/lit/ - Literature

>>17902793
Kek, this is the whole fad of dharma. Buddhists and Hindus do believe in such bullshit.
Even the the biggest critic of Enlightenment, UG Krishnamurti claimed to have experienced ridiculous things like his penis hole started spinning and he possessed psychic powers from which he knew the past, present and future of every man that he met.

>>17902793
Wait, what did they mean by a retracted penis?

This was the first psychic blowjob in written history.

>>17902814
>Krishnamurti claimed to have experienced ridiculous things like his penis hole started spinning

Why is it always about dicks?

>>17902793
Would buddha approve of this bigass statue?

>>17902793
Based

>>17903114
No, its too small for him.

>>17902793
>>17903133
They pale in comparison to the titanic sculptures of Western antiquity.

>According to the Roman historian Livy, the Roman general Aemilius Paullus (the victor over Macedon) saw the statue and "was moved to his soul, as if he had seen the god in person", while the 1st-century AD Greek orator Dio Chrysostom declared that a single glimpse of the statue would make a man forget all his earthly troubles.

>>17903114
>>17903133
>>17903146
Ernest Becker extensively talks about the slave instinct of humans being. And how easy it is to manipulate them by charm.

>>17903146
the Colossus statue (largest in antiquity) only stood 33m, Buddha statues reach upward of 100m.

>>17903159
one of the reasons Christianity remained such a slave minded religion is because of that.

I tried to find some commentary on this weird section but it seems that scholars are stumped by it as well. Here's the note in T.W. Rhys Davids' translation:

>Neither text nor commentary make it clear what these two marks really quite meant. The first, says Buddhaghosa, is ' like an elephant's,' and the second seems, from what follows, to be the power of extending the tongue, like a snake's, to a great length. This last is possibly derived from poetical descriptions of the tongues of flame or light playing round the disk of the sun.
>As to the means by which the Buddha made the first visible to Ambattha, Buddhaghosa simply quotes Nagasena (at Mil. 169) to show that he made a visible image of himself fully dressed in his robes. And the difficulty is to see how that would have helped matters. Only an historical explanation of the meaning of the marks can here guide us to what is inferred.

Rhys Davids and Maurice Walsh both translate it as sheathed privates rather than retracted, but it's still not clear what it means. There is probably some mythological background missing, the 32 marks haven't been found in any Brahmanical texts, so they remain an enigma.

>>17903205
This is pure speculation, but I heard some say that this is a weird interpolation that wanted to legitimize the buddha's authority by making him seem more like a brahmin sage, therefore making him more palatable to possible converts.

buddha was like it's simple guys, just chill out and take it easy, don't get too attached, go with the flow
and then for thousands of years retarded street shitting incel monks added layer upon layer of convoluted nonsense and lore on top

>>17902793
>When and where did the idea of the buddha as some sort of atheistic empiricist-psychologist guru come about?
DT Suzuki being a carnie, before it in the west Buddhism was rightfully part of the "orientalist" esoteric tradition.

>>17903241
How do you know what the Buddha taught? Have you got a time machine?

>>17903334
I am the Buddha