I haven’t read it yet, but the recent paper by Analayo critiquing MCTB just plain pisses me off. (Context: reddit.com/r/streamentry/ )
I don’t have anything to add or particularly want to write a rebuttal, but it’s just such a gaslighting premise.
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Insight meditation causing mental health difficulties? Not even possible — you’re deluding yourself about experiencing insight, you’re doing it wrong, and it’s your own damn fault.
Analayo? More like Analayo-retentive.
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Strawmen and gaslighting are more or less the bread and butter of intra- and intertraditional conflicts, no?
I really can't take any scholar seriously on this, considering they all take themselves far too seriously.
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It is not that there aren't academically interesting inquiries to be made, but rather that they are, well, academic.
Attempts to litigate living traditions through this method have to be considered Bad and Wrong, IMO, unless it is to draw lines between separate consensus groups.
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I remember when I used to have more factions of Twitter Buddhist followers before I ended up shedding them through various means.
Getting some fucking Mahayana practitioner lecturing me about compassion and Bodhisattvas when I'm not even Buddhist at all is peak hilariousness.
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"Something something meditation."
"How dare you hold a perspective completely outside my <sectarian consensus>! Haven't you read <sectarian authority>???"
"Uh, well, no, because I'm not a part of your tradition..."
*more expressions of frothing rage*
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Even funnier are all the examples of people who are not triggered and raging, but "compassionately educating" while completely oblivious as to the goals of their nonconsenting student.
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Funnier still is when they get mad about their techniques being misappropriated for the Wrong Purposes.
"Their" techniques, being so many iterations on older forms of Yoga.
(I don't have a problem with the use of older sources. I just find the obliviousness endlessly funny.)
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Thanks for the perspective! It’s making it a bit easier to laugh at it instead of being angry. The appropriation piece is what I personally love about the pragmatic dharma scene — we’ll relentlessly steal techniques, maps, and terminology from anywhere as long as they work.
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I understand that there is a special form of political violence under which the term "cultural appropriation" actually fits pretty well.
But when people take it outside that context, it becomes something like framing being decent to people you know as "emotional labour".
Some weirdo leftists get on me about that because it's apparently some racist white people sentiment.
Considering I'm half Sami and the Sami half of my home culture was mercilessly persecuted by the Norwegian state for over a century, this is certainly an interesting opinion...
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Only mentioning this because the frequency with which I see some jerk BS around about cultural appropriation in this context gives me hives.
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I’m struck with a mental image of someone who goes on vacation to different places, always buys statues of the local gods and spirits, brings them home, and them locks them up in cages underneath their own super-super meditation throne.
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