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eSporks posted:Can you link me to anything? The Wikipedia article on Daoism touches on its magical traditions. The four books in this series also give primary texts (with light secondary context) that cover different practices.
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Aug 31, 2021 22:07
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Thirteen Orphans posted:The Wikipedia article on Daoism touches on its magical traditions. The four books in this series also give primary texts (with light secondary context) that cover different practices. The wiki briefly mentions fortune telling and astrology, which virtually every religion has in some form. The source for that is this book which also mentions 200 deities. Nothing I have come across in Taoism mentions deities, and that seems to be very contrary to the Tao te Ching, so I dunno. Kinda seems like someone running wild with it. Again, admitting I could be ignorant, I am very new to Taoism. eSporks fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 01:18
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taoism as practiced is basically inextricable from chinese folk religion*. clearly you can decide that you just care about particular texts, but you're not gonna be taoist-ing in a way that's recognizable by most other practitioners. it sounds like youre reading the texts which is cool and all, but thats not all that goes into a religion (unless youre doing a protestant reformation type thing but thats gonna be a tough sell) * sure this is hyperbole but only a little like you wouldn't read the bhagavad gita and say that's all there is to being hindu (considering "hinduism" a single thing is its own hilarious can of worms of course), similar things can be said wrt. abrahamic texts, guru granth sahib and sikhi, etc reading the texts is cool but as with buddhism, youll want to find a temple
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Sep 1, 2021 01:41
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eSporks posted:Cool, I ordered that book and I'll check it out. Im curious what it means by the "trans-formative influence of sex" Check out the other three books in that series if you get the chance. His Yi Jing/I Ching book and accompanying text is good. Daoism isn’t just the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi. Daoism absolutely has had deities for much of its history. Part of this is, admittedly, interaction with Chinese Civil Religion but that’s just Chinese religious history in general. Thirteen Orphans fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 01:44
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Thanks, I'll check that stuff out, but its the type of things that generally turn me away from religion and the opposite of what made the Tao te Ching resonate so much in the first place. I'm really interested to learn about the history of it and where those ideas sprang from. The idea of needing a temple for spiritual practice goes against everything I believe personally.
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Sep 1, 2021 04:41
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it's not the temple you need, it's the people who go there and know poo poo about taoism
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Sep 1, 2021 05:10
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Rather than "Taoist magic", try looking into "Taoist alchemy". For various reasons that seems to be how much of that end of taoism got translated into English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemy Probably because a lot of it comes down through tales of sages brewing elixirs of immortality.
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Sep 1, 2021 06:56
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eSporks posted:Thanks, I'll check that stuff out, but its the type of things that generally turn me away from religion and the opposite of what made the Tao te Ching resonate so much in the first place. I'm really interested to learn about the history of it and where those ideas sprang from. The idea of needing a temple for spiritual practice goes against everything I believe personally.
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Sep 1, 2021 07:58
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Perhaps I need to dissociate my feelings for a temple with that of a Church, the community aspects of Church are great. I'll try to find one and be open to it.
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Sep 1, 2021 14:09
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:Rather than "Taoist magic", try looking into "Taoist alchemy". For various reasons that seems to be how much of that end of taoism got translated into English. Yeah the texts about things like talismanic rituals aren’t in the Western zeitgeist like alchemy/qi gong/nei gong.
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Sep 1, 2021 21:53
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i remember thinking "wtf they were clearly dying, why did those dumb emperors think they were becoming immortal when they drank mercury?" and then somebodys like "dude chinese immortals arent fuckin highlander theyre wispy spirit things that can fly and stuff" and then i looked up xian and it made way more sense
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Sep 1, 2021 22:20
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holy poo poo horse paste is turning maga chuds into immortals
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Sep 1, 2021 22:21
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Achmed Jones posted:i remember thinking "wtf they were clearly dying, why did those dumb emperors think they were becoming immortal when they drank mercury?" One of the reasons old alchemy used literal mercury is because it preserves the body. An early belief was that a Daoist immortal could leave their physical body and return to it at any time. So folks saw these perfectly preserved bodies and were like “Ah! They’ll be back at some point!”
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Sep 1, 2021 22:49
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I did not know that, thanks! Makes good sense, tbh!
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Sep 1, 2021 23:48
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Achmed Jones posted:holy poo poo horse paste is turning maga chuds into immortals I wonder how history is going to look back on some of this stuff. The horse paste has the airs of something that in a hundred years they'd go 'well, sure, there are RUMORS, and we can't say NOBODY took it, but obviously most of them just used off-label conventional human ivermectin.'
