If you are alluding to the more celebrated discourses attributed to the historical Buddha, then, indeed, I find myself disliking intensely the ponderous Dīgha Nikāya and the saccharine, maxim-mongering litany of the Dhammapada. No, I do not object to introspection, nor even to that austere species of spiritual bookkeeping which tallies craving against release, but here the mind, and its fetters, and the unrelieved greyness of renunciation scarcely warrant the interminable and curiously airless analysis to which they are subjected. What weighs most heavily is the cloying moralizing that seeps through every page, a pedagogical drizzle that never quite rises to the dignity of a storm. The reader is not persuaded but rather wearied into assent.The Blessed One’s deficiency in aesthetic tact is particularly striking. His monotonous dealings with sufferers—neatly sorted into types of ignorance, as though consciousness were a filing cabinet—produce a suffocating sameness, while his habitual return to the dreariest aspects of existence lends the whole enterprise an oddly punitive tone. One has the impression that joy itself has been placed under doctrinal suspicion. The world, in these discourses, is not so much transcended as methodically flattened, its colors leeched out in favor of a uniformly sepia resignation.I am not especially enamored of that rhetorical contrivance whereby his interlocutors are led, with almost mechanical inevitability, from confusion to enlightenment, as though they were obedient chess pieces nudged across a board whose outcome was never in doubt. This trick of “erroneously discoursing one’s way into awakening” quickly becomes tiresome; one begins to suspect that the questions exist solely to justify the answers. What may not have seemed so oppressively schematic in its original setting now appears, to a less credulous reader, as a rather artless piece of spiritual stagecraft, populated by earnest monks, pliant householders, and conveniently obtuse skeptics.There is, moreover, a persistent whiff of borrowed gravity about the whole affair, as though earlier speculative traditions had been both rejected and quietly cannibalized. The resulting sermons exhibit that peculiar blend of severity and sentimentality which delights in placing ostensibly virtuous seekers into existential discomfort, only to extract from them the last ounce of pathos before administering the prescribed cure. Non-Indian readers often fail to realize two things: that not all heirs to this tradition are equally enthralled by these texts, and that many who are tend to venerate their author as a moral authority rather than attend to him as an artist of language. He appears, in this light, as a somewhat overzealous preacher of negation, an industrious arranger of edifying commonplaces, and a tireless purveyor of solemnities.
>>25252362If this wasn't AI, bravo OP, you really got him down, both the style and the angle of analysis. Great little semi-niche read
>>25252362dude looks like an older colin mochrie from the thumbnail
>>25252362> ponderous Digha Nikayaa manual is not to be read as a poem.> saccharine, maxim-mongering Dhammapadato each his own, I guess.> One has the impression that joy itself has been placed under doctrinal suspicion. The world, in these discourses, is not so much transcended as methodically flattened, its colors leeched out in favor of a uniformly sepia resignation.looks like someone is pretty comfy, to the point that having his/her way of experience challenged is a problem. good for you. have a nice day.
>>25253385Ill will is a fetter, anon
