Comment by helterskelter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helterskelter | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, I've been thinking about this lately myself. Buddhism influenced German philosophy in the 1800's through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which basically influenced everything that came afterwards, and it also influenced art through Dada which you could argue was really a crypto-Buddhist/Taoism fusion expressed through a somewhat distorted Western lens, and that really goes on to influence postmodernism to a huge degree. This embedded it in Western thought in a much deeper way than 1960's fascination with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism IMHO.

I think Buddhist philosophy still has a way to go making its way through the West -- liberal democracy's crisis of vacuuity is something we're really struggling to come to terms with, and it feels like Western society is slipping into a full-blown existential crisis. Seems like fertile ground for a religion and philosophy that a large part of is predicated on nothingness and how to live and be content in the void. I have to admit though that it's unbelievable watching the market's seemingly unlimited ability to coopt, repackage and in turn sell literally anything, even a religion and philosophical system which would be completely opposite to a consumer society.

Buddhist influence on the West is way older. It goes back to Hellenistic era, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art

Not unlikely Christianity was influenced by Buddhism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Christianity.

And certain groups, especially a Gnostic creed Catharism, has a lot of similarities.

Reminds me of the movie Man from Earth (don't watch the sequel). The precepts of both Christ and the Buddha are quite striking in their similarities, but perhaps both are a manifestation of an even deeper principle, of what it means to be a good person.

If you rephrase this as succinctly as you can you'll end up quoting the Dao de Jing.

The source of that comes from somewhere too, as it's still a human made construction. It seems like being "good" is simply advantageous to us as a species, hence why it is in all religions.

“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts

I recommend the book "Sacred Knowledge" by Willian Richards and the concept of cosmic unity (as the first "birth matrix") from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD" by Stanislav Groff.

There ideas are in every culture and religion.

This comment is rather uninformed. Greco-Buddhist art was real, yes, but emerged far away from the geologic 'West' -- in Bactria, at the edge of India, where Hellenic garrisons had established a kingdom after the collapse of Alexander the Great's empire. We have very little evidence of feedback from there to the west, and so little potential for Buddhism to influence the development of later Greek society or e.g. Rome.

The most we have are faint gestures at how some Buddhists could indeed have been alive in the same place, at the same time, as early Christians. But Christ himself, as far as we know, never referenced Buddha or any Buddhist works, never interacted with a practitioner of the faith (or even referred to one), and all the same applies to the Apostles.

E.g. nobody would suggest that Buddhism was particularly influenced by Greek religious thinking, but we know with certainty that Greeks were present in the region due to their service in the Persian empire of the time.

> it's unbelievable watching the market's seemingly unlimited ability to coopt, repackage and in turn sell literally anything, even a religion and philosophical system which would be completely opposite to a consumer society.

In some sense, this is one manifestation of what Nietzche said was a good state. A scrappy, anti-metaphysical system that doesn't need to rest on grand notions of reason or morality (not that there is no reason or morality, but in the traditional Western metaphysics sense; I find that people often conflate the two, I certainly did at one point), that simply outcompetes, adapts, and comes out on top.

On the other hand, I think Nietzche would have hated the outcome and would have worked to further refine his philosophy. I wonder what his thoughts would be in the 21st century.

Also through your comment, I realize I don't actually understand subtle differences in Eastern philosophy. Confucianism would have been up Nietzche's alley (no metaphysics), but Buddhism is a weird mix of "metaphysics" in the sense of spirits and gods, but not "metaphysics" in the Western Platonic tradition, and is in fact in many ways opposite to many of the dualities and boundaries that Western metaphysics creates.

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