Why does /lit/ hate this dude?

He died of alcoholism and peddled a cheap Watts Brand Buddhism that razzles, dazzles and never points you in the right direction ("but the fact that we're looking for a right direction is the whole problem! GULP.").

He was, easily, more Tim Leary than he was Thomas Merton.

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>>9083663
>("but the fact that we're looking for a right direction is the whole problem! GULP.").
But that's the hoax
>He died of alcoholism
yolo

>>9083663
He was an entertainer, and called himself such. Why do people think he thought of himself as any more than that?

I mean, if you want to learn about intricate Buddhism, go somewhere else, that doesn't mean everyone who has ever touched on the subject is immediately a con artist.

>>9083663
fpbp

>>9083689

So if Jeffry Daumer says he's a bad guy then he's alright?

Apples and oranges, I know, but surely you see the point. Going around acting like a guru, giving lectures, guiding people through their lives, being listened to by ardent students and lost young people around the nation, and then disclaiming it with "look I'm just an entertainer" does not make it all okay.

If you have nothing to teach and you surely know so, then don't teach, and certainly don't pretend to entertain when you're teaching.

Ideas aren't toys.

>>9083711
So you think he actually did harm to those people by exposing them to his ideas on the subject?

>>9083711
>you are forbidden to talk about Eastern philosophies because then some idiots might think you're a guru, even if you explicitly tell them you're not

He was pretty funny in Just Shoot Me

>>9083733

I suspect so, yes. But that's not my general grievance.

He remains today what he was in the 60s: an introduction for young Americans to Buddhism. Intentionally or otherwise, he mixes counterculture with Buddhism, a match made in Hell.

I think this really lets people down: a bunch of wishy washy stuff about the Dao carelessly tossed in with mindfulness-of-breathing and a healthy dose of cuteness.

I had the very good fortune of studying Buddhism under an excellent scholar, so my introduction to Buddhism was much more like what I want it to be for anyone interested: it'll blow your fucking mind, but not because of Daoist cute-tricks. It'll blow your mind because it will begin to make you realize that "Buddhism" is a vast intellectual and cultural tradition that, in size and breadth, one begins to feel rivals Westernism. It's like you get to explore another Earth, with another history, another way of looking at things and talking about them, a different philosophical vocabulary.

And this begins to pry your mind open to the realization that questions of human inquiry (what is truth, what is being, what is good?) explode in size and complexity under the burden of a history of ideas that sources, not just from Athens and Jerusalem, but from India, Arabia and China too.

Each of these mother-cultures connects, intersects and interacts with each other, but the problem of modernity where they have collided is exactly the place where we find ourselves stuck in a loop of confusion about how to stop playing video games and facebooking so much.

So I guess my hope is that people looking to Buddhism will go all the way and use it as an entry point into studying the East in general.

But instead we wedge it into our own western process of self help and entertainment, and the outcome is some stoned 20 something watching Allan Watts videos on Youtube at 2am while he tries to figure out what the fuck his life is for.

>>9083640
I have virtually no interest in Buddhism or any sort of orientalism, but even I know this guy is the biggest hack since Jesus

He has some good and easily accessible ways of looking at things, nice to listen to as well, for people who have no interest in actual philosophy he is good. It's easy to be a critic.
He pretty much admits that guru's in India and himself are in a sense, frauds, to dillitants looking for some sort of 'enlightenment', he also denounces the retarded psychedelic hippy cult and his talk about dealing with death has some value to me at least.

If you read philosophy for fun he doesn't have anything to teach but if you can enjoy it for what it is, lighthearted amusing relativist ranting, it's just fine.

>>9083787
>and the outcome is some stoned 20 something watching Allan Watts videos on Youtube at 2am while he tries to figure out what the fuck his life is for.

Yes but you seem to think those people had potential to go anywhere to begin with. These aren't scholar material to begin with, I reckon this might be better than nothing.

>>9083787
Good post, thanks

>>9083815
yawn

>>9083787
Where to start studying senpai?

>>9083790
stand back, we have an ascended among us.

>>9083833
Alas, even the nutters that follow this sort of ego obsession which buddhism offers admit that barely anyone achieves that pseudo-state of self delusion, so the chances are slim.

