/lit/ - Literature

Templete

>>20718576
/qa/ won

>>20718612
What?

>What?

>>20718679
>smugsoy

>>20718612
>>20718617
>>20718679
>>20718695
Embarrassing posts, (You) should KYS

>>20718612
BASED GET THE FUCK IN HERE KWAHBROS WE FUCKING WON

>>20720110
Accurate desu

.

Copenhauer and NEETsche misunderstood Buddhism so severely that they ended up getting it right anyway.

>>20722696
what do you mean?

>>20722737

Mainly seeing Buddhism as nihilistic, pessimistic and ascetic, which is understandable considering the limited access to information they had about it.

And the supposed verification they got when they recognized some of those practises in certain later schools of Buddhism.

It's hard to sum up all of Buddhism and what they got wrong about, not least because it isn't (only) a philosophy that can be condensed into words but a practice.

One blatant misconception is that the first noble truth is "Life is suffering". In actuality it is; "Dukkha (is)". Suffering, as it's commonly understood in Western terms, is an inadequate and misleading translation of dukkha.

Western terms that point more toward to its true meaning are "imperfect circle" "incompleteness" "needs (as in physical needs, which imply incompleteness)" , by extension the imperfect circle of reincarnation.

That term leads to more misconceptions if taken to literally, namely that Buddhism posits you have to "exit" or "deny the existence" of that circle. If the literal meaning of those were to be the case, Buddhism would advocate suicide or radical asceticism, which Buddha explicitly didn't.

Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, experience as meditation (The Manfred Meditation) and ACCEPTING everything that is, are ironically getting very close to Buddhism. A further step would be to accept not only existence but its inherent passingness without clinging to it. This is neither an affirmation nor a denial. It might seem contradictory, and it is. The highest jhanna is described as consciousness and non-consciousness. That's as far as words can take you.

There's an ironically Buddhist aphorism about not wanting to be "in a system of circles" in Human, all too human.

>>20723798
*Addendum to the last sentence: circles / wheels.

Elaborating on the misconceived practises: as I said, some Buddhist schools do indeed have ascetic and moral principles, but Buddha during his life broke some of those according to tradition, such as having a wife and a child.

This gets back to another Nietzschean idea: the teachings of a savior/messiah being instrumentalized and warped by societies. I don't remember the exact book and page off the top of my head, but Nietzsche explicitly said that he didn't disapprove of Jesus but of what the church and society had made of him. He created a "typology of the savior" (which he, as the Antichrist, also considered himself) which was to be "an introverted idiot" (idiot in the original sense, a person not partaking in affairs of the polis). The original German actually has more connotations, which again are ironically similar to Buddhism, namely a pun. "In sich gekehrt" means introverted in the psychological sense, but it's also the participle form of having/being "cleaned in oneself", which is also a Buddhist practise, literally and metaphorically.

Another aspect that Jesus, Buddha and Nietzsche have in common is overcoming resentment. Nietzsche sees resentment in the church and its morality, but not in Jesus himself. The opposite in fact, he harbored no ill will or desire for revenge, despite experiencing suffering. The resulting practise from this varies though, for Jesus it's forgiveness, for Nietzsche saying yes to everything about life and for Buddha it's the equilbrium of karma and detachment from dukkha (=/= life)

>>20723865
In Copie's case, he developed, from the wrong assumption that Buddhism considered life and the will itself as inherently negative or painful, a practise that was quite similar to Buddha's middle path between excess and asceticism.

All this isn't to say that NEETsche and Copenhauer were Buddhas or achieved enlightenment, they were still quite polemic and harboring some not so subtle resentments, but they were more Buddhist in thought and practice than they realized with the limited information they had.

>>20723950
Not enough eunuchs pissing out of straws/10

We read that in 11th grade Latin class, good times.