[rosser]

Years ago, there was a PBS documentary about the Buddha. [1] In it, one of the guests was addressing a question about the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. He dismissed the popular notion of reincarnation, where one was Napoleon or Cleopatra or the like in a previous life, instead likening it to repeating puberty over and over and over again.

It's not a question of being forced to make the mistakes. I think you're making a bit of a "forest for the trees" kind of mistake in the way you're looking at it. Accepting, for sake of argument, the story's premise of a one-soul universe, in each successive life, I'm choosing my mistakes. Ideally, I'm choosing new and better mistakes each time — much like the oft-cited entrepreneurial advice to keep making new and better mistakes.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/

[jonmrodriguez]

What about the natural disasters? You're not choosing that pain and suffering. (Well, maybe a little bit nowadays through global warming, but at least before this century you weren't)

[rosser]

This gets back to the popular notion of Karma, which says that when bad shit happens to someone, they somehow "deserved" it.

First off, I don't think Buddhism even has a notion of "bad". It recognizes that there is suffering, but it doesn't say suffering is bad; it merely says, matter-of-factly and without judgement, that suffering is a consequence of desire. In order not to suffer, the Buddha teaches, one must (among other things) be in accord with and accepting of one's circumstances, whatever they may be. Buddhism is very practical that way; there's the old saw about the Zen master who quipped, "Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

When "bad" shit happens, in that light, the suffering one experiences doesn't come from the thing that happened, but instead from wishing things were somehow different than they are. When you do that, you're diverting your awareness and mental energy from the reality that is manifest and present in front of you, and instead focusing on something that is not only not real, but can never be real.

And when you do that, you completely miss the fact that, up there, on that ledge, a lone flower has somehow managed to survive all the carnage around you. Had you not been preoccupied with wishing the world was other than it is, that flower would have reminded you that, even in the presence of destruction, life and beauty are resilient, and will ultimately triumph.

[chroma]

Thanks for explaining the Buddhist view. I don't know if you endorse it or not, but that sentiment really irks me. It reminds me of theodicy: Play with words enough, and you can claim the world is a beautiful place.

Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine.

Over 6 million children under the age of 5 died last year, mostly from disease. That's a Hiroshima bombing every week, killing only children under the age of 5. In the time it's taken you to read this paragraph, a handful of children will have died in terror and agony. Their parents will be filled with grief and guilt for years, if not the rest of their lives.

That is suffering, and it is bad. And no amount of platitudes or pretty flowers on a hillside can make up for it. If anything's in charge of this cosmos, they've got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Of course, it would be satisfying to point a finger. Reality is more frustrating: The universe is indifferent; horrifically so. For example, nothing in physics prevents a tiny protein-encased strand of DNA from killing 400 million people in the 20th century.[1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

Note: Parts of this post are paraphrasing an argument originally made by Sam Harris. Credit where credit is due and all that.

[rosser]

You're welcome. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm Buddhist, but I've found a lot of wisdom in and no small amount of inner peace through the Buddha's teachings.

Play with words enough, and you can claim the world is a beautiful place. Except, it isn't. It's worse than you can possibly imagine.

The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things in a way that, frankly, I find rhetorically cheaper than much of the sophistry that calls itself theodicy, and which, it appears, we both disdain.

That is suffering, and it is bad.

No, it's not; it's experience. It just is, whatever you may think of it, and what you think of it doesn't change the thing you're experiencing one whit. Calling an experience "bad" — or anything else that makes a moral, aesthetic, or other kind of qualitative judgement — is something you did, intrinsic neither to the experience, nor to the thing being experienced, but only to you. There's no such thing as "bad" anywhere in the whole universe except in your mind.

Buddhism isn't about trying to make unpleasant feelings "go away", or pretending they don't exist. Of course they do; you're feeling them! It's about being present to those feelings, rather than wishing they weren't there, and recognizing them to be as transient as the pleasant feelings and everything else in life, including life itself.

[cousin_it]

> The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things

He's right to conflate these things. Suffering is not beautiful.

[shiven]

Suffering is not beautiful.

Suffering is.

Accept.

Beauty is.

Accept.

not Beauty also is.

Accept.

[ganeumann]

And Buddhists don't think it is, in the sense that you mean beautiful. They think that it is unavoidable. And they (also) think you can learn to avoid it.

I don't agree with the ur-parent that Buddhism thinks that if you can clear away the illusions of everyday life that you will see beauty. I think it believes that if you clear away the illusions, then you will see clearly, and that this is something worth doing because it will end your suffering, no matter who you are and what is happening to you.

But it's also believed by most Buddhists that this rarely happens, that it takes many many lifetimes for it to happen to anyone. So they also believe that helping reduce the suffering of all other sentient beings is one of their missions.

[acjohnson55]

And yet, many of the people who are undoubtedly suffering horribly still manage to find moments of happiness in short, brutal lives. We as privileged people should absolutely be doing all we can to help improve quality of life for all humans, but I think you're projecting bleakness you feel on situations that do in fact have moments of joy, and even peace.

And I think joy is a better word than beauty. Beauty kind of implies to me objective truth, but joy can be found even in unimaginable trying situations where no objective person would see beauty.

I guess at the end of the day, all you can really choose is to believe in something or to believe in nothing.

[JoeAltmaier]

That's a bleak outlook. In the end all we get are the "pretty flowers on the hillside". Look at the sadness and say "nothing can make up for that" and you've died already.

I say "look at the flowers on the hillside, nothing can cancel that out"

[zhaodaxiong]

Buddhism thinks general bad things as the person suffered do not understand the deterministic natural behind their suffering. So there is no good/bad, there is only knowning/unknowning

[fargolime]

You choose the pain and suffering (mixed in with the good stuff too) because otherwise you'd be as bored as it gets and can't even kill yourself. If you choose to believe that.