The Greens haven’t gotten a president but they absolutely do campaign and win at the local level. And PSL isn’t on the ballot everywhere so they’re the next best option. https://www.gpelections.org/greens-in-office/

People were shit talking Bushnell in the original thread when it happened. But I think it can arguably be more effective than fragging folks in the building or something. Obviously, encouraging suicide isn’t good as a standard. The people in charge won’t care either way. But if voters work mostly on vibes, which they often do, this paints a picture of “peaceful person harmed only themselves to protest the government’s evil actions” instead of letting people handwave them away by focusing on them hurting other people instead.

People don’t generally know what Thích Quảng Đức was protesting, but given images of a burning monk, they assume the people who let that happen and that prompted the action are the villains. Of course, there’s tons of people who handwave away people like in the OP as just those with mental illness already prone to suicide. So it could really go either way.

If OP is another Bushnell, I wish they hadn’t died and had lived to continue fighting alongside other comrades, but I respect they care enough about something to go to these lengths because it often feels like nobody cares at all.

I was looking for a specific ebook the other day. Not on private sites, not on public sites, can’t get it through my libraries. Finally checked out book piracy IRC for the first time. Still not there.

Nah, I just meant that there are people who do not conform to the ideal stereotype of a monk, sometimes because they were born into the religion. Which sometimes is fine, like tons of monks have full body tattoos and stuff unrelated to their practice, but sometimes there are people who do things contradictory to the teachings. A monk smoking, riding a motorcycle (not like a motorbike for transport), and with a flashy phone probably isn’t following the teachings to the letter, if at all. There are militant monks warring against other religions right now. That blows some people’s minds because all they get is sanitized images of lotus flowers. Just wanted to point out that Buddhists are people too so romanticizing them, Asian or not, will always lead to disappointment and impossible standards. Just like how Christian’s aren’t always Christ-like. Tons of Buddhists only engage with things on a surface level, even if they’re born into a culture more inclined toward it.

EDIT: Many people’s first introduction is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I haven’t personally read.

I think I get what you mean. I was trying to avoid orientalizing because there are white Buddhist teachers across the globe who really know their stuff. It’s not a matter of “Asian teacher good” or “Asian religion good”. There are plenty of Vietnamese monks who were born into the religion who smoke and ride motorcycles and buy the latest iPhones. It happens everywhere. But institutionally, because there has been more community and monetary support for Buddhist temples, you get more of the philosophy and less of the ‘meditation-as-productivity-tool’ stuff in non-Western countries.

Westerners just primarily get exposed through very watered down versions of the philosophy from people like Alan Watts and other spiritual hippie types who traveled to India decades ago. And before that, people like the British colonists who threw out any idea they couldn’t recontextualize into a Christian framework. Or modern tech grifters selling their meditation apps.

There’s lots of cool teachings and stories you can interpret literally or metaphorically depending on the situation. Like Manjushri cutting open the Himalayan valleys with a giant flaming sword, the consumption of human ashes as an intentional taboo to shock the mind out of a dualistic concept of reality, Chinese monks burning the books of other monks and essentially telling them to . There’s thousands of years of cosmology that blends with different cultures. And equally as much philosophical work as all of the European philosophers combined.

But with that also comes stuff like the Gelug school burning down other Tibetan monasteries, abuses of power in the sangha, etc. Some more humerous stuff like Buddhists debating Daoists, winning, then writing a follow up called “Laughing at the Dao”. Just regular infighting, violence, and things that plague every other religion.

So its good not to have a romanticized view of Buddhism or any other religion. I personally vibe it much more than anything that relies on a creator god, but as this thread discusses, governance based on religious principles doesn’t usually go so well.

I don’t know the historic background, but I would totally believe this. I learned a little bit of spoken Tibetan while I was there, but the romanized words are not pronounced at all like they’re spelled and pronunciation is difficult in general. It wasn’t necessarily the language itself though, it was more that you have a break in concentration where someone is speaking Tibetan for 2 minutes while you stare at them, then you listen to the translator for 2 minutes and try to write things down, then it’s back to not understanding for another 2 minutes, etc. I imagine it’s a lot more effective when you speak the language. But 2 hours of that a day was really not fun. Still learned a lot though.

The Maoist uprising only occurred within the last 20 years, starting around 1996 and the monarchy was abolished in 2006. There were a lot of concessions made for this to happen and restrictions put on the most militant Maoists to re-integrate them into society and work with them through political processes instead of further violence. They’ve been ruled by a Democratic coalition government for a while that includes a few different communist groups. But they aren’t a wholly socialist country and there’s still elements of monarchism and things like that.

Well, I edited my comment to say the experience also turned me vegan. Since the primary goal is the reduction and elimination of suffering, it only stands to reason this includes animal suffering. I don’t consider myself a Secular Buddhist in that I don’t try to mold the religious teachings I’ve received into a secular framework (and I do not like Stephen Bachelor), but I just go along with some things while not personally believing they are true. Rebirth being the biggest thing, where a lot of Buddhist philosophy falls apart if you remove cosmological components like that, since many things follow from that assumption. But I’m not personally sold.

Buddhists tells a lot of stories about how significantly advanced practitioners can influence their own rebirths by building the mental fortitude (through years/lifetimes of meditation practice) to withstand and navigate the hellish and chaotic experience of their mindstream being ripped from their body at death and scattered/pulled in many different directions to their new life. It’s silly to tell, but essentially, someone told me that my cat could be an enlightened being who is here to teach me patience and compassion for other beings. Do I literally believe that? No. But the idea did make me try to temper some of my impatience with their more destructive behaviors and open my mind to being more compassionate toward other animals in general.

