I gather from my twitter timeline that MLK did some bad things and some people think it’s important that on this day we know about them… I don’t know what they are and don’t care.
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
A question that may be worth asking is how and whether the content of what he taught connected with bad things. One has to wrestle with this in the case of Heidegger, for instance, who was a Nazi official (and also the most important 20th century philosopher imo).
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
Setting THAT question aside… I may be able to answer questions about the content of what Trungpa taught!
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Replying to @Meaningness
Hmm yeah definitely not looking for a good/bad guy take. I've been stewing on what exactly my question is and I'm realizing it may have been: if you have wrestled with the content of his teachings vs. his life have you done any of that in public?
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Replying to @benedictfritz @Meaningness
Which I'm a little embarrassed to ask because I know so little about him that it might be insulting to ask if wrestling is even necessary! But asking obliquely probably doesn't help either
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Replying to @benedictfritz
Right, sure. I haven't done that publicly. There's a lot of complex narrative that one would have to go through to do that. In the end, I don't think it matters, because he's thoroughly dead. His lineage is de facto dead too, although the corpse is still lurching about a bit.
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
What's left is the texts. All the content in them is totally mainstream. What's distinctive is primarily his choice of what aspects of the mainstream to emphasize and what to pass over. I think he did an excellent job of that.
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
So the larger question is whether mainstream Vajrayana leads to bad behavior, and if so how and why and whether that can be prevented or made less likely. The system itself says “yes”. I discussed that in several places in this:https://letter.wiki/conversation/209 …
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
I.e. the tradition itself says “this can lead to bad behavior” and it also says “there are ways of making that less likely, but no guarantees.”
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Replying to @Meaningness
Awesome, thank you! I had read the first couple letters in that series but haven't caught up with the latest. I'm also about 1/3 through Sacred Path of the Warrior—is that a good place to start?
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Yes, I think that’s a wonderful book imo! It’s officially non-Buddhist, so it’s somewhat atypical of his work. It’s somewhat lacking in context (unless you did the training program that used to go with it).
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
That is, if you like it and think “I want more stuff like this”, there’s one more book from his Shambhala system, but then that’s it. Whereas with his Buddhist work, there’s dozens of his own books, plus —since it is mainstream—endless stuff by others on the same topics.
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Replying to @Meaningness @benedictfritz
I think Shambhala was his greatest work and it’s a tragedy that he never finished it and that it then got mutated into glop.
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