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  • hardie karges 7:11 am on September 10, 2017 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , FRENCH, Noble Truths, , , ,   

    Buddhism’s Noble Truths: La Vie Est Magnifique, Sois Toi-Meme–NOT… 

    img_2116“Life is magnificent; be yourself.” These words are taken straight from a T-shirt, so hardly authoritative, but I don’t think any phrase could better demonstrate the differences between East and West, the West being something of a personality cult of ones own self, while the East—Buddhism, at least—denies the existence of a self entirely…

    That doctrine of ‘no self’, anatta, translates to us most easily as ‘no ego’, something we are very familiar with, but in fact also refers to the idea of a transmigrating soul, or any permanent self, one that in Asian religious traditions is usually envisioned as forever returning, though a similarly permanent soul is envisioned in Western traditions on a one-way trip up there or down there… (More …)

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    • davekingsbury 2:57 pm on September 11, 2017 Permalink | Reply

      As always you tread a distinctive personal path through the subject, bringing it sharply to life. A great contribution to the great and, as you say, urgent debate!

      • hardie karges 5:29 pm on September 11, 2017 Permalink | Reply

        Remember the old Chambers Brothers’ song ‘Time Has Come Today’ (don’t know if that one made it to the UK or not)? Tick tock tick tock…

        • davekingsbury 12:25 am on September 12, 2017 Permalink

          Know it well … Now the time has come / There are things to realize … it behoves us all to go on thinking rather than just turning off and going with the flow – which is not to decry the meditative path!

        • hardie karges 6:35 pm on September 12, 2017 Permalink

          🙂 No, thinking is not a ‘defilement’ in my Buddhism…

        • davekingsbury 1:08 am on September 13, 2017 Permalink

          It is very evident through all your writings. 🙂

  • hardie karges 7:26 am on December 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , FRENCH, ,   

    The French get so righteous about the spread of English 

    at the expense of French (maybe French is just more expensive), but they do the same with Dutch/Flemish and others. All of Belgium, and especially Brussels, used to be a political and linguistic entity with Holland to the north and its Germanic language. That all changed with Napoleon and the Flemish had to wait long and fight hard just to regain parity. Of course, long before that, all Franks were part of that same entity before they became ‘Romanized’ and proceeded to butcher Latin. Apparently not all of Charlemagne’s progeny were in agreement on that issue, as the domain became divided, and the French/Latin-speakers became a centralized nation long before the rump Holy Roman Empire of independent principalities became Germany. Whether the centralization of ancient Rome was somehow transmitted through the vestiges of its language while the Germans were stuck in the proud but ultimately feudal heritage of its own tribal past would be an interesting thesis. Whether the individualism and de-centralization of ancient nomadic Germany was the basis of capitalism and industry is another. Throughout the entire Germanic Europe to this day the dialects spoken are mutually intelligible from one village to the next, though the national standard dialects have become mutually unintelligible.

     

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