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Sep 3, 2021 08:30
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I'm reconsidering all my no temple ideas. I'm likely going to be homeless at the end of the month and strongly considering joining a temple. It seems like a better alternative than anything else and a path my life has been moving towards anyways. Does anyone have any experience, advice, or recommendations for that? I'm in California, but willing to travel. Are there any temples I should look into? I'm about to start doing some of my own research.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:21
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Are you looking to become a monk or to just be part of a sangha? I think that joining a monastery will likely not be a great direct solution for near-future houselessness (although I would not be surprised if monks would help you on a short term basis, either).
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Sep 10, 2021 19:50
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I'm not sure. At this point the idea of becoming a monk is starting to sound appealing. I already lost everything last year so it doesn't even feel like I'd be giving anything up. The only times I'm able to find joy is when I can escape from the grind and relax, or the rare moments I can socialize with people. It's getting harder and harder to socialize as well, as the things people are concerned with are so frivolous. Everything about society feels burdensome, and I feel like Im contributing to all the harm in the world by participating. I'm not sure I'll make it being homeless, I can't imagine myself sustaining my job. I already had to drop out of school. I've explored public resources, and they are all too overwhelmed to assist. One of the other options I am toying with is just going bicycle touring, but I don't really know where that path leads, and it seems lonely.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:59
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I've also just been moving more and more away from material pleasures, and they feel like a prison because our society is structured around forcing you to have them. I don't see where the end of the homeless path leads. In an ideal scenario I claw my way out just to end up right back in the precarious situation I am in now. Re-aquire all the material goods I need to participate in society again, just so I can live a lone and toss them out again? The monk path at least seems to have a purpose and direction to it.
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Sep 10, 2021 21:52
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eSporks posted:I'm reconsidering all my no temple ideas. It's probably better than a shelter. I feel for you because I have been homeless for a year or so and it is not fun.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:37
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eSporks posted:I'm not sure. This was basically Upali’s reasoning for becoming a monk
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Sep 16, 2021 17:34
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The threat of homelessness has also been sucking the joy out the things I enjoy. Want to eat food that tastes good? That costs money, don't do that. Want to go hang out with friends? That costs money too. Listen to music? That costs money. Go to the river? Better pay for parking and gas. I just feel such immense guilt for even trying to enjoy something right now, and my life is forcibly getting more and more ascetic. I know I'm in a horrible place and trying to not to make any decisions out of panic. I do often feel like I'm not aloud to have "a good life", and maybe its just time to accept that. There is also all this moral weight, of just knowing that everything I do is contributing to the destruction of the planet and collapse of mankind.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:25
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eSporks posted:The threat of homelessness has also been sucking the joy out the things I enjoy. Want to eat food that tastes good? That costs money, don't do that. Want to go hang out with friends? That costs money too. Listen to music? That costs money. Go to the river? Better pay for parking and gas. Yeah I would highly recommend you seek spiritual guidance from someone especially since you can’t afford a therapist rn. You’re p obviously in a spiral and are letting the stress of the situation overwhelm and paralyze you from doing things that may help you avoid or deal with the situation (completely understandable). Go to a Temple, church, mosque or synagogue and ask the staff for someone to talk to.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:33
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Yeah I would highly recommend you seek spiritual guidance from someone especially since you can’t afford a therapist rn. You’re p obviously in a spiral and are letting the stress of the situation overwhelm and paralyze you from doing things that may help you avoid or deal with the situation (completely understandable). Go to a Temple, church, mosque or synagogue and ask the staff for someone to talk to. eSporks fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 16, 2021 18:38
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eSporks posted:The threat of homelessness has also been sucking the joy out the things I enjoy. Want to eat food that tastes good? That costs money, don't do that. Want to go hang out with friends? That costs money too. Listen to music? That costs money. Go to the river? Better pay for parking and gas. Have you been able to do much meditation or similar practices during this period?
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Sep 16, 2021 19:08
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I started meditating daily at the beginning of COVID and it helped me tremendously. I know part of my issues currently are that I set up an elaborate series of coping mechanisms that are now falling apart. I was meditating every morning, but now that I have to rush out to work I can't do that anymore. No amount of meditating is going to make an affordable room appear though. I've been responding to 5 listings a day that are already outside my budget and not getting any calls back.
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Sep 16, 2021 20:11
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I may be the outlier here, and I’m certainly not a monk or very good at Buddhism, but I would be cautious about going down this path as a result of going through hard times. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, and it’s like a year long process to get in specifically because it tends to attract people who are in a situation like “I lost my job, my dog died, and my partner left so why not give up everything to go do some good”. Some of those people end up getting in, and in my time there I saw almost all of them burn out and hop on a plane back home in the middle of the night. Then again, I’ve never been staring down the barrel of homelessness and starvation, so if you think it’s the right path you probably know better than I.
