Hacker News Reader

Comment by popalchemist | Hacker News Reader

> In almost all cases we found the inverted version more sound.

This "insight" depends entirely on the author(s) NOT UNDERSTANDING what is meant by the original quote.

> If you are not happy here and now, you never will be. Taisen Deshimaru

> If you are not happy here and now, you may still be happy in the future. not Taisen Deshimaru

In the original quote, the Zen master is pointing at the idea that you are always in the here and now. Even if, at some other point in time in the future you arrive at happiness, like the second "inverted" quote says, you will still be in the here and now, then.

View on HN

The entire intro is so poor I just stopped reading. If the point of the article is valid and well researched they should just remove the entire intro it's so off putting. If they have created a bad intro just for the sake of self selecting credulous individuals (a common tactic for grifters and the incomprehensible) than they are killing it.

Yeah, the inverted quotes look prima facie worse or just obviously false to me.

And often yes, it is due to what you have pointed out.

I mean the first inversion sounds like the most unhappy thing a person can do:

>>>Their Inversion: Learn not to let go. That is the key to happiness.

Learn not to let go? Ok, thanks infinite compounding intrusive rumination. Also people are loss averse by nature so very few people will have to "learn" to "not let go".

Then there is this one, where the inverted statement is so awful the had to fudge and qualify the whole thing.

>>> Quote: Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

>>> Their Version: Happiness sometimes is being pained in body and troubled in mind.

>>> The real Inversion: Happiness is being pained in body or troubled in mind.

Thanks for this feedback! The intro was meant to take some weight off the article, which sounded maybe a bit too serious, rather than an intriguing read. But point taken. The idea behind inversions was to show that the original quote makes sense if you try to understand what it might mean, but if you do the same exercise with a very opposite meaning, you can still try to "understand" what the author had in mind and contemplate some made-up wisdom. I.e. that the quotes don't carry that much information and that a lot our cultural context of what we take for granted is a bit hand-wavy and leaving lots to guess. But point taken, will try to avoid such games, or make the intention clearer in the future.

With the word "learn", the meaning I get is not really "to attain such ability" (which is natural), but "to get accustomed to doing". And "to let go" or "not to let go" may be also be understood as "give up" vs "don't give up", as opposed to the suggested rumination of the past.

The original quotes are deeply profound. They point to something that is beyond understanding. I also found the attempt to invert them to be off-putting.

  "Do not belabor wisdom to examine it;"

  - Niutou Farong

[0]: https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/song-of-the-mind-xin-ming/

> infinite compounding intrusive rumination

pasted this into ddg. now i know my mental illness. are you fucking kidding. (thank you)

I think the verb “learn” implies actions devoid of thought after learned.

Learning to suffer means that it is effortless, automatic, unconscious, same as one would learn to play a piano piece or drive a car or walking. At some point the activity requires little if any conscious thought.

I think the article is exactly right about this point.

A lot of these sayings are not how things work, but a fairy-tale that sounds nice and we wish were true (this is true of most zen stuff). Basically they are fantasies that reality is less unfair/arbitrary and imaginings that happiness is attainable by everyone in every situation.

I applaud the article for mentioning say, the importance of sex in happiness. This is something that you'd never get in a wishy-washy zen yoda-speak quote, but which is almost certainly true and probably worth admitting at a more conscious level.

> but a fairy-tale that sounds nice and we wish were true (this is true of most zen stuff). Basically they are fantasies that reality is less unfair/arbitrary

(zen) buddhism is a lot of things but certainly not a fairy tale. The basic assumption is that suffering is the basic state of life, that life is very unfair and arbitrary and that what you're going for is not even happiness but elimination of desire and ultimately the self. Very non happy go lucky as far as philosophical systems go. The article really has a very botched definition of happiness going on which it defines right in the beginning:

>For us, happiness is the target state that we want to achieve, at which we would be in our ideal condition

Happiness isn't a target state or object to be grasped, which is very trivial to show. Just imagine you get everything on this shopping list of happiness. Now you wake up the next day, what do you do? Life is always in some state of non-equilibrium and in particular if you do, as the article suggests, define happiness as a sort of string that pulls you along.

Ive long held that buddhism and related philosophies are a total cop-out. Instead of dealing realistically with the realities of desire and personhood it seeks a way out. Instead of coming to an understanding that happiness is a state to be pursued it builds this fantasy ideal of "zen".

