Is Buddhism a Philosophy? Was it Ever a Philosophy?
20 November 2018 [link youtube]
Buddhism has sometimes been interpreted as a nihilistic "anti-philosophy", and sometimes presented as a sort of secular-spirited skepticism that just happens to be dressed up in monastic garb; both of these interpretations are false. ————— You can find me on Patreon: https://patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel/
Youtube Automatic Transcription
boy what a difference it makes when I
stand up straight the last video was I was hunched over the government's go I look a lot better so that's great so guys I'm starting this videos by noting if you started watching my channel recently you think of me as someone who studies Chinese as the t-shirt indicates but actually back in my brilliant focused hard-working heyday as a young man back when my energies were not so dissipated but I didn't have such relaxed lifestyle I studied the ancient Indian language pally so my lifestyles changed in a lot of ways I'm now 40 years old I have a five year old daughter I have a 26 year old girlfriend who needs a lot of attention she's just a tough campaign but there was a time when I was younger and much more mentally focused in self-discipline and was over the real jerk - I was really hard to get along with it was always saying to people I'm not on vacation don't waste my time I've got to get back to the Buddhist monastery I've got to get back to the library I gotta go back to the archives I've got to get back to the gym did workout back then - but I studied the most ancient language of the Buddhist tradition so it occurred to me right after making the prior video talking about the nature of philosophy in the Western world to do a video type with the nature of philosophy in Buddhism and thus in a large part of Asia and I do now have expertise in Chinese and Japanese but my original area of expertise in Buddhism was ancient India Sri Lanka and then the transition from Sri Lanka to Thailand Laos Cambodia Myanmar etc so ancient tera vaada Buddhism but really all of the forms of what is in the follow after that although you know like everyone else I have relatively little interest in forms of Buddhism that are relatively corrupt and far removed from the original philosophy there is that keyword that that started the whole thing rolling so the question in the titleist video is is Buddhism a philosophy was Buddhism ever a philosophy and it's significant to note that from an early period in the European appraisal there has been an interest in instead interpreting Buddhism as an anti philosophy interpreting Buddhism as a kind of nihilistic antique read or anti religion and this is sometimes done quite sincerely and sometimes with less sincerity I would say this got popular first in the French language it would be interesting to look at in Europe where this idea picked up first but I can remember from the earliest period of the European interest in Buddhism probably because at that time France was so Christian and the French imperialist encounter with Buddhism was so different from the British imperialist encounter there was a lot of interest in looking at Buddhism not just as an antidote to Christianity but as some kind of nihilistic or skeptical antidote to religion in general in the English language I would say this only really became popular in like the 1970s when the philosophy of Naggar Jinnah became very popular some people prefer to pronounce that name Nagarjuna whatever knock yourself out I mean how we pronounce Sanskrit in 21st century English a little bit flexible on these questions anyway Naggar Jinnah is not is not the Buddha in the garden is a later Buddhist philosopher but he became a kind of turning point in the Western reappraisal of early Buddhist philosophy as a negative critique of the religions that were older than Buddhism now if you just look at it to that limited extent there are two negative contrasts you are going to talk about in adam braiding the sense in which buddhism is and isn't a philosophy one is the extent to which buddhism was proposed to challenge and negate the philosophies that came before it in ancient india and we normally refer to those religions as hinduism and Jainism but they were significantly different from Hinduism as it exists today in India significantly different from Jainism as exist in India also so it was ancient but it was season one Buddhism against season one Hinduism it was a very different theater of debate but we do have a lot of evidence of exactly what the debates were and the fact that it did indeed challenge and then the second contrast is the extent to which Buddhism has emerged into modern Western consciousness or even even modern Asia Asian consciously west and east into a modern appraisal as a challenge to religions like Christianity and Judaism though and Islam sure throw that in too so Buddhism as a philosophy in this context gets a lot of credit for what it rejects for what it expresses skepticism about for what expresses doubt about in the sophisticated way in which it challenges the assumptions of its interlocutors the way in which it challenges the assumptions of Christians and ancient Hindus in these these two contexts so the best-known example of this in the example that has the most pages devoted to it in the Pali Canon so the Pali Canon is the most ancient and most important corpus of Buddhist texts is about the existence or nonexistence of the soul and please don't send me email on this the word soul is a correct translation into English it is not about the existence of the self it's not about the bodily self it's about the existence of the soul it's not about the psychological personality it's about you have a soul that really is what's being debated there and it really seems that pretty much everyone