@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz It's the best Buddhist lineage because it's not Buddhist in anything but name 😆

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz Chinese Buddhism is eclectic but it's still intelligible with Hinayana and earlier Mahayana forms. Monastic, discipline over magic (with some exceptions), etc. but once you get to Yogacara the whole project might as well just reintegrate into the Vedic tradition because they're (almost) saying the same thing.

Only in Vajrayana you still have a paradox where your goal is to shed conditionality through renunciation but none of the actual techniques have anything to do with that. The cope is "you're doing all these side quests so you can reach liberation more quickly afterwards" but if that's how it works then you don't really need to make renunciation your aim in the first place.

The whole thing is made better sense of by mainline Aryan thinking. You're liberated by fulfilling your dharma. You do your duty and you do it well. The best, if possible.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz To the extent you're indulging all this esoteric gobbledygook it should be toward the end of self mastery. Rotating shapes in your head isn't fixing your karma or whatever, on its own it's just escapism.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz Vajrayana Buddhism reminds me a lot of Catholicism in how it becomes a worse iimitation of the thing Buddhism is meant to replace.

It's built on this Jewish foundation where anything they identify as Greek is shunned... and then it gets bigger. Christians start getting educated in Platonic schools, start plagiarizing Platonic textbooks for their theology. They start using the exact same materials in the Eucharistic rituals, utilizing an alter the exact same way the Greeks did in their temples, probably without even thinking about it, since every Greek convert would have grown up making offerings that way. This new brand of Christo-Platonist becomes revered, and people start incoming them and making the same offerings to them as they do to Yahweh, and did to the gods. Then it gets even bigger. People are worshipping saints evwrywhere. We start getting stories of these saints that are suspiciously similar to the stories or pre-Christian gods, and we worship those saints, because of course we do! Christians have been doing so since at least their grandparents, probably forever. Arguments that once explained why we light candles and craft images of the gods are used to mandate images of saints...

By the time you get to the 8th Century, the Catholic Church accidentally created a copy of the Greek Paganism it rejected, except worse, because the founding myth is predicated on the rejection of everything Greek in favor of weakness, sterility, immediate anticipation of a global rebirth that will never come.

Vajrayana is essentially the same. It's an imitation of the Vedic tradition but without the nobility. I dislike it less than the rest of Buddhism but I still don't like it.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz I also tend to think it should be its own category because it's so eclectic but both Buddhism and Vajrayana are Promethian, in the most negative sense of the term.