Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

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What's your point?

Buddhism is not Christianity. It does not assert that it is the One True Path, and that it's teachings are the One Size Fits All solution to everybody's problems.

It does not follow that what Buddhism teaches is bad for Buddhists (attachment to objects) is therefore bad for everybody, and that if you market something that someone may allow themselves to form attachments to, you have therefore harmed them. If a Buddhist allows themselves to become attached to their iPod, then Buddhism offers them tools to deal with the suffering that might arise from that; there is no attached 'sin' committed by the marketing team at Apple.

Jobs didn't fail to meet any standard that Buddhism sets out for Buddhists (Buddhism sets very few such standards. You can be angry and discompassionate and attached to worldly things, and be Buddhist. The idea is that Buddhism helps you deal with the problems you have, not that Buddhism requires you to be a perfect being or kicks you to the curb).

You're simply inventing your own arbitrarily high standards based on fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist concepts.

So if Buddhism does not assert that it is the One True Path, what's the Fourth Noble Truth?

In America, Buddhism tends to be portrayed in this sort of light: basically, that Buddhism makes no exclusivist truth claims. But for a Mahayana Buddhist to make the Bodhisattva Vow in the context of the Four Noble Truths necessarily entails teaching others about certain things which are True, to the exclusion of things which are false (belief in Jesus or Allah or Vishnu etc) Perhaps the missionary form of this is not quite equivalent to, say, Evangelical Protestantism, but it's there.

One concept within Mahayana Buddhism is that of Skillful Means, the idea that sometimes a teacher has to use or allow an expedient practice even if it's not the "highest" truth. So the Zen Buddhists say that all the Shin Buddhists are ok, because it's just skillful means for them to believe in the salvific power of Amida Buddha and next life they'll have a better chance at encountering the fullness of Zen. Or maybe their recitation of the nembutsu is just some sort of meditative practice that happens to produce desirable Buddhist qualities. Nevermind that this is totally revisionist to the Shin understanding.

Yes, you can be angry and discompassionate and attached to worldly things and "be Buddhist." But if you die that way you probably won't be reborn as a human. Maybe as a hungry ghost or a fighting demon. :)

Buddhism may assert that there is a true path. The difference between it, and many other religions, is that you don't have to be Buddhist to walk the eightfold path.

What you've said is just an instance of skilfull means. Ultimately, the followers of other religions (or no religion) will suffer rebirth in Samsara and continue to experience suffering. To the degree that they walk the eightfold path via their current paradigm, that will determine the quality of rebirth.

Edit: My point is that Buddhism proclaims that the Four Noble Truths are applicable to _all sentient beings_. Not that they are applicable only to Buddhists. If that was the case, then the Bodhisattva Vow could be resolved simply by the cessation of Buddhism! But the Bodhisattva Vow is a vow to save all sentient beings, not all Buddhists.

So if Buddhism does not assert that it is the One True Path, what's the Fourth Noble Truth?

The hand pointing to the moon is not the moon.

``Come, Salha, do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with a liking for a view after pondering it or with someone else's ability or with the thought 'The monk is our teacher.' When you know in yourself 'These things are unprofitable, liable to censure, condemned by the wise, being adopted and put into effect, they lead to harm and suffering,' then you should abandon them.''

AN 3.66

So, Buddhism agrees with Einstein rather than Heisenberg?

Einstein: The moon is there whether or not anyone is looking at it.

Heisenberg: The moon may not be there if there isn't anyone looking at it.

Buddhism: The hand pointing to the moon is not the moon.

"The pointing finger is not the moon" has never, IME, been taken to make ontological claims of any kind about the moon, except that it's not the finger pointed at it. It means the same thing as, "The map is not the territory," and not, "Because this map shows rivers and towns in these locations, such rivers and towns must exist."

Your idea of a thing is simply and solely your idea of the thing; the thing, itself, is simply and solely the thing, itself. Buddhism just suggests out that you conflate them at your peril (to the extent, of course, that Buddhism has a notion of "peril").

Oh. I took it to mean that Buddhism is the quest for truth not the truth.

The Buddha is saying not to follow something on the basis of externals, but rather on one's own self testing. That the Buddha arrived at the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path through such testing is of importance.

If we return to the Pali scriptures, we can see that although the Buddha states that the question of God/gods is in the realm of "unanswerable questions," that even if they did exist they would ultimately undergo death and rebirth, albeit perhaps in an unimaginably long time frame from the perspective of humans. He considers debates over deities pointless, _because even they are subject to the truths he espouses_. Is this not a truth claim that contradicts most theistic religions? Is this not a truth claim to the supersession of Buddhist truth over others? (Forgive me, but my copy is in another location so I can't give an exact reference.)

Although the view of deities in Buddhism differs between schools, the general understanding of Buddhism is that such belief is not conducive to enlightenment. This is indeed an exclusivist truth claim to the superiority of the Buddhist practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism

Luke 11:23 - "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters."

Some religions are more exclusive than others. If you've been (or are) a Protestant Christian (depending on the denomination, of course), you may think of religions as exclusive belief systems. It's like political parties - you join one because it's right about everything, then sneer at the others which are just there to mislead the innocents. Then you join a faction in the party, because the rest of the party has fallen from the true path (though presumably not enough to damn them to hell).

"Religion" is an abstract word, not a concrete one. It can have different meanings. Some religions are exclusive belief systems (like many political parties); others are more like philosophies with a bit of mysticism thrown in. It's only their ability to retain adherents, and their attempts to explain the mystical that make us call them "religions".

I don't think I've ever met a self-identified ex-Catholic, or ex-Buddhist, just non-practicing ones; because they don't seem to think that their lack of faith and practice excludes them from their religion. As an ex-Protestant, I used to ask how they could still say they were part of a religion they obviously didn't practice or believe in. Then I realized that my definition of "religion" was different to theirs, because my religion stated that you had to believe to be part of the faith.

Christianity has one way into heaven, baptism, but beyond that things diverge quickly. It's better (IMO) than believing different religions but acting the same in practice. As Chesterton put it:

"So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. "

Apple and Jobs damn well know their marketing exploits societal pressures and individual shortcomings that also results in their devices being sold to people that can't afford them and suffer as a result of buying them.

Many philosophies allow you to defend such behavior, by pointing out the net advantage the devices have for all people that buy them combined. Buddhism doesn't, because it expects you to act in non-harmful ways.

In these days of mass communication, that basically means from abstaining from using mass-communication devices, because you can know, within reasonable doubt, that many kinds of communication will cause some harm. It's only within personal interaction with a small number of people that you can honestly attempt not to cause any harm.

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