in ancient India with the exception of people who are complete atheists complete nihilist who rejected religion entirely pretty much everyone seemed to agree that there was something called the soul and the head debates about the nature of the soul and where it came from where when after you died there's one theory and a mmm I've had connections with the scholars who are interested in this there's one theory that the most ancient idea of the soul in India was actually linked the idea of the rain cycle that when you died your soul evaporated up into the heavens and rain down again so just as in ancient Greece there was a kind of speculative diversity of views about spirits and souls and even indeed cosmology and questions of where does rain come from that there were different kind of supernatural approaches competing and the Buddhists come in at the hard skeptical or Nile and of this saying no there's absolutely no soul at all and moreover they think that there's this fundamental jarring improvement in your life if only you can deeply and profoundly appreciate that there really is no soul if you'll give up this this delusion so this is one flattering example now you can also look at any kind of specific religious austerity that the Buddhists were opposed to for example the idea that starving yourself to death brought about enlightenment that that fasting brought about enlightenment the Buddhists are opposed to that the idea that throwing yourself into freezing cold water like in a ritual way repeatedly brought about enlightenment of spiritual attainment so you get very caddy sort of Buddhist debates about that like well if you think throwing yourself into freezing cold water makes you profound or philosophically advances you you ought to get down on your knees and worship the fish that are swimming in this is this cold pond right now they're much more likely than you or I you know this this kind of thing what's the significance of taking a vow of silence what's the significance of starving yourself to death there are a lot of specific oh oh sorry and a huge one what's the significance of the Vedas the ancient religious texts of Hinduism and the Buddhists just think it's nonsense the magical book that many other people in India not all are worshipping as they were equivalent to the Bible the Buddhists think that has no no significance at all so it's easy to cherry-pick it's easy to selectively quote these most critical passages of Buddhism this what a lot of people want to do and then present Buddhism as a nihilistic anti philosophy as a liberating skeptical ethic of cross-examining your opponents and revealing the truth now this is itself however completely fictional because what you're doing is only looking at what we're looking at less than 1/2 of what the religion is Buddhism ancient Buddhism in the ancient world absolutely was based on hallucinogenic experiences of Sir I shouldn't say hallucinations purely hallucinogenic hallucinations period and of have hallucinating and seeing all kinds of things including gods with a lowercase G Yeti's and demons and the the ghosts of deceased people and the fate of what happens to the ghosts of those dispute disease people after they die and that they go through a kind of magical process of reincarnation and other spirit realms and so on so all of that is fundamentally dogmatic and magical and it's only by focusing on one half of the equation that Europeans and also modern people in Asia tried to rehabilitate Buddhism by focusing on its most skeptical aspects even though those aspects are there now even if we just stuck to say say two issues within ancient Buddhism the soul ie the fact that ancient Buddhism projected the soul and the concept of fate the concept of the gods controlling your your fate Buddhism also rejects that the idea of the gods determining what's your any any kind of fixed fate destiny no the school would put the issue of destiny if you just think about those two issues you already have two really big wedge issues that make Buddhism seem very enlightened and modern compared to Christianity now let's bring this back down to earth for a second here how about sex is recently as the 1960s but even more so in the 1860s you could have traveled to Thailand and said well everyone here is kind of fundamentally down-to-earth and relaxed about sex that relaxed about homosexuality they're relaxed about transgender process dressing people they don't seem to have the attitudes towards virginity and marriage that we have in the Western world compared to what was normal in Judaism Christianity and Islam the types of social customs and attitudes towards sex that had emerged out of Buddhism on the one hand it did valorize monks living in total celibacy there's kind of a very simple division between on the one hand there's the life of celibacy on the other hand there's this life of sexual freedom of lay people it's like monks completely reject using money they're not supposed to even touch money but if you're a layperson fine go out and earn as much money as you want to the similar kind of black and white difference between the monastic life which is totally virtuous world world rejecting and then there's the worldly realm life affirming and you know it's not quite it's not quite no-holds-barred it's not quite you know a free-for-all but much much more permissive again even in the 1960s little in the 1860s then what Europeans were saddled with so again there's this tendency to want to interpret Buddhism as a kind of liberating nihilistic ethic as an anti philosophy and an anti religion as removing chains so again my point isn't that this is totally false or totally you can see why people got excited people were really optimistic but this is less than half of the whole story just as when people stand up