Posted: Feb 08, 2021 1:33 am
Animavore wrote:One of the things that really put me off Buddhism towards the end, and I realised it applied to nearly them all, is how terrestrial it all is. How Earth-based. There's no talk of being reincarnated on the other side of the Universe but presumably there shouldn't be.
Also how anthropocentic it is. In Zen Buddhism even animals can, sometimes, become enlightened, but your best shot is as human. Then there's the Buddha himself defined as a perfect person in all ways and they've a bunch of features that Mark him as perfect to do with symmetry and proportions, but how is this not arbitrary and all too human?
That is one of my major criticisms - it's so anthropocentric. Thais believe in ghosts/spirits and that these materialize due to some karma conditions... but it's always human ghosts that are seen, never ants despite there being several orders of magnitude more ants than humans and consequently there should be a shitload more ant spirits wandering about waiting to be seen. If ants don't have spirits, there goes samsara. If ants can't do bad karma activities, then there goes samsara.
While there are a lot of deep, introspective elements in Buddhism that I find quite refreshing, there are still fooking massive gaping holes despite them having thousands of years to plug them.