Thursday, August 04, 2005

The Buddha is like...

The Buddha is like Hume in wanting to set man free from his own irrational attempts to build metaphysical scaffolding as a vantage point for perceiving the nature and destiny of almost everything about which man has ever had a persisting question. He is like Nietzsche in seeing the sad plight of human power shackled by the guilt-ridden resentment of the weak. He is like Marx and Engels in wanting to liberate man from the chimeras and myths under whose mystification he is pining away. The Buddha is like John Stuart Mill in seeing that the most powerful bonds that enslave man are not tyrants sitting astride great thrones but those subtle persuasions that rule the inner man and strip him of his integrity and independence. The Buddha is like Freud, too, in wanting to free the creative processes deep in human personality from the compulsive authoritarian controls of an ego or super-ego in which every urge to happiness is distorted, suppressed and denied. He is like Wittgenstein in wishing to alert man to the "mystification" of the human intellect by language.


N.P. Jacobson
Buddhism: The Religion of Analysis

1 comment:

Victoria said...

Just to say Been here!