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.
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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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If I characterized it so that it seems like a new orthodoxy - "THIS perspective is the better one!" - then I failed.
The point is rather that you can reach very different conclusions based on *the same point*, which is all too commonly ignored in these discussions.
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My preference, such as it is, is not the point.
That it's just an idiosyncratic preference or method, though, that's the point.