and say about the American Constitution and the formation in the United States America this is some great liberating thing about the whole world you can kind of put your hand up and say what about the slaves and the native people like what about and did you speak what's like what about slavery and genocide to put that but there are some big gaps in you know the good news about the American Constitution it doesn't mean there's nothing to be excited about or nothing to appreciate in America Constitution but there are some really big questions left here and with Buddhism I mean just the issue of slavery the issue of imperialism and kingship the issue of government the issue of what kind of government was associated with and promoted by Buddhism and I mean again most Buddhist scholars are still shocked when I even mentioned slavery well guess what guys this was a huge part of the religion right up till the day before yesterday there's a lot that's being swept under the rug there um you know in Southeast Asia especially it's true also that Buddhism was very positively related to literacy as such so it kind of gets a bit of a it gets a lot of good press gets a free ride that way which is it's a very positive thing Buddhism was really the source of written language in Southeast Asia and it provided literacy it taught literacy to both you know men and women so I give credit for that and I could get into even the title goes how literacy was spread to people through Buddhist monks Buddhist monks were really the only teachers doing professional teachers professional educators in a society that was really totally illiterate before tera vaada bosom arrived there and Buddhist temples even in Laos even in the mountains of Laos they became engines of literacy and warehouses of common literature and is a lot pause the you know that however these societies did not progress scientifically they didn't I mean and we don't even have to say compared to England and France they did not progress scientifically even compared to China or Japan or India of it never even really caught up with India they never built the pyramids they never caught up with ancient Egypt they never accomplished anything on that scale they very fundamentally remained mired in a kind of worse than feudal ignorance and why is that well again obviously I'm not saying that that Buddhism alone should be criticized this way of most people who are sincerely engaged in the study of the history of Islam they look at the dark ages that Islam brought about as this terrible regression if you just look at ancient Athens the pagan period of ancient Athens compared to the Dark Ages once Catholicism takes over you see a kind of regression there also many religions have kind of blotted out the human capacity for innovation imagination learning etc etc but with those religions with Islam and Catholicism it's kind of easy to point to repression as the problem and with Tera Byte of buddhism really just want to talk about terrible isms at this moment so I think this is true well this would also be true of many other forms of Buddhism but let's just say with tera vaada Buddhism it's not so much that you see repression that's there of in the sense of Islam brutally conquering a country forcing all of the men to be circumcised as adults smashing their idols burning down their temples stealing all the gold from the temples and then forcibly assimilating everyone and cultural genocide on a massive scale this is how Islam conquered a large part of the world it's not that what's disturbing the lesson we have to take from the lack of progress input of societies is just fundamentally satisfying the myth of reincarnation as to people that a great deal of the edge death loses its sting and life loses its lash and it's motivation when you see yourself not as an individual living one life who's got to accomplish something now it's now or never you're gonna die you never come back you got one life you're in and you're out as opposed to oh no no it's a cycle of suffering it's a cycle of reincarnation of lives that come and go again and again over thousands and thousands of years hundreds of thousands millions of years this is a cycle that goes on almost forever my one of my professors have autism you say it's it's infinity minus one you know the cycle of riyals but you've been reincarnated in it warrants times Newton in the innumerable times before and you will be reincarnated numeral times again and this may motivate certain kinds of suicidal and self-destructive virtue it may make people more willing to sacrifice their lives and it also demotivates certain kinds of accomplishment certain times of world changing and life changing paradigm challenging activities in in one's life so I closed this video by saying I am now 40 years old and I'm trying to plan what I'm gonna do between age 40 and age 60 I'm never gonna be 40 years old again the mental intellectual creative potential I've got now I don't think I'm gonna have it at 60 maybe no wrong maybe I'm gonna go be a Renaissance man at 60 and 70 I don't know but there's no doubt the kind of motivation I felt many times when I was thinking I might only have a few years to live I've got to live now gotta do this now the intense focus and work ethic I have I think that can emerge out of nihilism or atheism or maybe if refuse of the world but there is something mentally deadening about spirituality put it that broadly when people think they're not living for today they're not living for now they're not living for the next 20 years you're living for an eternity in paradise in Christianity those or you're living for an almost eternal cycle of reincarnation I think this really has a tremendously deadening impact on the human spirit it Rob's death of its sting but mmm yeah it may also rob life of its savor Buddhism a mix of dogma philosophy and anti philosophy I will put the link to my buddhism playlist at the bottom of this video shout out to the one supporter on patreon one who asked me to make more videos but put his philosophy
