#western buddhism

[writerbuddha]

On George Lucas identifying as "Buddhist Methodist" and why that's perfectly fine

So, recently I encountered with someone on Tumblr who insisted on the idea that George Lucas identifying as "Buddhist Methodist" is a form of white-washing and that he is just picking up the things he likes from Buddhism and by doing so he is disrespectful to a more than two thousand year old spiritual tradition and if these claims are coming from an Asian then that means it's true. In general, I avoid participating in discussions like this, but I think these assertions should be addressed.

Buddhism is essentially a set of methods that helps us to develop our full human potential by understand the true nature of reality. It is a practical doctrine, addressing the problem of human suffering and it doesn't insist on a single solution - since human beings differ greatly in their needs, dispositions and abilities, Buddhism acknowledges that the paths to peace and happiness are many. Buddha showed us a path we can follow in order to free ourselves of life's problems and develop the good qualities of our minds, love, compassion, kindness, non-attachment, mindfulness, generosity and wisdom and more.

Although there are many different traditions within Buddhism, non-sectarianism is very much a characteristic of it: practitioners are encouraged to receive teachings and explanations not just from the tradition they follow but all the other traditions as well, and to put them in practice, so we will have a better understanding of different teachings. Giving exaggerated importance to one or another of the different schools and traditions within Buddhism can end up being harmful to the goal of the Buddhist path itself. 

The Buddhists teachings on how to develop good qualities of our minds are open to everyone – regardless of cultural background or religion. All spiritual and religious traditions are essentially teach the same practice: love, compassion and tolerance. For this shared core, it's all right to adopt some methods from Buddhism and keeping your original tradition, whether it to be Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu - some Buddhist explanations, particularly those based on reason, can be very beneficial to practitioners of other traditions.

You're encouraged to "cherry-pick." For example, a Christian would likely find the Buddhist methods of non-attachment, mindfulness and meditation to be very beneficial, but in the same time, they would most likely be confused about the non-theistic absolute in Buddhism. Thus, it's best to study and use the methods that they deem to be useful to evolve as a follower of the Christian tradition.

Furthermore, if calling yourself a "Christian Buddhist" or a "Muslim Buddhist" or a "Hindu Buddhist", or a "Taoist Buddhist", or a "Wiccan Buddhist", or anything, really, benefits to your spiritual practice and helps you to evolve, you're perfectly free to do so.

The Buddha gave many instructions. If some of them help you live to better, to solve your problems and become kinder, then you are free to practice them. You do not have to be a Buddhist to be able to practice what the Buddha taught and there is no need accept the Buddha as your guide or to become an actual Buddhist or to call yourself Buddhist. The purpose of the Buddha's teachings is to benefit us, and if putting some of them into practice helps us live more peacefully with ourselves and others, that is what's important.

When it comes to Buddhism, the notions of race and ethnicity must be reconsidered. Probably the best example of this is the fact that Tibetan Buddhists are recognizing a number of Western children as the reincarnations of highly elevated Tibetan Buddhist teachers (for example, Tenzin Ösel Hita). There is the example of Alan Watts, who was influenced by all kinds of religious and spiritual traditions and interpreted many of them to Westerners, including Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism, and who was called "a great bodhisattva" by one of the greatest Zen masters, Shunryu Suzuki.

There are some who may be very opinionated, may have very strong feelings about what disrespects Buddhism and what the fact that it originates from Asia means. In the same time, they don't practice Buddhism, don't have any idea about what Buddhism is and why the Buddha gave his teachings. They might go as far to assert, it belongs to a particular group of humans or to a particular location on Earth, that's it's somehow intellectual property which is copyrighted or whatnot. They can actually end up undermining, if not assaulting Buddhism itself. So, if you have questions about what is and isn't compatible with Buddhism, you should look to those - Asians like the Dalai, Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki or Western Buddhists like Tenzin Palmo or Thubten Chödrön - who dedicate their lives to practice, study, preserve and teach the Buddhist path, to bring the Great Healer to as many beings as possible. And not to those who - regardless to cultural, racial, ethnic, religious etc. background - latest hot take is "gate-keeping Buddhism is woke."

