How can people claim to follow Buddhism as atheists, when all Buddhists worship Buddha as a God, and worship his reincarnation the Dalia Lama?
>>7474575
>all Buddhists worship Dalai Lama
>Dalia Lama
>Dalia
It's called western pseudo-buddhism. Don't tell me you thought that western buddhists were actual buddhists? It's just a, manipulated, permissive philosophy that they use to justify their ignorance and detachment from any issues in the world
>>7474583
I thought so. Like how the fuck can you be a Buddhist without believing in Buddha as a God, it's like being a Christian who is an atheist. They only do it because it makes them look hip.
>>7474575
nigga you're not even trying c'mon son
>>7474588
Not only that, buddhists desire is to move past samsara, while western pseudo-buddhists really just want fun
Good job on noticing this, OP, maybe the thread would have better bin in /his/ or /r9k/ or /pol/ or /b/
>>7474596
They are Hedonists I hate them!
>>7474575
>he's a Mahayana or Vajrayana pleb
Mahayana is heresy except for Zen.
Theravada is the real religion and Buddha is NOT a god in Theravada.
>>7474583
>>7474588
Not even Buddhist, but you guys are dumb.
Just one example: the branch of Buddhism followed in Tibet is not the same as those of Sri Lanka, or China, or Japan. Buddhism is very old, and it has spread to large territories and have been interpreted by a vast number of people.
Also, the more you dig the texts of Buddhism, the more you search for the old materials, for the words that are contemporary to the historical Buddha or just slightly older, the more his deity is toned down, and the more the man himself appears as a sage of flesh and blood.
Just like any remarkable person, a lot of rust and rant has accumulated over his figure. Even today this is true: Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Einstein are not the supreme wonders of nature that many believe in: if you study the sources of the time and really pay attention to their lives you can see the bones, the sinews and the marrow of their works – you can see that they were human, filled with failures and that their works are the offspring of a lot of effort.
And there are a lot of things in the philosophy of Buddhism that work as a good moral philosophy, as a good “how-to-live” manual. In its own time Buddhism was not a religion: it was a particular philosophy, the ideas of a man on how one could live well and achieve happiness.
Of course, Buddha was a man of his time, and a lot fo topics that he addresses (like rebirth) were current in his time. Even the world-renunciation of a noble prince was not a particular new thing: it was actually common: a lot of nobles did that back then.
>>7474575
they just think le fat happy man stands for peace and weed
>>7474621
>responding seriously to a troll thread
>using the word "heresy" in a Buddhist context like a retarded papist
>making a special exception for Zen
Why, cause you like Alan Watts lectures? If you knew anything about Theravada and Zen you'd know that Tathāgatagarbha is both central to Ch'an and totally at odds with the doctrine of anatta, no matter how much Chinese exegetes tried to reconcile the two.
sage because this thread is retarded, but it'll get 70+ replies worth of clueless shitsmearing anyway
>>7474588
>Like how the fuck can you be a Buddhist without believing in Buddha as a God
I don't know SHIT about Buddhism and I know that this is horseshit, which makes you a hypocrite OP.
>>7474624
Good post. I studied a semester of Tibetan Buddhism and you hit the nail on the head and did so more eloquently than I could have.
>>7474583
>It's called western pseudo-buddhism.
Literally every strand of buddhism has been adapted to fit its cultural surroundings. In China it melded with Daoism, in Japan Shinto, in India Hinduism, Burma and Vietnam local folk religion...western buddhism is far from unique in this.
>>7474624
>Einstein are not the supreme wonders of nature that many believe in
you have no idea how ridiculous the idea of conceptualizing space into a rienmann metric is and how insane that he was correct about it. say what you will about his later years, but GR is more or less the biggest intellectual accomplishment one man has had.
>>7474634
i like how wrong weed smokers are who think it is anything but the exact opposite of buddhism
>>7474634
who needs buddhism when you got peace and weed
I've hung out with a lot of stoners, and plenty of them are interested in buddhism, but none call themselves Buddhists and they know more about buddhism than you guys are acting like.
This stereotype is a fabrication.
>>7475915
But he was working his ass off to finish the GR corpus first, for there was another man working on the same matematical problems (David Hilbert )and who was eventually to solve them by himself, altough he said that the idea was, aftear all, first noticed by Einstein. He was quite humble, and yet he achieved, by himself, the same thing as Einstein.
Science is like a building: one cannot create new floors without the ones under it. If Einstein wasent born than somewone else would have done what he did, and not many years from when it happened.
>>7474575
>how can people follow one ancient branch of Buddhism and not all the other ones?
Retarded question. Not nearly all Buddhists worship the Buddha like a deity. The ones that do only do so because they were monotheistic pagans before Buddhism reached them.
>>7476018
*polytheistic
>>7475915
>science is anything but quackery
hahahahaah
>>7476066
It hurts to know that there are a lot of people in the world who are much smarter than you, dosent it?
>>7476096
They certainly aren't empiricists. Now, don't project you hiveminded milquetoast bastard.
>>7475911
THIS
I have western friends with Buddha pendants, statues and other figures in their homes as a commercialized zen. Western people have little access to Buddhism which is not a very accessible or widespread religion so they seek it out and make it their own.
>>7474642
Chan aka Zen means meditation and the emphasis is on dogmaless transmission and hard work because of daoist and samurai influence.
That makes it pretty amenable to secular approaches, just like Theravada. That's why it's cool.
>>7474575
I don't, but keeping a fat smug laughing buddha in my room does cheer me up
>>7476102
Why do you think empiricists are dumb? Is it because of this guy?
>>7475915
and yet mathematics are pure conventions
I love how this started as a troll thread yet managed to degenerate into something even more grotesque than that. Shitty criticisms and shitty counters.
>>7474642
>Tathāgatagarbha
You should know that there are several distinct views of this that are mutually exclusive, some of which are not found in Ch'an at all.
You would be really hard pressed to claim that the specific Indo-Tibetan doctrine of Tathāgatagarbha found in the atiyogatantrayana sects was at odds with anatta.
