Honest question: Is buddihsm real? Does it have any basis in scientific and objective reality? Or is it fiction? I don't mean side stuff like meditation improves your IQ I mean does the fundamental point of buddihism have any basis in reality.
If it is fiction, why is it so popular among technical people like people who come to HN? Are the people on HN who are interested in Buddhism aware it is fiction/real?
> Is buddihsm real? Does it have any basis in scientific and objective reality? Or is it fiction?
These are Buddhist questions. :)
The Buddha famously told his followers not to accept his teaching merely because he said it, instead he told them to "go and see for yourself." The point is that if you want to know if buddhism is real, try out the practices and see if they make sense to you and make a difference. If the practices work, adopt them, if you find them worthless, abandon them.
You get free will and karma in Buddhism. Great 2-for-1 special.
Another way to come at it is to consider the good old Four Noble Truths. There are different ways to say them but this is how I learned them:
* Life is full of suffering
* Suffering is caused by attachment to desire
* There is a way beyond attachment
* Meditation and Buddhism is the way beyond attachment (or to Enlightenment, if you prefer)
+1 on most of this. A small note: I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress. I take the Buddha to have said roughly, “I teach the origin of unhappiness and how to liberate yourself from it.”
I think when you marry life is suffering, and resistance is suffering, you get to the root of it. Ego is ultimately the root of suffering, resisting what is. Our cravings and aversions result in us not being able to be meet the present as it is, and accept it. It causes us to artificially label experience with qualifiers such as good/bad etc
As we root out our cravings and aversions, our egoic programming, fear stops running the show, and gratitude and contentment takes it's place. We're able to meet every moment as it is and appreciate the perfection.
> I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress.
Agree. Suffering doesn't send the right message in terms of what the word is trying to signal. The best version I've heard is likening life to a carriage ride, and the wheel is just never quite right, so it's always just a little bit uncomfortable. Nothing's just ever quite right.
The noble truth of 'Dukha' doesn't translate to 'life is full of suffering', but rather that life contains suffering, which may sound obvious but there is a subtler meaning here.
The subtler meaning is that nothing in existence will truly and permanently satisfy you, because that is the nature of the mind. Many people obviously don't realize this as they run around chasing their first million, billion or trillion.
> If it is fiction, why is it so popular among technical people like people who come to HN? Are the people on HN who are interested in Buddhism aware it is fiction/real?
Because it sounds cool and intellectual.
This is the same reason crypto-buddhist "philosophies" became popular in the Hindu-sphere post the decline of Ancient Vedic religion, which had no concept of rebirth and rather focused on Rta (cosmic / natural order), vrata (duty), kratu (will) etc...
Looking enlightened is more important than actually being enlightened.
If you were a machine, your highest basis would be electrons and related EM fields: it would be the finest level of matter you are made of, the highest level where your consciousness could reside. The idea behind buddhism and other methods is that humans have a higher basis, sometimes reaching extreme heights. In order to gain enlightenment at those levels, there is buddhism. In this thought framework, our science studies a very coarse level of molecular matter, so it's of no help for gaining enlightenment. Similarly, buddhism isn't concerned with the level of matter that's studied by science, so it's of no help for scientific endeavors. For example, buddhism talks a lot about karma. At a certain level, karma is a form of matter with very concrete properties, but to our science it's an unreachable abstraction that you may as well call fiction.
Well, if you come at it from the mindfulness angle, there are real studies showing that mindfulness works. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8083197/ and similarly, if you come at it from the religious angle, you can trace a lot of the aspects of mindfulness back to the Buddha's original teachings as recorded in canon. And if you ask if there is a fundamental point beyond those, I think the answer is that there is none recorded - the best description I have been able to get of Nirvana is that it is a state of perfect mindfulness.
There is plenty of proof, just not the type of proof likely to be accepted by people looking for a measurement from an external device, which precludes scientific proof until consciousness can be measured. Given that science cannot identify consciousness in live organisms at this time, you are going to have to wait a long time.
In general, there are three commonly accepted methods in Buddhist epistemology to know if something is true: perception, inference, and testimony. For the specific case of rebirth, common proofs use either perception, or inference.
- Perception: You train in states of concentration and use those to gain direct knowledge of past lives. Maybe some people would find this unconvincing even if they had the experience. Certainly not something likely to be accepted as scientific as Ian Stevenson's research has shown, even if the case presented was iron-clad.
- Inference: This uses Buddhist logic and an understanding of dependent origination. This specific argument comes from Dharmakīrti.
- Every moment of consciousness must have a substantial cause.
- Physical matter can serve as a cooperative condition for consciousness, but it cannot be consciousness's substantial cause, because matter and mind are fundamentally different in nature. Matter is extended, non-luminous, non-aware and consciousness is luminous and aware. If you are a scientific materialist, you will not accept this, but it must be noted that there is no scientific evidence of any kind for dead matter gaining awareness.
- Therefore, each moment of consciousness must arise from a preceding moment of consciousness of similar type.
- Then you trace this chain to the first moment of your present life. The chain must have been preceded by a moment of consciousness of similar type. The same logic applies to the last moment of your present life.
- Therefore, consciousness must be a stream that transcends physical birth and death.
Again, I am aware many people won't find this convincing, but to say that Buddhism does not attempt to prove rebirth and karma is not true.
It is difficult not to dismiss this sort of proof out of hand, because every religion engages in it. Buddhism can probably (?) coexist with many deist religions, but few of them can coexist with each other.
This is a strange question. It's like asking if Christianity has any basis in scientific and objective reality, which as a religion it does not, none do. It doesn't even make any sense to ask the question, like what does an objective reality of a religion even mean? You explicitly disclaimed discussion about the cognitive benefits of its practice so I'm not really sure what else you could be asking concretely.
I suspected that most people on HN viewed Buddhism the way you do: as something with no basis fundamentally in science and therefore reality but felt that the practices have side effect health benefits or other benefits undiscovered by science.
From the sample size of people who responded, I would say I am wrong. A good amount of HNers believe it literally as something beyond science.
If it is fiction, why is it so popular among technical people like people who come to HN? Are the people on HN who are interested in Buddhism aware it is fiction/real?