#george lucas #buddhism #western buddhism #religion #philosophy #methodism #spirituality

[entanglingbriars]

#tech #buddhism #salon #western buddhism #buddhist mondernism #curtis white

[justplainsimon]

Yeah, so not only is del toro's pinocchio spitting in jordan peterson's face, along with the legacy of some guy who died on a meat hook, but its um...

its pretty freakin buddhist

And thats all i'm gonn say

#guillermo del toro's pinocchio #western buddhism #philosophy

[airteacher]

https://youtu.be/7Jb72-QgXOc?si=HpMn6vt4QJBurOkl

In case anyone wants to be lead in a loving-kindness (aka metta) meditation by a real life teacher as opposed to my ficticious one.

#ooc #ajahn brahm #buddhism #theravada buddhism #western buddhism

[the-harvest-field]

Jesus Loves you too?

From the cradle to the grave, Jesus loves all of us, too. If one is a born again Christian, you are born in water and spirit and is literally born again into eternal life with the love that is greater than any other love. Some people when they die cremate all their belongings including their bible with them. You could imagine the library of your grandpa up in smoke, yet eternally living with…

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#Christian Buddhism #Eastern Christianity #Love is the law #Rian Buddhism #Rustenburg #Saved by holy water #Virgin Birth #Western Buddhism

[yellowocaballero]

So fucking glad to see someone talk about SSS Class revival hunter 😭 I lived it so much and I feel like no one ever mentions it against more popular titles like ORV or even The Lout of the counts family, so I'm so glad to come here and see your amazing takes :>

Thank you for the ask which lets me talk about SSSCRH (the version I read was titled 'Suicide Hunter', which tbh I like more - no beating around the bush).

It's hard to draw an accurate comparison since I'm going off just the webtoon for SSSCRH, while I'm going off both the webtoon and the webnovel for ORV. And I love ORV, ORV is my media blorbo right now, it hydraulic presses my brain, I am writing ORV fanfic - it's, like, funner to enjoy. But SSSRH is just better. In the vast majority of ways it is is better. It's better than the holy trinity by a wide margin. TW talk of suicide obviously.

I can't believe I'm saying this but you need a basic understanding of Buddhism in order to understand SSSCRH. It's not about Gongja's suicides - he doesn't suicide from depression or lack of self-esteem. SSSCRH is about suffering in the Buddhist sense - dukkha. I don't want to make this an essay, so I might reblog this with more information, but extremely shortly:

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. You've heard that Buddhists say 'life is suffering'. To put it one way that doesn't require defining a lot of words: the cause of suffering is experiencing the world as we percieve it instead of how it truly is. Suffering isn't just being miserable and in pain, and life isn't suffering because life sucks and global warming exists and people voted for Trump. Life is suffering because we can experience beautiful and joyful moments in this world, but we do not exist in the moment of that happiness or place our ego/'self' between us and that happiness. Living in that moment, accepting the moment as it is unconditionally, is freedom from suffering. The Buddha tries to free people from suffering through teaching Buddhism.

"What does this have to do with the webnovel and manwha about a guy murdering himself thousands of times" it has everything to do with it. Because SSSCRH is about suffering, and it is about using suffering as a tool in order to experience a world unfiltered by ego and break down the artificial boundaries between human beings. Suffering in SSSCRH is not a bad thing. Gongja has the unique capability to (reincarnate.) experience a person's suffering in unity with them, which dissolves the delusion of separation between people and puts us in touch with the reality of oneness.

The Murim arc was fucking insane because Gongja pulls a Big Bodhisattva Move and walks through the suffering of the world in order to achieve full understanding of the human experience. He takes all of the suffering of the world into himself and is liberated. You can tell it's Buddhist because death was not presented as a bad thing - death was an aspect of a happy ending for the Heavenly Demon lady, because she was finishing her life according to her own joy, and because her teachings were passed on she did not truly die.

