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Comment by mirkonasato | Hacker News Reader

As soon as I read "meditation may be the enemy of activism" the image of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức burning himself to death in 1963 popped up in my mind.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...)

"Đức calmly sat down in the traditional Buddhist meditative lotus position on the cushion. A colleague emptied the contents of the petrol container over Đức's head. Đức rotated a string of wooden prayer beads and recited the words Nam mô A Di Đà Phật ("Homage to Amitābha Buddha") before striking a match and dropping it on himself."

"Photographs of his self-immolation were circulated widely across the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diệm government. John F. Kennedy said in reference to a photograph of Đức on fire, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.""

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Buddhism is not just meditation. It is a big ethical system.

By stripping ethics from it you would stop all its activism.

Indeed. But a premise of Buddhism is that the ethics came about as the result of meditation.

This is not the premise of Buddhism.

Here is a good starting point for understanding what is: http://ftp.budaedu.org/ebooks/pdf/EN074.pdf

I didn't say it is "the" premise of Buddhism. I said it is a premise of Buddhism.

It is.

The story of Shakyamuni Buddha achieving enlightenment after 49 days of meditation under the Bodhi tree is pretty well known. There, of course, are a lot more antecedents to contemporary Buddhist thought and ethics than that one incident, but it's fair to say it's a pretty core part of the historical tradition, and precedes essentially everything that came after.

For context in this discussion, I am a practicing Zen Buddhist.

Ethics affect the seeds you plant. If your seeds are bad you will not even have the opportunity to learn meditation.

Meditation is for going beyond all that.

> I am a practicing Zen Buddhist

Who?

Please cite a source for this. Ethics are supposed to help with Buddhist practices towards achieving enlightenment from what I’ve read, not the other way round. If they came about as a result of meditation automatically, the Vinaya would not need to list so many rules for monks and nuns.

Neither meditation is said to be sufficient for enlightenment, at least to Buddhists who are not Zen (or Ch'an) practitioners.

We cannot just ask Siddhartha Gautama anymore about the practices and his words were mysticized and changed over generations, as were ethical rules and especially the added monastic rules.

Even Pali Canon is suspect in pieces and that's a more reliable source in the practices he reformed.

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