Anyway, for Buddhism specifically:
I agree that suffering is a fundamental part of experience. Totally. Unequivocally.
I don't agree that it's always a useful lens through which to *interpret* experience.
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There are a lot of tremendously useful Buddhist techniques. Many parts of Buddhism are essentially improvements on (at the time) antiquated Hindu sutras.
But that doesn't mean the metaphysics are very useful to people.
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If we reference Finno-Ugric myth, we do find suffering as an ever-present concept.
What else would you expect? These peopled lived in extremely harsh environs. Maybe 2% of us today would survive in the North of antiquity. It's a harsh place to live even today.
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The entire cosmology, all the myths, all the stories, default to this harsh reality.
When you die, you don't go to heaven. Your bones are ground to dust in the river of death. You may end up tormented there, as a shade, forever. There is no happy ending.
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So what do you do? You don't overcome or surpass suffering. You simply get on with the day.
You persevere, but not out of some mystical attainment - simply because that's the only option in the face of such a hopeless state of affairs.
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And so suffering is a fact of life, yes. It's ugly, yes.
But it's not worth obsessing over. You just do you, and do it as well as you can.
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I know there are Buddhist traditions that diverge from this pattern, of course. I know it's not suffering all the way down.
That's a big part of the reason why I preference, say, Zen over Mahayana.
A cosmology built ENTIRELY around removing suffering? Please. That's ridiculous.
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is it? Or is it that you're coming from a Finno-uguric background? People also feel a need to pronounce on stuff far before they have accomplishments equal to the level of people who made these statements in the first place.
That seems... unwise.
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I'm not saying I'm right. That would be gross negligence on my part to imply.
But that's a ditto for most people saying anything about anything.
Authority is mostly a power fantasy. Sometimes derived from experience, but even then highly specific. I think questioning is good.
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It's a fair enough point that you shouldn't go around spouting off, but the original comment I made was specifically about people spouting off. That was the entire point.
I'm not telling anyone how to practice in private. I don't think I have any business doing that.
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Even if Buddhism gets things right, though, I don't think that qualifies arbitrarily chosen Buddhists to tell others how to practice.
This is maybe a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but I've encountered it enough times that it seriously bothers me.
Also: it's great if qualified people can defend their practices, but that doesn't mean a claim to authority is necessarily valid.
And when it comes to lineages that are millennia old, we can hardly claim to understand them anymore (yeah, that also applies to shamanism ofc.)
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there are specific accomplishments in the spiritual paths. And saying that they don't do something, or do do something without having them strikes me as dangerous. And, ofc, as you point out, since we've lost so much, who knows what the Buddha and his original Sangha could do?
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Well, ignore them? I mean at times such things irritate me, too, but they have no actual power over me, so...
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That's not the entire point, though.
There's also the idea that the validity of any fundamental statement about reality is a moving target, and rather relative.
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