But the purpose of embracing suffering is to discover the ability to fully embrace life, and that's where Heavenly Demon's teachings were incomplete - as the ghost dude said, Gongja hasn't even experienced his own full life and the infinite capability for his own happiness. You can only feel the depths of sadness when you've felt the depths of happiness. Sadness deserves its place in the world and it can strengthen you, but so does happiness.

Gongja is attention-seeking, envious, and unbelievably petty. When he drills down into his own desires and why he wants the things he wants, you see that he has a very strong sense of justice and right and wrong - he realizes he doesn't want to be famous, he wants to be acknowledged, but on an even deeper level he is desperate for love and to be loved. Everything he does is to experience love, and as such he learns to love others. His love for the Flamey Asshole was purely parasocial and ego-filled, with no concern for who he was as a human. Throughout the manwha, he grows to care for people as they truly are and pierce through any delusions or misleading outward appearances. He has released all attachment to life and death, and as such does not fear death, and as such has taken a step on the road towards becoming a Boddhisatva who frees others from the cycle of samsara, and as a result has learned sick sword techniques and is sooo good at beating people up.

I think the only other thing I want to mention here because otherwise this is an essay: in almost every time loop/regression story, only the final regression matters. In stories with dungeon monsters and NPCs, only the humans matter. The regressor exists in a space where there are no consequences for their actions, so they act terribly and do whatever because none of it matters. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray acts like an asshole because he can. That's not the case here. Everything Gongja does matters. The NPCs are fake, but Gongja never treats them as anything less than real people who deserve life. Once he understands a person's life he never treats them as unimportant. No loop is thrown away and no person or life is disregarded. His choices matter, the way he treats others matters, and Gongja never treats anybody as if they don't matter except for himself.

That was not short. There is a lot more. The female characters are so good and so rich. From a craft perspective it is excellently paced and has a wonderful sense of set-up/payoff and balances tone and maintains a lot of momentum, which is really hard in a time loop story. You have to do a few very specific things to write OP characters well and SSSCRH does it very well. There's more to say from a craft perspective and it's hard to judge accurately from a webtoon but it's good. I was so strangely struck the entire time about how sincere and genuine it was, how it said what it said with no trace of irony of confusion, and I think that's what stuck with me the most.

TL;DR: SSS Class Revival Hunter is good for a lot of very normal reasons, such as excellent pacing and set-up/pay off and characters, but it's also so sincerely and genuinely Buddhist that it blew my tits clean off.

#sss class revival hunter #kim gongja #ssscrh #I s2g I rewrite these like three times to be as short as possible #I just knew I had to define some terms because if I say 'it's about suffering' and leave it at that #people aren't going to fully get it #its not intuitive from a western perspective #It's really hard to get the full meaning of SSSCRH if you have no familiarity with Buddhism #bc suffering (and delusion and nothingness and oneness) mean diff things in buddhism than in english #theres other buddhist stuff like responsibility to the whole and the community but this was long enough already #the few ppl talking about it have good takes but I think ppl miss how #kgj isnt depressed and he doesnt kill himself from self-sacrifice #he's not kdj or cale #he only truly commits suicide (throws his life away) once which was from part percieved worthlessness of his own life #and big part EXTREME FUCKING PETTINESS NEXT LVL PETTINESS INSANE PETTINESS #every other time he kills himself is from his EXTREME goal oriented behavior #as usual there seems to be a dialogue with the rest of its genre #specifically the extreme egocentrism and selfishness of its genre and other OP protags #(which cale has a hilarious relationship w/) #(ur doing amazing honey i know this upsets you) #my asks #and theres also a conversation with buddhism itself anyway #i love orv but this is so much better on so many levels and its being slept on smh #nobody is going to read this its way too long but you know. its not ABOUT you.

