Comments on: Bonds of Chaos

By: Lightning Round – 2014/09/10 | Free Northerner

Lightning Round – 2014/09/10 | Free Northerner — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 05:01:05 +0000

[…] a neoreactionary aesthetic. Related: Bonds of chaos. Related: Chaos and […]

By: Chris B

Chris B — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:21:51 +0000

@scientism I envision the development would be towards this direction –

http://www.fractalwisdom.com/science-of-chaos/the-four-chaos-attractors/

only much more developed and sophisticated. A comprehensive anchoring of Nothingness/ Chaos at the center of philosophy whilst maintaining intellectual discovery in the sciences that is inherent in western thought. It seems to me to be the only way out of the Occidental funk we find ourselves in. The application of this to epistemology, ontology and metaphysics would be fascinating and very much in line with scientific discoveries and thought currently being developed surely?

By: scientism

scientism — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 16:39:44 +0000

Ironically, though, going back to the original texts and reading them is a very Western (Protestant) thing to do. Texts generally don’t play a straightforward role in religious practices and there’s typically an official interpretation with a long history.

By: Antisthenes

Antisthenes — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 02:49:50 +0000

Having ‘purposes’ to twist something to is so very un-Buddhist.

By: Kgaard

Kgaard — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 02:47:12 +0000

Yes … good point. I went to the Wikipedia page on Buddhist texts and was rather surprised at how much stuff is there. I admit it has never occurred to me to dig into primary sources on Buddhism. I’m familiar with the 8-fold path and the Tao Te Ching (Taoism, I know) and the Upanishads (Hinduism, I know). But when I looked through all those texts on Wikipedia I realized, “Damn, I’ve actually never read ANY of these.” I’ve gotten my Buddhism from Hesse, Kerouac (Dharmma Bums), Pirsig (Zen & MM), Campbell and a plethora of popular interpreters of it. So hmm …

Still … a concrete takedown of how the hippies twisted it to their own purposes would of course be off the charts.

By: Antisthenes

Antisthenes — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 02:19:46 +0000

@Kgaard

In order to realize that Western ‘Buddhism’ is a progressive invention, you only have to consider how many Western Buddhists actually speak Pali and/or Sanskrit, and consider how much progressives have invested in coming up with hip, fashionable alternatives to Christianity.

By: Kgaard

Kgaard — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 02:05:54 +0000

Scientism — This is fascinating. Thanks. Would be quite a breakthrough if one could definitively demonstrate that Buddhism as conceived of in the west is actually a progressive invention. I’m curious how they’d lay out the argument. I’ve been to Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka and Japan and frankly was never struck by any sort of disconnect between what I saw there and progressive interpretations of Buddhism. That said … the Sri Lankan Buddhists proved to be pretty hard-ass in defeating the Tamil Tigers! (Personally I’m a big fan of Sri Lanka. Place is way better than India. At present there is a a significant Muslim minority there but everybody gets along reasonably well in Colombo.)

By: scientism

scientism — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 22:50:41 +0000

I read two very interesting papers on this subjects some time ago (when I had an unfortunate interest in finding a “rational spirituality”) and I don’t remember all the details, although I remember them being eye opening. I’ll try to find the citations, but my understanding is that Westerners were involved in articulating the concept of a “Theravadan” Buddhism common to SE Asia, with its routes in Sri Lanka, whereas in actuality Buddhism in SE Asia was, essentially, a set of disperse monastic and ritual practices without a strong intellectual, political or meditative component. It was the Western influence that led both to the interest in Buddhist texts (such as the Pali canon) and the popularity of meditation among laymen and the new meditation-oriented branches of SE Asian Buddhism. Westerners emphasised the supposed rationality and similarity to empirical science as well as the progressive aspects like egalitarianism, non-violence, lack of ritual and imagery, etc. Basically, Westerners in SE Asia helped the locals build a Westernised version of Buddhism and the locals went along with it for nationalist and anti-colonial reasons.

With Japanese Zen, supposedly the goal was to make Japanese culture more appealing to the West after WW2 and rehabilitate Zen because it had previously been involved in justifying imperialism and militarism and this project was influenced by Western philosophy and the psychology of William James. The Zen reformers emphasised its peaceful nature, for obvious reasons. If I recall correctly, much of its claim to be practice focused and aniconistic is of more recent origin.

By: Kgaard

Kgaard — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:02:31 +0000

Scientism … Can you expound on this concept of westerners seeing/injecting progressivism into Asian religions? That’s a new idea to me but intuitively it rings true. How would “pure” Asian Buddhism differ from Buddhism as funneled through western purveyors? I know the meditation part is largely a western graft-on … but what is different about, say, Japanese or Sri Lankan Buddhism vs. the hippie Buddhism we see in the US or UK?

By: scientism

scientism — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 19:37:31 +0000

There’s plenty of comparisons to be made between East and West (Aristotelian and Confucian ethics, for example, or Greek and Neo-Confucian/Buddhist/Taoist conceptions of Sagehood) and there’s a lot that’s overlooked in the Western tradition. A better framing might be “using Eastern tradition to bring a new perspective to Western tradition.” Maybe we need a better way of looking at what we have, now that our own tradition has been decisively propagandised by the Enlightenment. For that matter, you have to tread carefully, since Enlightenment fingerprints are all over “Eastern” philosophy too. For example, contemporary Japanese Zen was an attempt to import Western ideas into post-War Japan and meditation in SE Asian Buddhism is a Western influence. Westerners trampled all over the East looking for “alternatives” to Christianity already. Everywhere they went they saw progressivism, oddly enough. Even the current Confucian revival in China is often used as a platform to push Western-style liberalism.