Happiness is something we should work towards constantly. It makes me happy to go on hikes and see beautiful places it makes me happy to eat good food it makes me happy to spend time with loved ones and it makes me happy to build cool things. I pursue all these things happily, to achieve the state of happiness that they provide for me. You ask what happens if I achieve all these things? Well so far this week ive achieved 3 of 4 of the examples above and I am still happily pursuing doing them again.

"Zen" just means meditation, derived from Chan in Chinese Buddhism, which is derived from Jhana in Pali. It's not a fantasy ideal, but something you do.

Buddhist practice, in general, isn't interested in creating fantasy ideals, and it also isn't really a mere philosophy - it's a practical method with some ethical and social teachings. That method is designed to bring you into intimate contact with the "realities of desire and personhood", which most of us are almost entirely ignorant of, and avoid confronting through the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

Actually, happiness is the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice - happiness free from conditions. If you had an accident during a hike and couldn't hike any more, you developed issues digesting certain foods such that you couldn't eat what you consider good food any more, your loved ones passed away or left, presumably your happiness would also take a hit with those things, the things you depend on for happiness. Buddhist practice doesn't preclude doing any of those things, it just trains the mind not to rely on them for wellbeing, and to find a deeper source of wellbeing that can always be contacted regardless of current circumstance.

"pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain" is the natural state of living things. It is an invaluable drive that has brought about the vast wealth of this society we live in. It has driven people to explore the secrets of the universe and to build amazing things. This drive has been unceasingly pushing us toward a world with less pain and unfairness, with more equity and kindness since the dawn of humanity. That is an admirable quality in my eyes.

Sadness and suffering too, are a natural part of being alive and isnt something we should avoid. If I lost the ability to hike I would be sad. Because thats the appropriate and healthy reaction to losing something you care about. This sadness and suffering is part of the natural process of grief. When I have lost loved ones I have deeply grieved them with my entire being. I have mourned with every ounce of my self and eventually come through the other side able to move on. I would have it no other way. This process does not preclude finding other sources of happiness later but it is important to go through.

That "deeper source of wellbeing" you talk about is the fantasy part. Can you touch it? can you tell it you love it? Can you share it around a table with people you care about?

Happiness arises spontaneously when our desires are sated, whether they be sexual or otherwise. It arises also when our aversions are fended off.

  "Desireless-ness is wisdom.  The two are not different; they are the same."

  - Ramana Maharshi

Start a new zen philosophy but with blackjack and hookers

Forget the blackjack

Chögyam Trungpa has entered the chat

Perhaps a more familiar wording might be, "it's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got".

> Basically they are fantasies that reality is less unfair/arbitrary and imaginings that happiness is attainable by everyone in every situation.

No. They are guidance on making the best of an arbitrary reality.

Zen should be analyzed with Zen: if you found Buddha destroy it because it is not the real one.

At which point the master says something like "a dog licks his own ass clean!" and beats you.

Hey, the medium is the message.

"if you see the illusion, you are enlightened. but if you think that you are enlightened, you are in the illusion."

It would be more interesting and true if they'd chosen to invert the first half of the sentence. Like:

"If you're happy here and now, just remember you won't be in the future."

That's one I could get behind.

I thought the whole point of these Zen sayings was that they are silly or nonsensical until you interpret them in some deeper way.

Edit: As akprasad pointed out below, I was thinking of koans.

You're thinking of koans [1], which are a specific kind of Zen speech used to shift the mind out of conceptual thinking. Outside of that context, Zen teachers often just talk in conventional language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan

An even bigger problem is that, in the first line, the quote is not real.

I was pretty skeptical of that Buddhist quote the moment I saw it. If you want the tl;dr version of Buddhism, that's the 5 Precepts: that is the boiled down, maximally condensed "minimalist" version. If you want more than that, you have the Eightfold Path. It's already getting long, but hey, if you want everything in bite-sized form, that's as close as you'll get.

So when I saw "all of Buddhism" in 4 words I thought: no, I don't believe that - I'd sooner believe that's a misattributed quote. And while I couldn't find an exact source online, this summary from ChatGPT summarizes my take.

The quote "Learn to let go. That is the key to happiness." is often attributed to the Buddha, but it does not appear in any of the traditional Buddhist scriptures. It is likely a modern paraphrasing or interpretation of Buddhist teachings on attachment and impermanence. The Buddha did teach about the importance of letting go of attachments and desires as a path to enlightenment and inner peace, which is a central theme in his teachings. However, the exact phrasing of this quote cannot be directly linked to any specific Buddhist text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com