stand up straight the last video was I was hunched over the government's go I look a lot better so that's great so guys I'm starting this videos by noting if you started watching my channel recently you think of me as someone who studies Chinese as the t-shirt indicates but actually back in my brilliant focused hard-working heyday as a young man back when my energies were not so dissipated but I didn't have such relaxed lifestyle I studied the ancient Indian language pally so my lifestyles changed in a lot of ways I'm now 40 years old I have a five year old daughter I have a 26 year old girlfriend who needs a lot of attention she's just a tough campaign but there was a time when I was younger and much more mentally focused in self-discipline and was over the real jerk - I was really hard to get along with it was always saying to people I'm not on vacation don't waste my time I've got to get back to the Buddhist monastery I've got to get back to the library I gotta go back to the archives I've got to get back to the gym did workout back then - but I studied the most ancient language of the Buddhist tradition so it occurred to me right after making the prior video talking about the nature of philosophy in the Western world to do a video type with the nature of philosophy in Buddhism and thus in a large part of Asia and I do now have expertise in Chinese and Japanese but my original area of expertise in Buddhism was ancient India Sri Lanka and then the transition from Sri Lanka to Thailand Laos Cambodia Myanmar etc so ancient tera vaada Buddhism but really all of the forms of what is in the follow after that although you know like everyone else I have relatively little interest in forms of Buddhism that are relatively corrupt and far removed from the original philosophy there is that keyword that that started the whole thing rolling so the question in the titleist video is is Buddhism a philosophy was Buddhism ever a philosophy and it's significant to note that from an early period in the European appraisal there has been an interest in instead interpreting Buddhism as an anti philosophy interpreting Buddhism as a kind of nihilistic antique read or anti religion and this is sometimes done quite sincerely and sometimes with less sincerity I would say this got popular first in the French language it would be interesting to look at in Europe where this idea picked up first but I can remember from the earliest period of the European interest in Buddhism probably because at that time France was so Christian and the French imperialist encounter with Buddhism was so different from the British imperialist encounter there was a lot of interest in looking at Buddhism not just as an antidote to Christianity but as some kind of nihilistic or skeptical antidote to religion in general in the English language I would say this only really became popular in like the 1970s when the philosophy of Naggar Jinnah became very popular some people prefer to pronounce that name Nagarjuna whatever knock yourself out I mean how we pronounce Sanskrit in 21st century English a little bit flexible on these questions anyway Naggar Jinnah is not is not the Buddha in the garden is a later Buddhist philosopher but he became a kind of turning point in the Western reappraisal of early Buddhist philosophy as a negative critique of the religions that were older than Buddhism now if you just look at it to that limited extent there are two negative contrasts you are going to talk about in adam braiding the sense in which buddhism is and isn't a philosophy one is the extent to which buddhism was proposed to challenge and negate the philosophies that came before it in ancient india and we normally refer to those religions as hinduism and Jainism but they were significantly different from Hinduism as it exists today in India significantly different from Jainism as exist in India also so it was ancient but it was season one Buddhism against season one Hinduism it was a very different theater of debate but we do have a lot of evidence of exactly what the debates were and the fact that it did indeed challenge and then the second contrast is the extent to which Buddhism has emerged into modern Western consciousness or even even modern Asia Asian consciously west and east into a modern appraisal as a challenge to religions like Christianity and Judaism though and Islam sure throw that in too so Buddhism as a philosophy in this context gets a lot of credit for what it rejects for what it expresses skepticism about for what expresses doubt about in the sophisticated way in which it challenges the assumptions of its interlocutors the way in which it challenges the assumptions of Christians and ancient Hindus in these these two contexts so the best-known example of this in the example that has the most pages devoted to it in the Pali Canon so the Pali Canon is the most ancient and most important corpus of Buddhist texts is about the existence or nonexistence of the soul and please don't send me email on this the word soul is a correct translation into English it is not about the existence of the self it's not about the bodily self it's about the existence of the soul it's not about the psychological personality it's about you have a soul that really is what's being debated there and it really seems that pretty much everyone in ancient India with the exception of people who are complete atheists complete nihilist who rejected religion entirely pretty much everyone seemed to agree that there was something called the soul and the head debates about the nature of