Brand New Ancient Buddhist Philosophy, Part 3

hi this is part three of the discussion
of how the history of the 20th century in Buddhism has shaped the situation we're in now at start of the 21st century if I were going to summarize subject being discussed in one sentence up to this point it would be that the crisis of modernity is a crisis of confronting what's ancient and what's not the first two parts obviously the big preoccupation was in delving into the political conditions in the 20th century that have shaped the situation we're in now on 21st and obviously the emphasis have given to it should give you the sense that those those political and social conditions and economic conditions have been so overwhelming that they have been more important than the philosophical problem we're talking about now but by the same token as the emergency period of what I've termed refugee Buddhism as that period of emergency has come to an end as the period of communist persecution has come to an end and other unique post-war features of 20th century have petered out along with certain philosophical movements that work though closely linked now that profound underlying problem comes to the fore how far the implications go of this conflict between what's ancient and what's only apparently what we now know in the modern age um brings into question all the assumptions that millions of Buddhists learn from their grandparents and regard it as legitimate authentic and definitive present the other necessary Preppers to this discussion is what I covered in my very first youtube video where I clarify that when I say something is more ancient I am NOT claiming that it's more rational or more scientific different philosophies from different periods of time are simply different and nobody should make the claim that for example pre-socratic velocity the most ancient philosophy from Greece is more rational and more scientific than a post Socratic philosophy simply because it is more ancient obviously when you look at specific thinkers on a case-by-case basis course some are more rational some more irrational someone more spiritual etc any contrast can be made between specific philosophical authors but what I covered in my first youtube video was to clarify that when I say something is older not making any kind of claim that it therefore presents a more skeptical more rational more scientific attitude within the Institute bosom however if you can transplant yourself into the mindset of a Catholic fer for a second you can consider how how unsettling it is for modern Catholics to know that in the Bible the Bible as we still have it today the text in this case hasn't changed in the Bible the so-called Virgin Mary never was a virgin it has been a known fact than something like the 2nd century ad that Christians were intentionally mistranslating and promoting a mistranslation of the Hebrew Aramaic etc um that made a word that sibling meant young woman appear to mean virgin and constructed and promoted the miracle of a virgin birth connecting Jesus to some of the Old Testament prophecies since are called Isaiah um today every Christian is confronted with the fact that the more ancient version of the life of Jesus does not include any virgin birth if your grandparents and raised you to believe that this was central to Catholicism you can imagine what a strange said only thing would be to simply know that no that's not Egypt and it's not legitimate and in a world where everything is unreal it's it's not real Oh some things are more unreal that is so the knowledge that ancient Christians who wrote the Bible never even made a claim never advanced a myth that Jesus was a virgin birth that must affect the way you regard the religion in some sense even though I'm not at all putting forward a claim that the most ancient part of the Bible is more rational to say that something is coherent is very different from saying that it's rational reason that it's true the most ancient period of Buddhist philosophy is coherent it presents its own view of the world and that view of the world is magical it is supernatural it includes gods and demons and a magical mountain at the mineral middle of the world and reincarnation and magical formulas that you can chant to try to protect yourself against the venomous snakes um it's a magical ancient view of what the world is and of our places quite apart from the place of the Buddhist philosophy which is also very much magical however it is coherent and when you compare that to something that arose many centuries later in Thailand in Japan or in China in a totally different language and totally different culture it is naturally impossible to make those into one coherent whole especially philosophy but even in the level of ritual I'm sure there are millions of Christians who continue to celebrate holidays that including Christmas with the virgin birth included but also having the knowledge that this is just a leader myth added on Christianity and it's not part of the original difficult tradition and it's not even something that Jesus wanted people to say about him he didn't go around Jim hey you should know I was pretty pretty interesting what kind of results you get trying to sell that story so we have thousands of examples in Buddhism we can likewise a the crisis of modernity makes us confront what's ancient and what's not and again what's not ancient I'm not at all here to tell you that it's um what's not ancient can never be a coherent part of the philosophy of the hood it never can um Japan has a tradition that still popular day of worshipping the earth uma Bodine Seth i'll put up the chinese characters here at the top of the screen this is one of the most popular statue making statute worshipping traditions in japan and when japan occupied ruled taiwan they actually tried to export this tradition to taiwan you know that wasn't so many decades ago today i think that's something i don't think there will be any Japanese missionary organization trying to get other cultures and other countries to to worship statues of the so called Earth Moon what he said um that tradition people do ascribe miracles and supernatural powers to it less and less as time goes on but I would compare it to the intense emotional attachment many Christians have to the Virgin Mary the earth-moon Bodhisattva is especially associated with parents warning their deceased children when when there's been miscarriage or when a child has died younger than the parents there are dulles many many people who have strong emotional connections to this tradition still today even if they would never believe in supernatural effects of the statute however you know culture is not static culture doesn't exist as a statute in a museum that's dead culture culture only exists it persists when people actively reproduce it when people are making it new again and again and during World War two the Japanese believed in this enough to try to reproduce this culture in Taiwan that's a really interesting test of faith and today I mean there are