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by keybored 921 days ago
From what I’ve understood of Buddhist philosophy, it rejects this view that some pile of wood can turn into a table. Of course a table exists... but there is nothing special about “forms”. Everything is dependent origination (everything is caused by something else). We conventionally and intuitively split things into sort of the process of making a cake and then say that the cake is something kind of absolute and rigid. But it’s all just process; one thing causes another thing which then causes another thing.

Psychologically speaking it is not helpful to think of forms as anything but convenient signs. Yeah they exist for practical purposes, but they actually don’t. Psychologically speaking (again) we need to get away from thinking that there is ever a split between “things” and “process”. Ultimately it’s all relativistic. The one Absolute Truth is that everything is relativistic... of course most people (philosophers?) reject that as a trivial contradiction, but Mahayana does some tricks (apparently—who am I, Wittgenstein?) which makes this seeming contradiction just work.

At the end of the day our natural intuitions are wrong. They were more towards Aristotle’s view. So we have to actively do things like analyze or meditate in order to see reality for what it truly is. In order to rid ourselves of clinging.