the soul and where it came from where when after you died there's one theory and a mmm I've had connections with the scholars who are interested in this there's one theory that the most ancient idea of the soul in India was actually linked the idea of the rain cycle that when you died your soul evaporated up into the heavens and rain down again so just as in ancient Greece there was a kind of speculative diversity of views about spirits and souls and even indeed cosmology and questions of where does rain come from that there were different kind of supernatural approaches competing and the Buddhists come in at the hard skeptical or Nile and of this saying no there's absolutely no soul at all and moreover they think that there's this fundamental jarring improvement in your life if only you can deeply and profoundly appreciate that there really is no soul if you'll give up this this delusion so this is one flattering example now you can also look at any kind of specific religious austerity that the Buddhists were opposed to for example the idea that starving yourself to death brought about enlightenment that that fasting brought about enlightenment the Buddhists are opposed to that the idea that throwing yourself into freezing cold water like in a ritual way repeatedly brought about enlightenment of spiritual attainment so you get very caddy sort of Buddhist debates about that like well if you think throwing yourself into freezing cold water makes you profound or philosophically advances you you ought to get down on your knees and worship the fish that are swimming in this is this cold pond right now they're much more likely than you or I you know this this kind of thing what's the significance of taking a vow of silence what's the significance of starving yourself to death there are a lot of specific oh oh sorry and a huge one what's the significance of the Vedas the ancient religious texts of Hinduism and the Buddhists just think it's nonsense the magical book that many other people in India not all are worshipping as they were equivalent to the Bible the Buddhists think that has no no significance at all so it's easy to cherry-pick it's easy to selectively quote these most critical passages of Buddhism this what a lot of people want to do and then present Buddhism as a nihilistic anti philosophy as a liberating skeptical ethic of cross-examining your opponents and revealing the truth now this is itself however completely fictional because what you're doing is only looking at what we're looking at less than 1/2 of what the religion is Buddhism ancient Buddhism in the ancient world absolutely was based on hallucinogenic experiences of Sir I shouldn't say hallucinations purely hallucinogenic hallucinations period and of have hallucinating and seeing all kinds of things including gods with a lowercase G Yeti's and demons and the the ghosts of deceased people and the fate of what happens to the ghosts of those dispute disease people after they die and that they go through a kind of magical process of reincarnation and other spirit realms and so on so all of that is fundamentally dogmatic and magical and it's only by focusing on one half of the equation that Europeans and also modern people in Asia tried to rehabilitate Buddhism by focusing on its most skeptical aspects even though those aspects are there now even if we just stuck to say say two issues within ancient Buddhism the soul ie the fact that ancient Buddhism projected the soul and the concept of fate the concept of the gods controlling your your fate Buddhism also rejects that the idea of the gods determining what's your any any kind of fixed fate destiny no the school would put the issue of destiny if you just think about those two issues you already have two really big wedge issues that make Buddhism seem very enlightened and modern compared to Christianity now let's bring this back down to earth for a second here how about sex is recently as the 1960s but even more so in the 1860s you could have traveled to Thailand and said well everyone here is kind of fundamentally down-to-earth and relaxed about sex that relaxed about homosexuality they're relaxed about transgender process dressing people they don't seem to have the attitudes towards virginity and marriage that we have in the Western world compared to what was normal in Judaism Christianity and Islam the types of social customs and attitudes towards sex that had emerged out of Buddhism on the one hand it did valorize monks living in total celibacy there's kind of a very simple division between on the one hand there's the life of celibacy on the other hand there's this life of sexual freedom of lay people it's like monks completely reject using money they're not supposed to even touch money but if you're a layperson fine go out and earn as much money as you want to the similar kind of black and white difference between the monastic life which is totally virtuous world world rejecting and then there's the worldly realm life affirming and you know it's not quite it's not quite no-holds-barred it's not quite you know a free-for-all but much much more permissive again even in the 1960s little in the 1860s then what Europeans were saddled with so again there's this tendency to want to interpret Buddhism as a kind of liberating nihilistic ethic as an anti philosophy and an anti religion as removing chains so again my point isn't that this is totally false or totally you can see why people got excited people were really optimistic but this is less than half of the whole story just as when people stand up and say about the American Constitution and the formation in the United States America this is some great liberating thing about the whole world you can kind of put your hand up and say what about the slaves and the native people like what about