Japanese who are trying to export various forms of Buddhist philosophy abroad you can take glance of what those are but I don't think anyone is trying to sell this this magical statute that's linked to morning debt infants and so on so there's a shift many of the aspects of Buddhism that have been promoted ferociously in the last few decades have no authentic faces in the ancient texts and tremendous success for so-called breathing meditation I give you a link to an article everything discussing what the ancient texts I should said breathing meditation is a fraud and it's a money-making from people pay money to learn so cold breathing meditation putte scores so the focus sounds like it it's not an agent or authentic heart of autism and the modern history can read the article so cold interdependence is not an ancient and authentic part of the Buddhist philosophy and it can't be reconciled coherently with what the text says on one subject or on any other subject if you just read the first couple of paragraphs that the article I can link you to the article I've written about it you'll see that the timeline of who said what is just basically most three authors most recent on 1975 and then this idea spread all over the world hundreds of university professors and thousands of months now preach this story that is not supported by a single sentence in the Pelican no more than the concept of the virgin birth of Jesus is supported by a single sentence in the Bible it is an intentional mistranslation actively promoted actively to see anything um at least as much as the story of the virgin birth of Jesus I should clarify it for the 100th time that what is most ancient and most effective is not necessarily the most rational or the most appealing to modern people today indra the ancient god Indra is an important part of ancient Buddhism it's not he's not an important part of modern birds look around try to find a statue of Indra once in a long while you can find an image or a painting of them in any temple whether it's in Thailand or China or what have you in Nura has dropped out of the faith and when you know what's really ancient on what's not you're always running into funny coincidences of fragments that have one attack from the ancient period through Tuesday a throat China at least until recently they still had the belief in what was called the kitchen God in English the once every two weeks on the lunar calendar cycle there was a magical messenger of the gods who came to check on who's naughty and who's nice and part of the Chinese tradition was actually leaving out a bride leaving out some food once every two weeks in the kitchen so that when the messenger of the gods came to visit he would be less likely to report back to the God on the the sins and evil taste you've been committed if you talk Chinese people today they think this is a you know folk tradition that comes from China it's in the pally cab it's part of the most ancient tradition extension Buddhism that survived as as a folk practice in in China today and to give one more example that I think would and could influence thousands of people you know Richard Gombrich an academic but a proponent of Buddhism lifelong coupon it's very influential very functional esta tears he put out a series of theses on the epistemology and ontology of Buddhism these are not trivial matters if you have a standard Western education of philosophy those are normally the first two things you look for you look for ontology fiscal nology ethics and actually garbage covers all three in his thesis his thesis is alive every piece of evidence used to support it is based on fraud and I have an article on the internet that shows you that fact exposes it fairly rapidly take some work to go through but what garbage is done even though he's supposedly a secular Western thinker it's not incompetent you'll get any examples where I have gone riches claimable philosophy the source that he quotes and then my explanation of what that really means in its original context with the original language it's not accidental and he's not capable of that kind of compliments these are brand new ancient lies and the reason why they're powerful well the reasons are everything I discussed in the first two parts bundled up with this big fundamental problem crisis in the deer meat of looking back reconsidering reevaluating um what is but definitive Asian part puts the belief that a Buddhist monk who is attained Nirvana gonna fly through the air like Superman among other superpowers that is an authentic ancient definitive part of Buddhism on the one hand nobody is sincerely interested in preaching form of Buddhism that believes in and valorized this belief that Buddhist monks today can fly or that they should be able to fly or that they're doing something wrong if they've been meditating for all these years and can't fly on the other hand nobody wants to teach your version of Buddhism that said well 2,000 years ago there were monks who could fly but today people have lost the art and nobody is meditating nobody is attending to Vanar correctly so nobody can fly no he wants to teach your version of Buddhism that some is authentic but it's a crumpled failure of its former self but the third possibility for me is also not viable I do not think the future of this religion can be a lie in which people pretend that those texts don't exist that Buddhism never was built on the site of supernatural claim that meditation Jonah and Nirvana that they did it in all a supernatural powers most flying monks read and fire their bodies walking through walls and so on that has been in the 20th century a major attempt to solve the crisis of modernity in Buddhism but again I would say that that doesn't solve the problems it only distracts people from and if you're going to draw people into the religion on a false premise on the promise of a scientific and rational but its own then you are going to lose those people the minute they find out that you're lying to them and it doesn't take that long for people to get to that minute like these days now that the texts are available in digital format it could be about 10 minutes fraud in Buddhism it takes money away from people it sometimes takes medicine away from people tells people to just meditate and not get medical help so it sometimes kills people and sometimes sexual history but fraud in Buddhism main victim is Buddhist philosophy itself I've met so many people who dedicated years of their lives to Buddhism and at the end of those years were just as ignorant as they were at the beginning and they've spent those years worshiping statues sometimes worshiping living monks same months they give money to repeating magical formulas involved in all kinds of superstitious practices whether they involve statutes or mandela's or mountains of colored sand and they are just as ignorant or worse after years of gone by so what have they been defrauded him apart from loss of time and money Sabbath they've been cheated the opportunity to learn what the Buddhist philosophy is