[punkeropercyjackson]

I am BEGGING Atla fans to stop trying to look for some ulterior motive Aang had with not killing Ozai.Aang didn't kill Ozai-dosen't kill anyone at AT ALL and NEVER SHOULD and NEVER WILL because HE'S A BUDDHIST!!!!!!!! No geek ass who's never even eaten authentic asian food instead of weeb shit has a say in a millenia old eastern religion,no speakie pookie!!!!

#aang #pro aang #aang defense squad #trans aang #genderfluid aang #autistic aang #pastel punk aang #aang has ptsd #aang has mdd #aang has adhd #kataang #pro kataang #t4t kataang #kataang defense squad #aang and zuko #azulaang #teoaang #atla geekery #buddhism #racism cw #poc #anti asian racism #westernization #moc #💌 #summerposting

[mise-n-abyme]

"Nothing to say nor do, but to be a visitor passing on through; beholding the mystery that is of you, with eyes that are golden blue, and words which cannot construe what lies here in this memory of moments so true. Your life is a virtuous school, repeating dissonant lessons until they are explained in full; receiving recognition between the blurred lines of perception, the understandings of this divine inception are seemingly unmeasurable circumstances captured by a progression of an immaculate deception."

~Mise-n-abyme

|Artwork: 'The Blessings Of Lord Buddha' — Chalermchai Kositpipat, 2006

#occult #alchemy #mysticism #wisdom #esoteric #words #spirituality #spirit #self development #poetry #writers and poets #hermeticism #as above so below #buddhism #initiation #ancient wisdom #ancient philosophy #philosophy #magick #western esotericism #eastern philosophy #know thyself #dark night of the soul #rhyme #riddle #forbidden knowledge #mindbodysoul #transcendental #mystical #nonduality

[tetrachromate]

"why do white people dig into their ancestry for a smidgen of culture" because they think they're not allowed to meaningfully associate with anything outside their own immediate cultural context. Even *universalist* traditions like, idk, buddhism, are tainted by the perception of cultural appropriation because their most recent adherents tend to come from the sinosphere or SE asia

#with buddhism its doubly ironic #because some of the earliest converts were greeks #who they're totally happy to associate with as western/northern europeans #at least *classical* greeks #East asian buddhism was appropriated. i mean transmitted. from central asian sources who in turn received it from northern india #though of course in those days india didnt even exist. so they received it from Gandhara as did the Greeks #I get that white adoption of subaltern cultural elements is fraught #but if you dont want a culture exclusively derived from whitebread protestantism and odinist larping #you will need to be somewhat more nuanced in how you talk about it

[thecruellestmonth]

I know that Steph's death was retconned to have been faked and that she only haad a near-death experience—and, yes, I prefer this version of events because while it's extremely doubtful that Leslie would ever pull this stunt, it's at least morally correct for Bruce Wayne's loved ones to lie to his face and mess with his ego—

But I'm not on board with saying that Cass reuniting with Steph in death was just a "hallucination". No, Steph wasn't among the spirits of the dead. But I like the think that rather than Cass having a close encounter with a spirit of the dead, instead Cass as a spirit of the dead visited Steph's dreams.

In dreams and death, the line between the reality where Steph survives and the almost-reality where she died is blurred. But love and comfort and bonds between souls are the only things that are truly real.

#Stephanie Brown #Cassandra Cain #Cass and Steph #The other theory I like is Death Of The Endless adopting Steph's form to comfort Cass. #Was going to say ''delusions'' in the Buddhist-ish sense‚ but I didn't want it to be taken as the mental health sense. #Was also going to mention the ''delusions lf the material world'' but I didn't want it to be taken in the Gnostic sense exactly. #Feel like a lot of Buddhism is framed as western Gnosticism. Won't argue against that here. But it's not... accurate either... #Not me getting metaphysical lr whatever in the tags. The DCU doesn't have some strict cosmology. #It's just that hippie power of love mush. The non-denominational feel-goodism popular across focus groups. #That's what this post is about. #In dreams and death #the line between the reality where Steph survives and the almost-reality where she died is blurred. Here the borders and the illusions of t #yet love and comfort and bonds between souls are the only things that are truly real.

