Netti-Netti
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Heh, some seemingly distractatory posts actually have clarificatory value.Yeah come on sg, get with the programme!
Could be.and cultural too.....the Chinese "mindset" was more concerned with the earthy hear and now rather than the more philosophical Indian mindset prone to musing on future rebirths and cosmologies.
The linguistic aspect seems to have been driven by a certain amount of cultural hubris that was quite pervasive throughout early Chinese history, so much that it makes some historians wonder even now how Buddhism ever got going in China. Apparently the idea of importing something from India into China was so abhorrent to the proud Chinese that they came up with a legend that portrays Lao Tse as the founder Buddhism who went to India to raise the level of civilization there.
It seems the Chinese were willing to adopt foreign ideas only after they did a complete overhaul and repackaged them like they were Chinese. For example, it has been suggested that Taoism is actually a Chinese reformulation of forms of yoga that antedated the Vedas by hundreds of years in the form of oral traditions.
I realize these comments are an aside. Just wondering whether it makes sense to go back to see if some of these ideas and practices can be found in a pure form, without a lot of funky cultural adaptations thrown in.
I though that was interesting, too. The Taoist notion of emptiness is totally different from the Buddhist idea - more of an adaptive social attitude, whereas for the Buddhists it was a more philosophical idea. That's just one example of how these concepts can get reworked and thoroughly weirded out because of icross-cultural differences in concepts and idioms....and an interesting point about emptiness in your link there, n-n.
Anyhoo, even if it isn't a Buddhism, it's relevant to the questions at the top of the thread (thanks for the derailment, SG):
Opening your heart, you become accepted.
Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.
~Tao de Jing, 10