Buddha Travels West
Peter Abbs follows Buddhism’s path towards becoming a Western humanism.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy contains no God, no revealed dogmas, and no supernatural agencies. Some decades before Nietzsche, he wrote: “Mankind is growing out of religion as out of its childhood clothes… Christianity is dead and no longer exercises much influence.”
In some respects this is true. Just Google "more atheists than ever" and you get this:
https://www.google.com/search?ei=-8bfX8 ... WwQ4dUDCA0On the other hand, who is kidding whom? Religion is still embraced -- sometimes fanatically -- by millions and millions around the globe.
And the reason is not difficult to discern. When it comes to acquiring a font on this side of the grave for establishing objective morality and a font on the other side of the grave for assuring immortality and salvation, what's the alternative?
Are people going to flock to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer for "comfort and consolation" in regard to to that?
Buddhism merely puts a No God spin on the same results.
But his understanding, put forward most systematically in The World as Will and Representation (1818/19) does seem remarkably close to Buddhism. Schopenhauer says, for instance, that the meditator “best understands who methodically assumes the right posture, withdraws into himself all his senses, and forgets the entire world, himself included.” What is still left in his consciousness is primordial being.
But: However remarkably close any philosopher gets to any religious denomination doesn't appear to make my own objections go away. I merely note that any "spiritual" path found is better than having thought yourself into believing that human existence is essentially meaningless, only to topple over "in the end" in the obliteration of "I" for all the rest of eternity.
Gaining access to one's "primordial being" here is, to me, no less didactic than those on this thread --
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=195805 -- attempting to gain access to an "omnipotent being"
And, sure, to the extent that particular Buddhists seek to "forget the entire world" by huddling together in "sanghas" and focusing on the embodiment of dhamma, they can act out their spiritual quest in a way that, for most of the rest of us, isn't a practical option.
On the other hand, like all the rest of us, they need access to food, water, clothing, shelter and all that actually sustains their existence from day to day. Bills to be paid to provide that things. Bills paid as with all other religions by the "faithful".
What stands out here is the resonant phrase ‘primordial being’. It is a crucial term which has become badly obscured in our culture and yet remains central to any understanding of the current fascination with mindfulness. With a kind of clairvoyance Schopenhauer saw that while the West would be preoccupied with objective knowledge and the control of external nature, the East would engage with inner wisdom and the power of being.
On the other hand, how could it not be obscure as soon as you make an attempt to reconfigure it from in a "world of words" intellectual contraption to an actual entity to be described given the interactions of those entities we know as "human beings".
What "inner wisdom" in regard to what concrete situation? And why not be preoccupied -- scientifically, phenomenologically, technologically -- with what actually is objective knowledge embedded in the either/or world. That's what has brought about -- for better or worse -- out modern industrial world.
Note for example instances of "inner wisdom" and "the power of being" in regard to smart phones or personal computers or the internet. What of the 'primordial being" being then?
Instead, it sounds more like the sort of stuff that fixed jacob and his ilk here would focus in on to prop up their own "metaphysical" "theories of everything".