Permanently Deleted

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    From what I understand it's more about understanding that pleasure/suffering (or maybe degrees of suffering?) are a part of a cycle rather than static things and trying to transcend that cycle through a sort of mysticism and self improvement all deeply intertwined with various eastern religions/folk tales.

    Like don't constantly run from suffering because suffering is inevitable. Instead understand life is just various degrees of suffering and try to transcend that suffering by reorienting your understanding and approach,

      • Ploumeister [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        It is mostly about living in the moment rather than hanging on to attachment of things like sadness or happiness as it is part of life and these things come and go, practicing mindfulness and living in the moment really helped me when I lost a loved one and honestly seeing the way people are reacting to Buddhism in this thread is pretty annoying. Literally every religion has a dark past etc... but the fact that Buddhism is the only religion that gets this kind of treatment on chapochat is strange.

      • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        While I'm not a Buddhist and really don't know that much about it, from what I understand it seems to promote that sort of ironic or stoic detachment rather than a destructive detachment. If you start from the premise that all life is suffering, then Buddhism takes the position that one would appreciate the small joys (or moments of less suffering) much more than if they were constantly pursued to destructive ends and that you have to make a conscious effort to not fall into these destructive practices.

        It's hard for me to explain any deeper though both because I don't know that much more and its a massive and diverse religion. Like there might be a distinction between understanding that suffering is temporary and trying to be stoic. "Destructive practices" is a pretty vague idea. At it's core its an idealist philosophy heavy religion so obviously its gonna have a lot of problems even if something like the eightfold path offers a useful framework for approaching life

          • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Like I said, in practice it varies a lot through different cultures and time. There is also usually a distinction between what regular everyday Buddhists should do and what monks/Boddhisattva (those trying to achieve Buddhahood) do, maybe with the understanding that eventually all souls will live the life of a monk and achieve enlightenment.

            And not to be pedantic, but do you mean "asceticism"? Aestheticism is like devotion to art or something like that. Asceticism is self imposed austerity and anti-hedonism.