And to think that at some point in my life I learnt Ancient Greek, I remember astonishingly little. Even if it was seven years ago, I think. Hard to tell...
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And to think that at some point in my life I learnt Ancient Greek, I remember astonishingly little. Even if it was seven years ago, I think. Hard to tell...
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Hi @Ren,(By the way, I just want to throw in here that I hope I’m not sounding pedantic. English isn’t my first language and it’s been said to me that I can sound pedantic, so I want to careful about that!)
Thanks for this @Roobarb&Custard ! There was a lot to unpack in your message but I think I have a better idea now of what makes the Mahayana branch unique within Buddhism. I know very little about this, so if I unwittingly distort your meaning don't hesitate to let me know.There are lots of different schools within Buddhism but mine is from the Mahayana branch, based on the lotus sutra. Other teachers prior to this think of karma as being fixed or 'immutable' so you have to work through the various 10 worlds or states of life through various life times accumulating positive karma in life time over life time and transcending the Lower life states of worlds: hell, hunger, anger animality. If you think about it, this is really impossible because you always will unwittingly make new 'negative' causes and also has a negative 'punitive' stance, e.g. Advocating aesthetic practices etc. / which really confuse the real issue of being a self referring autonomous being - deciding for ourselves what is valuable or not valuable - based on a profound respect for life. Therefore good and evil are viewed as polarities, and nothing is seperated.
...In this teaching all the 10 worlds from hell to Buddhahood are mutually inclusive and interrelated, each has the potential of each of the other 9 states. E.g. hell has the potential for buddhahood, as well as the 8 other worlds or states.
Therefore within this teaching is the potential to change 'immutable' karma and turn crisis into opportunity - we call it value creating.
The 10 worlds or states of life are; hell, hunger, animality, anger, learning &realisation, tranquility rapture, boghisatfa (helping others), and Buddhahood (enlightenment to the intrinsic Buddha nature of ourselves and others).
There is a recognition that we can change our life state and don't need an outside authority to do it and we also have a daily practice to help us do so.
I don't want to go on too much but just to mention an important principle related to this 'three thousand realms in a single moment of life'
That is a way of describing the instantaneous 'flexibility', for want of a better word - of reality. Just as quantum physics is telling us now. Amazingly Buddhist theory (shakamuni) knew all this centuries ago.
That's what I mean about changing your reality. Your mindset and intention (and prayer) can affect things - and everything is mutually dependent. So yeah, changing the shit into something great, it's a very empowering practice!
www.sgi-uk.org
www.sgi-usa.org
www.sgi.org
@Sandie33 thanks for this. That is one hell of a paragraph@Ren
In one stance ... (again, in the context of multiple filterings through the minds of men.)
We find examples of the critical stance both in some Platonic dialogues and in some sophistic writings. The starkest expression of the opposition between nomos and phusis is that expressed in the Gorgias by Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias (though there is no suggestion in the dialogue or elsewhere that Gorgias himself held that position): Callicles holds that conventional morality is a contrivance devised by the weak and unintelligent to inhibit the strong and intelligent from doing what they are entitled by nature to do, viz. exploit their inferiors for their own advantage. He is thus an inverted moralist, who holds that what it is really right to do is what it is conventionally wrong to do. The true, authoritative norms are those which prevail in nature, as shown by the behavior of non-human animals such as beasts of prey; those who act in accordance with these norms ‘do these things in accordance with the nature of justice and … the law of nature, but perhaps not in accordance with this one which we lay down’ (Plato, Gorgias, 483e). The sophist Thrasymachus maintains a similar position in Book I of the Republic, though without Callicles' daring inversion of values. He agrees with Callicles in praising the ruthless individual (above all the tyrant) who is capable of overcoming the restraints of morality, but whereas Callicles calls such self-assertion naturally just, Thrasymachus abides by conventional morality in calling it unjust. Both agree that a successful life of ruthless self-assertion is supreme happiness, and that that is what nature prompts us to seek; both, then, accept the normative authority of nature over nomos. The difference between them is that Callicles takes the further step of identifying the authority of nature with that of real, as opposed to conventional morality, whereas for Thrasymachus there is only one kind of morality, conventional morality, which has no authority. In Book II Glaucon presents a modified version of Thrasymachus' position; while maintaining, as Protagoras does in the Great Speech, that humans adopt moral conventions as a necessary survival strategy in a hostile world, he insists that this involves a stunting of human nature, since people are obliged for self-protection to abandon the goal of self-satisfaction to which nature, as Thrasymachus insists, prompts them. This assertion of egoism is supported by the thought-experiment of Gyges' ring; if, like the legendary Gyges, we had a magic ring which rendered us invisible, and hence immune from sanctions, we would all seek our own interest without restraint. We find a similar down-grading of convention in favor of nature (though one lacking the immoralist conclusions) in Hippias' speech in the Protagoras (337c–d), where he urges that intellectuals such as are gathered in the house of Callias ought not to quarrel, since, though according to artificial political conventions they are citizens of many different cities, by nature they are all akin.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/#NomPhu
In addition http://quatr.us/greeks/philosophy/rationality.htm
Thanks for this and glad to see you back among us. This reminded me of a quote from Either/Or that I somehow kept in my campus room for years:
Hey guys!
As a massive philosophy fan, and a newbie on this forum, I thought I'd start a conversation about what 'movements' you like most in this most amazing of disciplines.
Are you more into ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, the philosophy of history, aesthetics? Are you most excited by, say, Marxism, Existentialism, Idealism, the Presocratics, the Philosophy of Religion?
Do you like philosophers who lead with insight, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein? With great rational systems, like Kant and Descartes? Or with a huge heart, like Spinoza and Epictetus?
I want to know all, and I'm really excited to start talking about my life's greatest passion
They aren't discrete organisms; philosophy is like The Blob, just rolling around, always aggregating and incorporating and growing more unwieldy.
Hi @Lurk, and thanks for sharing this about Taoism. I have to admit that I know little about it. Would you have a good introductory article to recommend?
About philosophical disciplines as discrete organisms: of course they are not. Did anybody claim such a thing here? Of course, for a number of reasons, including conversational clarity and precision, the division into disciplines is welcome and probably even necessary. Disciplines do not necessarily shame the same methods, and some methods are very specific to certain disciplines. It's also important to be able to refer, within a given discipline, to different sub-disciplines corresponding to different approaches. For example, if one wishes to discuss Ethics, one may enjoy being easily able to refer to what is involved in consequentialist ethics, virtue ethics, or the ethics of duty.
You didn't sound bitchy, just INTP-esqueI worried I sounded bitchy! I didn't mean to.
I can name a few people who changed how I perceive the world:
John Stewart Mill
Roland Barthes
Jacques Derrida
Ferdinand de Saussure
It's been over a decade.
HahahaYou can be as egoistic as you want my dear @Disguised - you revived my beloved thread and I thank you for that
what do you mean by potential when you say 'hell has the potential for buddhahood'? Do you mean the potential to become it, or bleed into it? And second, I'm wondering about free will. Does Buddhism, and the Mahayana branch and particular, accept free will as, vulgarly speaking, a western humanist would? I am interested to know how somebody can come to 'decide' to turn crisis into opportunity, what allows them to make that decision.
http://www.sgi.org/content/files/resources/introductory-materials/winning_life.Not lazy at all @Roobarb&Custard - there's no need for quotes if you can explain something that well. Thank you for enlightening me on Mahayana and the fluidity of the different states, it sounds very interesting. I might do a bit of research into this concept of having the 'experience of proof' as I find it particularly striking.