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Sep 16, 2021 22:09
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I'm just an absolute beginner with very, very minimal knowledge, so I apologise if I come off as ignorant here. Buddhism seems like a very chill religion, where the emphasis is on doing the best you can day to day for yourself and others. That in mind, to me Buddhist hell just doesn't seem to line up with the general tone. Being reborn into a lower life seems like a natural progression, whereas hell seems like a deliberate leap into straight up punishment and torture. How terrible does your karma have to be to end up there? Do you have to be a genocidal dictator to get there? Or is it enough just to be non-vegetarian, given all the lives you will have a hand in ending? Do you go to hell before every rebirth, or can you only end up there after being reborn to the lowest rung first? I suppose it can't be the latter, since the descriptions talk about harm done to physical appendages pretty exclusive to humans. It's probably something that falls under the "don't worry about it" umbrella. But from what I've read this seems to be an absolute fact of Buddhism, straight from the Buddha himself, so it seems fairly important to accept.
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Sep 17, 2021 13:04
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womb with a view posted:I'm just an absolute beginner with very, very minimal knowledge, so I apologise if I come off as ignorant here. I’m on my phone and about to go to work so I don’t have time for a more detailed answer but the biggest denomination of Buddhism is devoted to liberating the beings in hell and placing where others will get reborn on equal importance with where you will get reborn
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Sep 17, 2021 14:56
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womb with a view posted:I'm just an absolute beginner with very, very minimal knowledge, so I apologise if I come off as ignorant here. My own interpretation of hell realms is that they may not be literally what the short description suggests, even if they are evocative of the defining experience of those realms. So, the burning iron ball swallowing hell realm is more about hungers that are agony to satisfy. I don't know if there are formulas about good karma vs. bad karma. Someone might have had a lot of good karma (and gotten a human rebirth) but also have a lot of bad karma (which will come due, even if they did nothing in that life). I have heard that the hell realms may be more immediate concerns for entities on higher levels, who will live very very long and very very luxurious lives - surely very desirable from a human perspective, compared to our current lives of maybe a hundred years if we're lucky - and who will therefore exhaust all their positive karma and be left with only the bad.
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Sep 17, 2021 16:02
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Thanks for the response, I hadn't really considered the other realms when thinking about that particular one!
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Sep 23, 2021 14:28
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exactly what part of “you” gets reborn? the observer? the only part of me that is consistent and resembles a “me” is my memory and that my experience is generated by my specific brain. when I die, all of me that makes me me will die with my body.
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Sep 24, 2021 01:24
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echinopsis posted:exactly what part of “you” gets reborn? the observer? Not everything of you will die when you die. Your actions will continue to have their effects going, forwards. Your posts will be preserved, as will various actions and their consequent events.
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Sep 24, 2021 02:12
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echinopsis posted:exactly what part of “you” gets reborn? the observer? There is no part of you which is consistent. There is no self. All things are impermanent and constantly changing. You have hit upon the reason the illusion of a permanent self is created: memory. Through continuity of experience we gloss over the differences in emotion, will, perception, thought and body that occur from moment to moment which would mark us as being different beings. As this continuous experience is interrupted at the moment of death the illusion is briefly dispelled but when it re-presents itself due to our desire for mundane existence which causes us to be reborn we misinterpret this to be a new self; unrelated to our own; rather than their being no true permanent self; with this new being the direct consequence of ourselves just as a shadow is not a person yet belongs to a person. What we call “self” is the product of five aggregates or skandhas, these are emotion, will, body, thought, and perception. Like sticks resting against themselves or two playing cards supporting each other they all support each other. They are empty which is to say that their characteristics are derived from and “supported” by the other four aggregates and the world at large. All five skandhas are reborn into the new being, if it was carried in any one skandha in particular that skandha would carry the self and be considered the “true” self. There is no self. My thoughts cannot exist without my emotions, my will, what my senses perceive or a body to hold it together. My emotions are based on what I perceive, what I think, what my body does (have you heard just smiling makes you happier) and my will. And a body without thoughts, emotions, will, or perception is commonly known as a corpse. Therefore none of these things can be the self. After death all five skandhas shall according to your karma manifest towards a new form. All five shall be different than they were at the moment of death and because of this you would not recognize it as being you if you were to see it but this lack of recognition is the result only of the interruption in consciousness you experienced. You say the self is contained in the memories. If a dear friend of yours experienced amnesia like on TV would you recognize them as being them? They would be greatly different yes but would you call them by the same name? Talk about them to others about how they used to be . You undoubtedly would. This is because you experienced no interruption in consciousness while your friend did.