and did you speak what's like what about slavery and genocide to put that but there are some big gaps in you know the good news about the American Constitution it doesn't mean there's nothing to be excited about or nothing to appreciate in America Constitution but there are some really big questions left here and with Buddhism I mean just the issue of slavery the issue of imperialism and kingship the issue of government the issue of what kind of government was associated with and promoted by Buddhism and I mean again most Buddhist scholars are still shocked when I even mentioned slavery well guess what guys this was a huge part of the religion right up till the day before yesterday there's a lot that's being swept under the rug there um you know in Southeast Asia especially it's true also that Buddhism was very positively related to literacy as such so it kind of gets a bit of a it gets a lot of good press gets a free ride that way which is it's a very positive thing Buddhism was really the source of written language in Southeast Asia and it provided literacy it taught literacy to both you know men and women so I give credit for that and I could get into even the title goes how literacy was spread to people through Buddhist monks Buddhist monks were really the only teachers doing professional teachers professional educators in a society that was really totally illiterate before tera vaada bosom arrived there and Buddhist temples even in Laos even in the mountains of Laos they became engines of literacy and warehouses of common literature and is a lot pause the you know that however these societies did not progress scientifically they didn't I mean and we don't even have to say compared to England and France they did not progress scientifically even compared to China or Japan or India of it never even really caught up with India they never built the pyramids they never caught up with ancient Egypt they never accomplished anything on that scale they very fundamentally remained mired in a kind of worse than feudal ignorance and why is that well again obviously I'm not saying that that Buddhism alone should be criticized this way of most people who are sincerely engaged in the study of the history of Islam they look at the dark ages that Islam brought about as this terrible regression if you just look at ancient Athens the pagan period of ancient Athens compared to the Dark Ages once Catholicism takes over you see a kind of regression there also many religions have kind of blotted out the human capacity for innovation imagination learning etc etc but with those religions with Islam and Catholicism it's kind of easy to point to repression as the problem and with Tera Byte of buddhism really just want to talk about terrible isms at this moment so I think this is true well this would also be true of many other forms of Buddhism but let's just say with tera vaada Buddhism it's not so much that you see repression that's there of in the sense of Islam brutally conquering a country forcing all of the men to be circumcised as adults smashing their idols burning down their temples stealing all the gold from the temples and then forcibly assimilating everyone and cultural genocide on a massive scale this is how Islam conquered a large part of the world it's not that what's disturbing the lesson we have to take from the lack of progress input of societies is just fundamentally satisfying the myth of reincarnation as to people that a great deal of the edge death loses its sting and life loses its lash and it's motivation when you see yourself not as an individual living one life who's got to accomplish something now it's now or never you're gonna die you never come back you got one life you're in and you're out as opposed to oh no no it's a cycle of suffering it's a cycle of reincarnation of lives that come and go again and again over thousands and thousands of years hundreds of thousands millions of years this is a cycle that goes on almost forever my one of my professors have autism you say it's it's infinity minus one you know the cycle of riyals but you've been reincarnated in it warrants times Newton in the innumerable times before and you will be reincarnated numeral times again and this may motivate certain kinds of suicidal and self-destructive virtue it may make people more willing to sacrifice their lives and it also demotivates certain kinds of accomplishment certain times of world changing and life changing paradigm challenging activities in in one's life so I closed this video by saying I am now 40 years old and I'm trying to plan what I'm gonna do between age 40 and age 60 I'm never gonna be 40 years old again the mental intellectual creative potential I've got now I don't think I'm gonna have it at 60 maybe no wrong maybe I'm gonna go be a Renaissance man at 60 and 70 I don't know but there's no doubt the kind of motivation I felt many times when I was thinking I might only have a few years to live I've got to live now gotta do this now the intense focus and work ethic I have I think that can emerge out of nihilism or atheism or maybe if refuse of the world but there is something mentally deadening about spirituality put it that broadly when people think they're not living for today they're not living for now they're not living for the next 20 years you're living for an eternity in paradise in Christianity those or you're living for an almost eternal cycle of reincarnation I think this really has a tremendously deadening impact on the human spirit it Rob's death of its sting but mmm yeah it may also rob life of its savor Buddhism a mix of dogma philosophy and anti philosophy I will put the link to my buddhism playlist at the bottom of this video shout out to the one supporter on patreon one who asked me to make more videos but put his philosophy