>>9083828
Read the SEP article on monism or something if you want to get into autistic arguments about metaphysics.
Instant clue that someone is an uninformed ass-talker: they attribute "all is one" to Buddhism. In the Pali canon Gotama flatly rejects the doctrine "everything is a oneness" as hedonist/materialist philosophy, and in Madhyamaka to advocate for a monad is tantamount to affirming the svabhava that Nagarjuna and co. so stridently argued against. Monism is Vedanta, not Buddhist.
Also, Alan Watts is garbage. Even D.T. Suzuki, a jingoistic "Grorious Nippon" neo-Platonist who swindled gullible beatniks into thinking he was an authority on Zen Buddhism, thought Alan Watts was a clueless tool. Since you fags have a fetish for Eastern philosophy without understanding any of it, here is the Zhuangzi BTFO-ing monism.
>Now that we are all one, [how] can I still say anything?
>Now that I have called us all one, [how] can I have not said anything?
>One plus speech is two; two plus one is three. If we proceed on from this even an expert calculator cannot reach the end of it, how much less a common man?

>>9083826
Watta cunt.

>>9083859
Chan borrows more from Dragon's Gate Taoism than from the Pali Canon, and is extremely monist as there is only Buddha nature. It is probably unproductive to think in restrictive labels such as that, because it embraces paradox (Body is only emptiness, and emptiness is only Body). I agree with your assessment of Watts, but Taoism is much more vivid than that one Zhuangzi you posted. It believes the universe at its most basic essence is Tao, so essentially it could be described as monist.

sam harris is basically a shittier version of him that would rather kill people than kill himself

>>9083826
Spiritual pride is bad for ya son.

>>9083711
>read this back to yourself, man

>>9083859
>zen
>about words

>>9083640
This sounds exactly like Ecclesiastes
weird

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Easily accessible stuff doesn't give you pretendy points and pretendies are what most of /lit/ reads for.

All is one, so said the Buddha.

>>9083787
See
>>9084529

And yet there are two types of writers, those who take simple experiences and twist them into complex and obscure conundrums, and those who take complex ideas and reduce them into easily accessible and enjoyable snacks.

I appreciate both skills.

>>9084335
Do not compare the Harris to the Watts

One can provide brightness, the other endless legions of deterministic fedora tippers

>>9085031
not comparing them at all. but harris did pick up the watts crowd.

>>9083859
The average person doesn't care about being a scholar. They care about feeling better about life. He points people in a direction of better self awareness and self control. He admits that all gurus do not have a final answer to the meaning of life because that final answer is up to the individual. But in terms of shifting one's perception for a healthier life Alan Watts is great for that. Nobody cares about the history of these schools of thought they just want to feel better in a shitty western world.

>>9084639
Where? We have no records of anything he said. Only things of what he reportedly said several hundreds of years later, and as another anon said in this thread even those earliest records deny what you say they do.

>>9085265
>They care about feeling better about life.

then dont pretend you care about anything else

>>9086246
That's impossible. Just by regular growing up you believe whatever subconscious bullshit you decided the things you saw meant at the time you saw them as reality. That's how humans learn, they assume based upon their feeling and the situation at the time and create a complex dogma in the subconscious.
Which is why if you listen to people like Sadhguru who distills eastern thought for westerners, you'll begin to understand that there's no way to argue with what's natural.
There only learning to accept that you've been full of shit since you were born and need to shut up and take life as it is. No one can teach you how to exist, that's the primary problem of western civilization.
We assume that if we treat the problems then life will be great, while eastern thought is that your reaction to the problem is the problem.
Either way the person in question is always an uneducated idiot like you who thinks they understand other people so well you can tell them what they think about things.
Learning what you need to learn to feel like you're actually okay when you were okay in the first place is the challenge of modern comfortable civilization.

>>9086893
>No one can teach you how to exist
>There only learning to accept that you've been full of shit since you were born and need to shut up and take life as it is

???
apparently ur buddhist friends can, you just said that yourself

>>9083787
How do you go about studying Buddhism under a scholar? Are you talking about traditional academia under a Buddhist studies professor, or like actually under a monk or something? I'd like to experience the latter.

>>9083640
Genuine idiot and rapist, not a good dude desu.

>>9087287
>rapist
Educate me, pls.

>>9087287
Sometimes rape is a good thing.