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Ask HN: Those who respect/follow/enthusiastic about Buddhism, why do you do so?

by nerdyadventurer on 5/5/23, 2:12 PM with 5 comments

Namo Buddhaya! Today is a special day(5th of May) for all Buddhist all around the world.

As person born in Buddhist country and as a Buddhist practitioner I have immense respect for Buddhism, because it explains certain things even science cannot explain and it is amazing to know about tremendous good deeds of Lord Buddha. And there are lot of other things to be said which will take lot of time, so I'll stop.

As I observed on HN there considerable number of Buddhist enthusiasts / practitioners since posts about Buddhism get considerable attention.

So my question to those people, why do you respect / follow / enthusiastic about Buddhism? And as an additional question what drew you in to Buddhism in the first place?

Note: This post, does not mean I do not respect other religions.

  • by eimrine on 5/5/23, 2:25 PM

    There are five countries in the whole world for the whole time which were "developing" and become "developed", such as South Korea (sorry I forgot another examples). I clearly remember that all of those were Buddist countries.

    > It is because it explains certain things even science cannot explain

    You are having a poor understanding of what the science is. If Buddism or Blablaism of Whateverelseism explains what science can not explain, it becames a part of science immediately.

  • by 50 on 5/5/23, 3:36 PM

    metaphysics is one of the best games in town for we are all at a existential disposition. and buddhism holds it's own: not only does it have a powerful and credible metaphysics but a well-grounded epistemology and ethics which has inspired many from bashō to schopenhauer. nāgārjuna, dōgen, niguma, bodhidharma, to name a few, are on par with the manifestations of jc, laozi, and ramakrishna

    if only assimilation came easily! unfortunately in modernity, we are cursed with reducing our psyche to a smooth glossy surface where everything just slides off and nothing is taken in and allowed to reshape us

    but buddhism brings forth countless of interesting questions, e.g., paraphrasing žižek: not can we really break out of this wheel of desire into the primordial peace of nirvana but how did this primordial peace get disturbed in the first place? how did appearances emerge? or rather, is there a deeper tension in nirvana itself of infinite self-contradiction?

    otherwise, i assume, like many people in the west, i was introduced to buddhism via alan watts when i was an early teenager