
You can read the Dhammapada online or just listen to an audiobook on youtube, it's a very short collection of aphorisms. You can also read suttas (of which In the Buddha's Words is a compilation alongside commentaries) online on accesstoinsight.org
I would also recommend listening to talks by monks (Thanissaro, Punnadhammo, Vimalaramsi are three I resonate with) on youtube in order to get a bit of concrete information alongside your readings

>>21013605
>20th century American fundamentalism which makes sense since that's where atheism historically traces to
ok so just to be clear, you are a teenager, developmentally disabled, or an American

>>20462345
>how to sit in complete darkness for 49 days and have a great time
Pretty sure I did this from March 2020 onward

What's the best form of meditation? There are so many.

>>20410243
What is there to "prove" about rejecting various substance delusions? If nairatmya is the essence of Buddhism and I contend that it is, it would be incumbent on you to show there are permanent eternal unchanging substance(s), since I can just ad absurdum them until you are blue in the face as Vishnu from repeating the same bit about how fake things must be real because otherwise there's a contradiction in other fake things

>>20344203
Based and beyond good and evil

>>20048111
>how do you know that everything is empty of inherent existence then? because everything is interdependent
These are highly abbreviated and compressed answers, by the way. Entire works have been written by Buddhists for which these are merely the closing lines. Interdependence, for instance, is a contraction of the twelvefold chain of dependent origination such that it is boiled down to "all phenomena are caused to appear from other phenomena." Inherent existence, meanwhile, is taken to imply attributes like permanence or an unchanging nature, and these attributes are argued to be incoherent, e.g. a permanent thing could not experience change or have agency, which would lead to the breakdown of causation and no longer explain the appearances of things, etc., so it is to be rejected, and thus things are empty of such falsely imputed attributes

>>19940403
There is no supreme creator God, but physicalism is wrong. The only problem is suffering.

Schope was relying on translations which among other things rendered dukkha as dolor, "pain," and his entire appreciation of Buddhism is based on assuming it is in agreement with his pessimism and quieting of the will in order to overcome pain. It is less a matter of pain and suffering and more that the elements (dharma) of experience as grasped are in a state of commotion or unrest... one suffers in the sense that this can be experienced as pain if his mind is weak or clouded and sees lasting substance in any of this momentariness to cling to. See Stcherbatsky's work for a good secondary source on Buddhism.

>there is no inherent meaning in a text
This is only a problem for a philosophy devoid of soteriology or devoid of any sense of ultimate meaning. If you are content to merely "explain" it is not philosophy and more of a scientific approach. In that case, yes language has no inherent meaning, just signs we put together to create meaning. But then what? If there is no further answer it is like the owner's manual of a television set.

>>19704777
Yes

>>19689411
Buddhists believe "the soul," like any other element of experience, has no permanence. A good, but somewhat old, introductory text is Stcherbatsky's Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word "Dharma."

>>19650942
Always has been.

The Lankavatara Sutra

>>19545656
From the Buddhist pov if you are "reborn" in a heavenly realm, which was the goal of the mainline theism at the time Buddhism started, you are still subject to dependent origination and therefore death. Gods are effectively demoted from being eternal to being merely super-human. In the nikayas for instance there are suttas where Buddha claims Brahmā only appeared in his realm after passing from a previous realm, one he does not remember due to ignorance while Buddha knows of it. So gods still "exist" but they are constrained by many of the same conditions as humans.

I made this thread yesterday but it died. I'm unsure if it's just because what I posted was retarded, or if it was too late at night to get replies. regardless I'm pasting it again:

Hello anons. I recently came across this passage in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil:

To this day, the most powerful people have still bowed down in veneration before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate, final
renunciation: why have they bowed down like this? They sensed a superior force in the saint and, as it were, behind the question-mark of his
frail and pathetic appearance, a force that wants to test itself through
this sort of conquest. They sensed a strength of will in which they
could recognize and honor their own strength and pleasure in domination. When they honored the saint, they honored something in themselves. Furthermore, the sight of the saint made them suspicious: “No
one would desire such a monstrosity of negation, of anti-nature, for
nothing,” they said to (and asked of) themselves. “Perhaps there is a
reason for it, perhaps the ascetic has inside information about some very
great danger, thanks to his secret counselors and visitors?” Enough: in
front of the saint, the powerful of the world learned a new fear, they
sensed a new power, an alien, still unconquered enemy: – it was the
“will to power” that made them stop in front of the saint. They had to ask
him – –

--------- End of quote (he already used a bunch of quotation marks and I didn't feel like editing them to single quotes so that I could put double quotes around the entire thing)

So I don't really know why, but I absolutely love this passage, it almost gives me chills. Recommendations for stuff similar to this? Or with this feel? Or at least somehow related to the absolute strength of one's will power, going above and beyond? And inb4 somebody mentions it, not his other works. But it can be anything, fiction or non-fiction. And on another note, why does it end with two dashes?

>>19475875
based roerich poster

>>19453850
I don't consider myself much of a proselytizer but people should not be hostile to wisdom literature because it has been disfigured by corporate interests into something vulgar. That these interests go to great lengths to mutilate it says something, I think, about its power.

>>19431836
>Transcendental categories such as universals, time, the self, words, the past, ethics, etc. cannot be accounted for
ftfy

I don't take orders from a volcano

>>19205631
>the buddhist sutras in theravada.
Entire passages of the nikayas are contained in the prajñaparamita sutras, which the heart sutra is a condensed version of. It's all Buddhism. Keep coping hyperprotestant, it doesn't work like that and the sutta pitaka is not the "buddhist bible"

>>19149482
>going to hell
Yes.jpeg, in order to liberate the sentient beings there

>>19005410
Too slow. Buddha beat him by 500 years

>>18882896
I doubt the author has read the prajñaparamita literature or he wouldn't make claims other than emptiness
>>18883252
no there are actually different sanskrit terms used; the Yogacara delineate this in deep scholastic detail e.g. Mahayanasamgraha, Cheng Weishi Lun, etc. Mind ends up being a form of consciousness along with the five senses which are also (somewhat oddly) considered consciousnesses (sight, sound, smell etc.) so mind becomes a consciousness of thoughts in the way that smell is a consciousness of odors
>>18883947
Yeah the brahmajala sutra in the digha nikaya