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Sep 24, 2021 02:13
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:There is no part of you which is consistent. except my posts 
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Sep 24, 2021 02:15
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Achmed Jones posted:except my posts This is wrong view. Each post is terrible in an incredible new way
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Sep 24, 2021 02:27
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Hello thread gurus! I've been curious about Buddhism for quite a long time, but I've only just recently started to get serious about it. I started by reading Walking an Uncommon Path as suggested by the OP, and I thought this thread would be a good place to discuss it! First I have to say it was a really difficult book to read. I get that the Gyalwang Drupka only has a certain level of facility with English language, and I appreciate the special-ness of having a text from a Tibetan master in their own words in English, but wow that was harder than I expected! I do feel it was worth the effort in many ways, though. Certainly I learned many things from it, and many new ways of understanding things I already know. In particular there is one thing that I find confounding. At one particular section, the Drupka goes on at length about first respecting something, and then ignoring it, and more than any other idea in the book, I struggled to make sense of it. Respect the sun, because it provides the life energy for all things on earth and is a marvel of the universe, but then ignore the sun because... I'm not sure why? He gives many examples of things that should be respected but also ignored. I believe he even says that this applies to all things. Is there any distinction between things and phenomena in this context? The words seem like they might mean different things, but I think that might be English semantics sneaking in where they really aren't intended. I had a thought that maybe he means respecting phenomena because they are real, but ignoring them because their impact on us is imagined, or perhaps only perceived? I'm genuinely puzzled. By the way, thanks to everyone for making this thread an excellent place filled with many excellent dialogues. I can say that the words of some posters here touched me deeply and I am grateful for that. To say nothing of seeing our posting culture expressed through a lens of Buddhist philosophy as exemplified by Big Fluffy Dog just above me.
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Sep 25, 2021 19:20
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Welcome aboard! I have not read that book, but from your summation this sounds more like cultivation of non-attachment to various concepts. You do not need to cast out the Sun from your mind and curse it, indeed you should respect it for what it is and what it does for you, but unless you are in charge of installing the solar panels for the monastery, or have sensitive skin, the Sun should therefore not rest in your mind regularly. That would be the 'ignoring' portion. Taken together it sounds like a practice for cultivating non-attachment. You can do this for the Sun, but you can also do it for your status in life, your possible sickness, etc. But I freely admit that this is an interpretation of your summary of the teaching, not the teaching itself.
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Sep 25, 2021 19:53
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I guess it would be more helpful if I shared some more specifics of the actual teaching, wouldn't it? I was going off of some notes I made with my post, but I went back into the book and I do think that your interpretation is correct. At the same time as he is talking about this, he is talking about how fanaticism is an awful force and that we should never be fanatical about our religion or any religion. He first uses this respect and ignore dichotomy in this context, saying that we should practice the middle path, and respect all religions, but also ignore them.The Gyalwang Drupka posted:In the practice of Madhyamika you respect the entire world. You have to respect everything, no matter what it is. That's what I'm saying. We have many different religions. Some are very good religions, some are not so good, and some are nonsense. However as a spiritual practitioner it doesn't matter. It is recommended to respect all religions, but at the same time to ignore them! We should ignore all religions with respect. That's Madhyamika. I have a feeling Madhyamika means something quite specific, and he is just elaborating on that concept. He starts off by talking about religion despite also saying "respect the entire world," but goes on to say that: The Gyalwang Drupka posted:When I say religion, it doesn't need to be recognized or understood as a religion like Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. I'm not necessarily talking about these. When I talk about religion, I mean a broad way of seeing religion as anything and everything you do. Reading on he does talk about attachments directly, relating to stories about individual challenges or pains. Such as having a headache. Respect the headache and treat it, but do not worry about it over-much. He mentions a Sutra in which Shakyamuni spoke about an attendant who was extremely attached to wild animals, such that he was paralyzed by the suffering of a bird that died in the street. He wouldn't walk any farther. The Buddha comes by and says something like "Don't worry about it, this is their own suffering. Come and walk with me." Which could seem quite callous, but I think it is more reasonably interpreted as the middle path and as you say, not being overly attached to these things. I think part of the framing that I struggle with is the idea that you should do both, ignoring and respecting. It seems like it might be more natural to say that you should hold respect and ignorance of any particular thing in an appropriate balance. But now that I write it down, the difference between the two doesn't seem to be significant at all.
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Sep 25, 2021 20:46
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TehSaurus posted:
Madhyamika refers to a Mahayana school of thought that was started by Nagarjuna. It heavily stresses the emptiness of all things which extends even to dharma the Buddha and emptiness itself. Madhamyika is also noted for two truths theory. That all the truths espoused by Buddhism are conventional truths that are imperfect and flawed but point toward an absolute truth. He’s talking badly about fanaticism specially because becoming dogmatic about Buddhist doctrine blinds one to their imperfections and the transcendent absolute truth they point toward. This is also why you’re struggling with the idea of holding two seemingly contradictory ideas at once. You’re trying to engage with the idea rationally when it is explicitly anti-rational and can only be truly understood through experience. He’s attempting to point you to a difficult absolute truth. There’s no way to understand what he’s talking about without trying the technique in question personally.
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Sep 25, 2021 21:47
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