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| title | date | techne | episteme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Probability of Liberation: One in a Kalpa | 2012-07-11 | :done | :speculation |
Just realized something listening to a [Bhikkhu Bodhi talk][Bodhi talk].
Theravada Buddhism has a fundamental Big World cosmology, a multiverse full with an enormous number of worlds, existing for enormous time periods, all condemned to suffering until a Buddha arises and liberates that particular world (or rather, only a small subset of it).
Previously, I thought that's just a weird bit of mythology, or a claim to authenticity (we go back to the rare Buddha, you don't) dressed up in sci-fi terms. But I'm getting the impression it's weirder than that.
In Theravada, the Buddha doesn't use any kind of reliable or reproducible method to discover the Path of Liberation. He just lucks into it (or more euphemistically, spontaneously derives it from his innate wisdom). This makes the Buddha fundamentally a [Boltzmann][Boltzmann Brain] Savior! We are all stuck in a world full of suffering and rebirth we can't get out of, and that has no solution you could in any way derive. You need enormous statistical luck to just randomly get the Path right, or that's it, another round of suffering for you.
Which is why the Buddha is so extremely rare, and why it's so important to preserve his teachings and practices exactly - you can't get them any other way! If the teaching's lost, that's it, another bazillion years of waiting. The practices themselves don't have to be hard (and people are getting enlightened left and right in the scriptures, after all), but their authenticity is key.
This has a few important implications:
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The Buddha can literally show up one day, pull the whole Pali Canon out of his nether regions, claim it came to him spontaneously out of nowhere, but it's all true and you should follow him instantly. As far as Theravada is concerned, that's exactly what happened.
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This means Theravada can be as arbitrary and complex as it wants to be. If it were elegant or easy to understand, you wouldn't need luck in the first place! It also needs no justifications whatsoever for its beliefs and practices except that they go back to the Buddha - he didn't get them from anywhere, or following any kind of procedure - it's sheer blind epistemic luck.
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Bad rebirths as punishments, especially for anything sectarian, is necessarily a feature of the world, not because the universe hates heretics and wants to personally punish them, but simply because doing anything that distances you from Boltzmann Buddha is like throwing away your incredibly rare winning lottery ticket.
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Theravada can fully embrace boundless levels of [moral luck][]. For example, attaining Nirvana from scratch might require exactly zero karma, an insanely hard thing to do. Take one step, crush an insect? No Buddha is you.
So I think one thing is clear - "a reborn demon guru from Tibet told me, and he may have learned it from a dragon" is no longer the craziest Buddhist origin story.