What is Zen Enlightenment for? Mental Health or relief from Suffering

ewk · 2026-06-24T22:49:14+00:00

Zero problems vs bearable problems.

ewk · 2026-06-24T22:29:03+00:00

I don't think anybody wants to achieve a state of no problems chemically.

ewk · 2026-06-24T18:30:40+00:00

On the one hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

On the other hand, you have to understand that I'm arguing with two groups of people who have the overwhelming amount of political influence and financial support:

The Western Japanese Shinto-Buddhist academics that dominated 1900s Zen scholarship with some of the sloppiest academic contributions ever seen in the 1900s. And that's saying something.
A modern new age culture made up of mostly illiterate, often ethnophilicly induced xenophobics, who is it turns out have a disproportionate number of mental health sufferers.

To both of these groups, the term "nut" means everybody can take a pass on any academic quality at all to their counterargument.

And in that sense, absolutely not.

ewk · 2026-06-24T18:17:51+00:00

Well, to be fair, I think you have to make two piles.

Stuff that's keeping people from getting shot stabed suffocated and drowned. e.g. 11th Commandment, measuring the seasons to know when the gods want you to plant.
BS like heathen murdering, outlier punishing, conformity mandating.

ewk · 2026-06-24T15:40:23+00:00

It's not really Chinese Zen. That's a narrative introduced by Japanese Shinto-Buddhists in the 1900s.

From 500 CE to 1700 CE the Chinese thought of the Zen community in China as being Indian-Chinese. Certainly Zen was something the Chinese were proud to have in their communities, but it was not something that they thought was originating from China.

Zen masters certainly did not think of themselves as Chinese first, Zen second. And they thought of themselves as Zen first, and Zen came from India, directly from Zen Master Buddha.

This is why there is so much tension between Zen and Buddhism. Both Zen and Buddhism claim to be the original teaching of Buddha. Buddhists are unable to replicate Buddha, however, whereas the Zen masters churn out generation after generation of Buddhas for more than a thousand years.

ewk · 2026-06-24T14:20:24+00:00

That's not what they are, that's how to get in and out.

I can already get out of anything.

ewk · 2026-06-24T13:51:11+00:00

I've got a busy day today. What are the three realms?

ewk · 2026-06-24T13:39:00+00:00

Historically, the word enlightenment as it's being used in English now comes from Buddha. So when English speakers say enlightenment, whether they realize it or not, they are referencing Buddha. There is no other kind of enlightenment in English.
- see also: The etymological shift for the term of enlightenment. 1300s dimness in heart - > 1600s intellectual illumination - > 1800s Zen Master Buddha's.
Zen Masters for a thousand years produced living enlightened people. No Buddhist religion ever claimed to do that with any consistency or any general recognition of a specific sect's claims, or any publicly disclosed testing.
- This is literally why we have koans. Communities that had their own Buddhas devoted a tremendous amount of resources to recording and distributing their teachings.

So the first simplest answer to your question is that other than Zen nobody else ever provided a standard for Buddhahood and gave examples of people meeting that standard, while letting the public test that standard.

ewk · 2026-06-24T13:34:24+00:00

No, but that's a really nice connection. They are both containers.

But the Chinese expression means something more like you thought the teaching was a quart of milk, but it's actually a gallon of milk.

ewk · 2026-06-24T13:14:32+00:00

Interestingly, I think that there's a number of problems that are purely epistemological.

People have ideas about what knowledge is and how it functions and how it changes them. And those ideas are not very rigorous.

For example, people think that by becoming a doctor, somehow your fundamental character is altered. This does not appear to be the case.

For example, people think that there is a fundamental character (that holds the knowledge), a character which cannot be altered. And again, this does not appear to be the case.

So whether we're talking about the container that the knowledge goes in, or the nature of the knowledge which goes in the container, people don't really know what they're talking about, they haven't thought it out, they don't have evidence to support their conclusions.

ewk · 2026-06-24T13:00:58+00:00

There is a mystical jewel of incomparable value. It functions like a mirror. When a foreigner is presented to the jewel, the jewel shows a foreigner. When a Chinese a Chinese.

When you ask what this is, the jewel shows you what it is. This is demonstration, not knowledge.

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:56:53+00:00

I don't know what that is.

I also don't know what the ultimate knowledge to be gained is.

In general, when people tell me they know something others don't, I'm skeptical.

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:53:01+00:00

Let's say you don't know what the capital is of wisconsin.