Wikipedia no doubt has a simplified explanation, but in Madhyamaka philosophy, there’s the idea of the “two truths” which is something we delved very heavily into. I don’t know that it has really changed how I interact with the world as much as the former thing though.

I don’t honestly know, it’s not something I tried and it’s not something anyone I know actually did. It is something that is mentioned in texts though. It’s supposed to be a very advanced practice if you do it at all, so not something for newcomers. Primarily for the reason I mentioned of how it can really mess you up if you just go and do it on a whim.

Lol, no. I just mentioned it to point out that even the other Tibetan schools don’t really have much to do with the Dalai Lama. His picture isn’t hung up anywhere.

I used to think that if I ever wanted to leave everything behind, I’d go be a monk somewhere. But then I started falling asleep during lectures because they were being live translated from Tibetan into English and it’s hard to concentrate when someone is speaking a language you don’t know but you have to listen to them respectfully like you have a clue what it is they’re saying.

The biggest lesson I learned was the value of community and I sort of understood why people congregate to churches and things. Everyone around me had the same baseline assumptions of what they should be doing to better themselves and to support each other, so it felt really significant to progress along that path together. These were people that traveled from all over the world to come to this spot to learn from authentic teachers, so they were also much more genuine than the meditation bros you’ll find many places in the West. I hope to find that same community of socialists irl when I am in a position to do so.

If it were possible, I’d fly every Western Buddhist somewhere like that so they can experience the culture shock between their perception of commodified versions of Buddhism presented here and how much logic and philosophy is actually involved. It isn’t just good vibes and sitting on a meditation cushion. There’s mountains of texts written about epistemology, ethics, logic, etc. And it’s not static, there’s been many advancements in thought over the last decade. Such as how we now know that both Mahayana and ‘Theravadin’ (they weren’t called that back then) Buddhists existed in the same monasteries in the past and no longer think that Mahayana was a later development, but competing schools of thought that developed in conversation with each other.

There’s not really too many ‘secret teachings’ or anything. Even the things that are supposed to be ‘secret’ are really just things you’re supposed to be trained by a teacher on first so that you do them properly. It’s not a gatekeeping thing, but a “hey maybe you shouldn’t meditate in front of corpses to contemplate death without first appropriately contextualizing this action and mentally preparing yourself so that you don’t develop mental health issues” thing.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, that time also turned me vegan. The monastery only served vegan food. Meat has been big in Tibetan culture for a long time, but even long-dead masters had problems with it and monasteries forbidding meat is becoming more and more widespread. There’s lots of texts about animal rights and their place in Buddhist ethics as well.

He’s unfortunately the public face of Buddhism to the common person in the West, but I always have to go out of my way to emphasize how he’s really just a drop in the ocean. He’s not even the spiritual head of his own school, just the political figurehead for the exile government.

I studied at a Kagyu-Nyingma monastery and he never gets mentioned at all. His relevance to the average Buddhist who isn’t Tibetan is really quite low, and even many Tibetan practitioners don’t think of him as an authority, but just another teacher they may or may not be familiar with.

Someone practicing Zen or Chan or Pure Land, or anything else outside of that sphere doesn’t regard him at all except on an individual level.

Edit: I know he tries to sell Buddhism to the average Westerner who is influenced by Facebook posts, so pithy quotes like this are his style. But the Gelug school is literally the debate school that practices reductio ad absurdum in the courtyards to suss out what is true. So it’s always a little sad to see that and the rest of the philosophy de-emphasized.

I don’t know if this is true at a high level, but I think for someone just picking up a racket, it’s a lot easier to play than something like tennis. The birdie really does float unless someone spikes it at you, so you have a lot of time to react to what’s happening and someone more advanced can pretty easily tailor their play to a newcomer.

Blitzball

Badminton was literally the only sport I enjoyed as a teenager and would be willing to try playing again today Hitting floaty objects with a racket is fun.

As a Buddhist, I’m drawn to negative utilitarianism or ‘suffering-focused ethics’. It gets memed on to a ridiculous degree though by people saying shit like “if you want to eliminate suffering, shouldn’t you just kill everyone so they can’t suffer anymore?” and it makes the whole field of philosophy look like redditors.

A lot of RPG essays are people going over literally every quest in the game which is why shit gets expanded to 12 hours when they should really just be talking about core themes and relevant examples from those quests. Or standouts among them that represent something especially well/poorly.

You don’t need more than 1 sentence to say that the quest that wants you to kill 12 rats was because the developers needed an excuse to make you kill 12 rats. No, there isn’t a deeper reason. If there is, it most definitely isn’t worth talking about for 10 minutes.

I tested positive for the first time a month ago now and still have a persistent cough if I do even the lightest amount of exercise. I luckily work from home, but if that wasn’t the case, there’s no way anybody would want me in an office or that I’d be able to stock shelves for more than a few minutes before having a fit.

You are clearly emotional over the thousands of deaths I’ve caused. Please come back when you can have a rational debate about the merits of genocide.

Some friends of mine recently had a nice compromise. A local ceremony that was easier for their friends and family to get to, then an optional trip with them to Hawaii that you needed to RSVP for ahead of time cuz they were arranging group pricing for some stuff. Kind of like tagging along for their honeymoon.