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View submission: Conflicted about Zen Buddhism in general
There's a saying in Zen, "samsara is nirvana". That might be from Mahayana more broadly, I don't recall.
The aim of Buddhism is liberation from suffering, yes, but talking about "escaping from samsara" implies that there is something that does the escaping, and that there is somewhere to escape to. Everything that arises, every phenomenon, every experience, is characterised by the three marks of existence – anatta, anicca, dukkha. That is, there's no self to be found in it, it's transitory, and as a result ultimately unsatisfactory.
A kind of naive version of Buddhism might say, "Well, we need to find the Self-ful, Permanent, Delightful alternative to all of these no-self, impermanent and unsatisfactory things." In a way, that describes some other paths, like some mystical paths in Hinduism. (Hopefully I'm not being unfair to those paths, but my understanding is that they seek realisation of identity with the Self, also described with various other capitalised words.)
But that's not really the Buddhist path. We're not selves escaping impermanence and suffering by finding a permanent Self, but rather realising liberation within impermanence by seeing through the delusion of self in the first place.
Comment by the100footpole at 20/02/2025 at 12:57 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
"Samsara is Nirvana" is from Nagarjuna, IIRC.