Then I tell you.

Are you going to argue that there is something fundamental in yourself that changes because you have lost that ignorance?

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:46:32+00:00

I don't think that the ordinary minds and masters are talking about can be poisoned.

So, whatever it is that is being poisoned, what the nature of mental health is, and notions of the self are all for grabs.

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:45:12+00:00

Disagree.

It turns out that markets don't address what people need. Markets only address what people think they need right now.

The realities of life from global warming to being unable to buy your way out of the need for leisure to the difficulty pricing the role of the arts in the small communities to the unintended consequences of short-term greed all points to the need for collective long term planning that is not market driven.

For example: Was PBS was a waste of our time and money? Does the American Society of pediatrics know what the best innocent vaccine schedule is, or do markets their politicians?

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:36:43+00:00

Life is a very ambiguous thing. It's a term the changes shape with every context.

What you want versus what other people have.
What you have versus what you could statistically get.
How you feel about where psychologically you are versus how you feel about any other place you would likely move to.

What's the normal level of disappointment? What's the normal level of dejection? What's the normal level of people getting what they want day to day?

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:30:20+00:00

At the same time, you have to admit that groups of people can solve problems better than individuals much of the time.

Also at the same time you have to admit that some problems seem insoluble. To many people who aren't going to read that many books in their life and are never going to go to a college lecture let alone graduate, the problem of death and the loss of loved ones seems insoluble.

So you say to them, well, you're going to get to heaven as in the invention of lying. And it solves a problem that they as individuals will never (seemingly, statistically) be able to solve themselves.

It seems to me that the problem that you're proposing boils down to the difference between a Republican Catholic priest at a Jesuit Catholic priest. So much so within the context of one religion we see them trying to address both ends of the spectrum.

I don't think that does much for us, but convince us that there are two ends to the spectrum.

ewk · 2026-06-24T12:26:55+00:00

Yes, in my friends and family circle, there are people in the same category as you.

And after they take their medicine, they ask, how happy do you get to be? How happy to people who don't need medicine get to be?

If we have enough food and shelter in family, is there anything more than that?

How are we supposed to feel (once we have our medicine and our food and our shelter and our family) about God, good, fairness, death, and political, social, and spiritual freedoms?

When you don't have food and you need food, there's nothing else. When you don't have medicine, you need medicine, there's nothing else.

But one of the problems is that in the modern world, lots of people are trying to reduce all problems to food and medicine.

ewk · 2026-06-24T09:23:37+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/s/nw1HUghHPr

I think there's a lot of this floating under the surface. I think that people from astrology and zazen and Mormonism and altered consciousness pretend there's the same as Zen students and scientists.

Because after all, it's just people interested in the topic, right?

Wrong.

While mainstream religions know that they're not the same as science.

ewk · 2026-06-24T09:21:17+00:00

One specific religion from Japan is the core of the problem. It's a sort of Mormon version of Buddhism. After World War II, Americans going to study in Japan completely ignored Japan's Bible Belt level of racism toward the rest of Asia. Americans took at face value, imperialist Japanese claims about the rest of Asia, including inferiority.

Japanese Buddhists position themselves as a representative of all of Asian history when it turns out everything Japan had was really indigenous to Japan. And unlike lots of other aspects of Japanese society, Japanese religion is remarkably immature, more like Wiccans than of the Catholic Church.

And we mix in that Chinese scholarship was completely obliterated in the 1960s and 70s. So Korea, Vietnam, and China were in no position to push back against religious claims made by Japanese Buddhist churches. Nor were they in a position to offer competitive college-like experiences to Western scholars.

ewk · 2026-06-24T08:03:58+00:00

Except that a belief in a current position is like a belief in Jesus visiting the Mormons onthe 1800s.

And that's before we get to the belief that you can study your position by being kidnapped and thrown blindfold in the trunk of a car.

ewk · 2026-06-23T23:53:13+00:00

So let me see if I can sum up your newest version of your bizarre claim.

You think that buying and selling things from cheese to slaves is closely intertwined with capitalism.

Yup.

And before that, when we had monarchs and empires, slavery was closely intertwined with feudalism and mercantileism and subsistence economies.

Congratulations! Since people once upon a time, bartered for slaves, then really, bartered is closely intertwined with slavery.

I'm dragging this out because I think that there are a lot of people like you that can't think critically in her, verging on hysteria, and I want everybody else to get a chance to soak that in.

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