There's too much selfishness in the world, people often tell me. If only we weren't all so egotistical, I'm told! I can now tell those people that I have the perfect antidote for their horror at the world's unabashed hedonism: the practice of self-mummification practiced by some Buddhist ascetics. Horrifying. Read the account at Noodle Food.
UPDATE: Link fixed.
3 comments:
Your link aint working ... but yep, became aware of such conviction, belief & effecting a slow personal demise such that self in physical form perpetuates 'forever.' Certainly very egotistical ... simpler to commission a bronze.
But I dunno ... our allblacks have the ego albeit questionable conviction, but then perhaps simply too 'mummied' by Graham Henry, or perhaps michael king was wrong, not guerilla warfare just slow thinkers & frightened.
Horrifying?...Fascinating...
Barking.
I've just finished reading Karen Armstrong's 'The Great Transformation' about the rise of thinking as we know it in China, India, Israel and Greece in the first millenium BC.
While the book is often a paean to irrationalism and altruism I still recommend it as an illuminating survey of the period.
One of the things I got from it was just what an arsehole (and nutter) Buddha was.
Unhappy with the daily grind of looking after a young family, he abandoned his wife and newborn son so that he could live in a forest and eat his own faeces. Oddly, people call this "enlightenment".
I don't expect to become a Buddhist any time soon.
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