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Comment by NiceWayToDoIT | Hacker News Reader

I find this movement very similar to Buddhism or Christianity teaching, in the sense that you give up material world as the circumstances are such that you can not win. If you perceive world where every man mad political system as practical implementation is aristocracy then understanding that there is no democracy, socialism, communism (as they are just a flavor of the same system) will lead you that there is split on two group of people those who are aristocrats and those who are slaves. Only difference is that "good" aristocracies give more rights and more resources to their slaves. So, as each aristocracy must have slaves to exist (which will turn at some point to robots and AI) they have to advertise production of more slaves. In that regard in Buddhism and teaching of Christ to escape vicious cycle of you or your children being wolfs or sheep, only way to escape is to exercise nonviolent resistance and give up on the entire game.

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But Buddhism doesn't teach to give up the material world. Quite the opposite. It states there should be a balance. The middle way.

Dalai Lama was even cancelled by twitter users for that. He said that his successor, if a woman, must be beautiful (since she would be working with people and people care about looks). An appalled journalist asked: "but isn't the internal qualities all that matter". Dalai Lama mentioned the necessity of balance infuriating some of the viewers who then cancelled him.

In that explanation (same like Catholicism is in Christianity) I see divergent from the original teaching, due to simple reason as that would put a wrench in the gears of the aristocratic society. The teachings of the Buddha was aimed solely at liberating sentient beings from suffering, your mentioned "middle path" is pulling out of the context of the original meaning of the middle path. In case of Buddhism middle path was referring to pushing own body to extremes in order to gain enlightenment. Budha was killing his own body in the process, which was prevent him to attain enlightenment.

Reason why your mentioned path is wrong it that along those lines one can arbitrary choose min and max limits of the function and choose the middle. So to give a very crud example "if murder is not ok, than acceptable number of murders is 0 and on the other end we have 8 billion people so middle is 4 billion?"

In same sense your version says that between slave and aristocrat there are many levels of gray, but in fact slaves are just a slaves and aristocrats are aristocrats, being in the game just helps aristocrats and prolongs the cycle of suffering.

What does it mean the Dalai Lama was cancelled?

Some people got angry at him? Did he lose his Twitter account? Did it cost him his job? Is he not the Dalai Lama anymore?

He's not a CEO of American company, he's not a software engineer who could be fired. Being independent of all that crowd you don't have to care what they think. That doesn't mean they didn't try to cancel him. They called him a project of CIA who's job is to harm the CCP, they said they would quit Buddhism if he's not replaced, would quit meditating. Pretty much the same thing as in the case of, e.g. Richard Stallman (the 1st time). Except it didn't work.

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