[buddhaismyhomeboy]

Namaste to that.

Perfect answer

#buddha #buddhism #the path #life #western buddhist #death #nodeath #energy #unknown #i know nothing

[whereserpentswalk]

Just heard my professor describe a German philosopher from the early modern period as "one of the first people to read Buddhist texts". Never have I heard a more western centric statement.

#196 #my thougts #phylosophy #philosophy #western #imperialism #anti imperialism #global north #leftist #leftism #buddhism

[likealittleheartbeat]

“As a schoolboy, [the first psychoanalyst in Japan, Heisaku] Kosawa had idolised both Shin Buddhism’s 13th-century founder, Shinran, and a modern proponent, the Shin priest Jokan Chikazumi. Chikazumi befriended Kosawa and became a teacher and role model to him. Nevertheless, while studying medicine at Tohoku Imperial University a few years later, Kosawa’s focus shifted to Freud. In a personal letter, written in faltering and oddly romantic German, he credited Freud with seeing into the human heart as clearly as he and his fellow students had learned to observe cells under a microscope. By comparison, Kosawa’s professor at Tohoku cut an unimpressive figure. In 1932, the young student begged money from an elder brother, left his professor behind (he was told never to come back) and set off for Europe to meet Freud face to face.

He didn’t receive quite the reception he’d hoped for. Meeting the elderly Freud at the famous house at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, a Japanese friend had to interpret for him. Freud himself advised Kosawa to find a local girlfriend to bring his German up to speed.

Language was not the only thing separating the two men. As far as the philosophical and religious implications of psychoanalysis were concerned, Freud strenuously disagreed with both Kosawa and with another major pioneer of psychoanalysis in Asia at the time, Girindrasekhar Bose in Calcutta. With only a couple of notable exceptions, the Freud circle treated religion as a purely psychodynamic and social phenomenon, reducible to inner drives and conflicts. They made their camp in the now-familiar territory of faith as wish-fulfillment, avoidance of reality, a means of keeping a lid on society, and the locus of a great deal of obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

For Bose and Kosawa, this merely served to highlight Freud’s parochialism: his lack of experience with non-European cultures and patients. As a matter of fact, Kosawa agreed with his hero that religion was connected with guilt. He just thought it involved guilt of a different type. Freud said that religion derived (both in historical time and in the life of each individual) from the need to assuage one’s fear of a father figure: really, it was a kind of ‘deferred obedience’. Kosawa hoped to persuade Freud that this placatory impulse gave rise to an inadequate religion, and that another sort of guilt was far more important.

He offered Freud a simple illustration. Imagine that a child drops a plate in the presence of his parents. When he seeks forgiveness from his father, the child is rebuffed. He experiences a pang of emotion linked both to fear of impending punishment and to anger and resentment at his father for his harsh reaction. This, according to Kosawa, approximates Freud’s understanding of guilt in the religious context. But then the child asks the mother for forgiveness — and receives it. The mother takes the child’s fearful and rebellious guilt and alchemises it into a ‘reparative guilt’: an overwhelming response to total, unconditional forgiveness. This latter reaction was, for Kosawa, a truly ‘religious state of mind’ and he saw it as the core of his own Shin tradition. Freud appeared unmoved, however. ‘I have received and read your essay and will save it,’ he wrote rather distantly. ‘You do not seem to intend to use it immediately.’ There is no evidence that he gave it another thought.”

#Buddhism #I don’t think you can watch a critically acclaimed anime series and not see this played out #the psychosexual imagery in so many anime is so obvious #think of all the sexuality and Oedipal stuff in nge #or the phallic imagery and inc*st in rgu #or the parental dynamics in fruits basket #interested in why manga and anime have such a draw to this framework #but not mad about it at all #and how different it’s eventual conclusion is from western psychoanalytic influenced fiction!

[creature-wizard]

secular western buddhism is just another form of colonialism and i'm tired of pretending its not. Its incredibly condescending towards buddhism in asia and says shit like how western buddhism is the way it was meant to be taught.

It's a cutesy little product to sell to middle class moms and annoying entrepreneurs, basically.

#answered #buddhism #colonialism #secular western buddhism #cultural appropriation

[anne-bsd-bibliophile]

Originally published in 1960.

"It is rather that even a theoretical knowledge of other cultures helps up to understand our own, because we can attain some clarity and objectivity about our own social institutions by comparing them with others."

"When a psychiatrist asked a Zen master how he dealt with neurotic people he replied, 'I trap them!' 'And just how do you trap them?' 'I get them where they can't ask any more questions!'"

"The individual no more acts upon the world than the world upon the individual. The cause and effect turn out to be integral parts of the same event."

"Would it really do to find out that our game is not serious, that enemies are friends, and that the good thrives on the evil? Society as we know it seems to be a tacit conspiracy to keep this hushed up for fear that the contest will otherwise cease. ... Imagine how the Christian conscience would react to the idea that, behind the scenes, God and the Devil were the closest friends but had taken opposite sides in order to stage a great cosmic game."

"Opposites and differences have something between them, like the two faces of a coin; they do not meet as total strangers. When this relativity of things is seen very strongly, its appropriate affect is love rather than hate or fear."

"...in Buddhism liberation is called awakening (bodhi) just because it is release from social hypnosis."

"The philosophy of wu-wei or noninterference implies ... that people must accept themselves as they are. This will disturb the social order far less than splitting themselves apart to strive after impossible ideals."

"It is, however, possible to see that his comparative [societal] 'rat race' need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless 'nervous breakdowns' are to become as common as colds."

"The difficulty of Zen is the almost overwhelming problem of getting anyone to see that life-and-death is not a problem."

"The disturbed individual is not so much the historical throwback in whom sufficient ego strength somehow failed to develop; he is the victim of too much ego, too much individual isolation."

"The Eastern ways direct their students to 'look within,' to find out the self, only to dispel the illusion that it is inside as distinct from outside."

"Not caring is the parody of serenity, just as worrying is the parody of concern."

"This is the loneliness of liberation, of no longer finding security by taking sides with the crowd, of no longer believing that the rules of the game are the laws of nature. It is thus that transcending the ego leads to great individuality."

"But to say, 'You must be spontaneous' is the flat contradiction at the root of every double-bind."

"At this point the patient simply stops pretending. He does not learn to 'be himself' as if that were something which one can do; he learns rather that there is nothing he can do not to be himself. But this is just another way of saying that he has ceased to identify himself with his ego, with the image of himself which society has forced upon him."

"The ways of liberation make it very clear that life is not going anywhere, because it is already there. In other words, it is playing, and those who do not play with it have simply missed the point."

#alan watts #psychotherapy east and west #eastern philosophy #psychology #quotes #book recs #it would be so much fun to talk to a psychologist today and see what they make of this book (since it was written 60 years ago) #i love the idea of using Eastern philosophy to help with Western psychotherapy #because knowing more about Buddhism and Taoism has done a lot to help my mental state #Youtube

[weirderscience]

it really is funny though how quick alien conspiracy theories and new age stuff start delving into race science though. i guess its the tendency for people who believe in made up social structures to also really want some kind of magical thing that proves their specialness to everyone else. like even if they dont believe in aliens being progenitors of the white race or whatever theyll find some other thing like “aliens are racist and only like white people bc theyre smarter” or some shit. its like a whole Thing

#its why you see so many of those ancient aliens ppl also believing that giants and nephilim were real based on statues and reliefs #and a lot of those people also being in like. western bastardizations of hinduism and buddhism cults #i could really get into the fucked up nazi origins of a lot of those new age cults in america that ppl just pass off as hippie shit #but i have terminal dumbass disorder #labz.txt