One could be a Buddhist and not end up as a hermit. Most don't. — Coben

Very true. True hermits in buddhism are very few and far between and more often than not their hermitages are only "retreats" of a few weeks, months, at most a year. It's just important to remember that traditionally, as far as the Buddha's teachings in the sutras are concerned, seclusion is the goal, a vital part of the journey, and should be done by monks more and more often until the final retreat during which one attains enlightenment. One who can remain secluded in pursuit of enlightenment and no longer needs a master is known in the sutras as having "stood on his own in the Teaching." -Advice to Venerable Punna Sutra

This advice isn't for laypeople though - it's for monks, and requires lengthy training and immersion in the Buddhist forest tradition. Generally speaking, I can't imagine total seclusion as a healthy option for laypeople.

It might be better for those of us already exposed to actually face head on consciously what is in the muck of everyday semi-conscious modern life and see if we actually want it. — Coben

Good point. I'd surmise that (see there's my qualifier) pretending we're thinking only our own thoughts at the same time as we're reading, attending lectures, speaking with friends etc is an exercise in arrogance. So long as that stuff is getting in, better to keep letting more stuff in and grow that way. I would also say that some people need outside information coming in slower, and in smaller doses. They shouldn't be recluses, but they might not be ready to be full on socialites.

And it is often easier to chew on these things when they show up on the outside. — Coben

Agreed - any encounters with the world, be it with people, with nature, let us work with our problems in a tangible, real way. But they also carry us away from wherever we were and it's good to recognize that. That going with the flow in life and doing your best to manage it CAN work, but it's not your flow, it's not necessarily going to take you right where you need to go, and if you need to go somewhere different from most people, it'll be hard to find a flow that works, however diligently you try to navigate it. You might wind up more lost than you started out.

I see what you mean with trying on ideas; but I think you're a step away from answering just why ascetic buddhists can be so unpleasant to be around. There's a documentary on youtube, really the only one of its kind on Buddhist hermits living in a remote mountainous region of China. They're revered within their sect for going further in the Buddha's teachings than most are willing to and have isolated themselves in forest shacks while studying the sutras and living the disciplined recluse's life. One of them says that living in society is like being in a cloth dying vat and that if you stay in too long you'll never come out clean. Isn't that essentially what happens every time we "try on" some one else's ideas? Whether we decide to accept them or reject them, they're in us now, we've been dyed by them. Neurological studies support this, showing identical brain patterns appearing in both the speaker and listener during communication - a literal transfer of ideas.

There's a different lifestyle choice being made between those who spend time around other people, and those who choose to be hermits, or who choose to learn the buddhist way which if followed through leads towards being a hermit. Devout buddhists have enough on their plate observing and letting go of their own ideas. So I really can't say how compatible the two groups are.

Try reading them in bulk, like a dozen or more in a day, not hyper analyzing any one or treating it like an academic project and remember this person was real and natural laws applied to him. A picture of the real human being, not the statue, should start to form pretty quickly. I have a very positive picture of him. I also have yet to see him admit he didn't know. He knew his mind, better than anyone I'm betting, so he deduced he knew everything else. It's a fair deduction in an age before the scientific method. A modern buddha would have to know some science, I'd wager.

If you can't see the man for his flaws and still love him I'd question your comprehension. Even the Dalai Lama's admitted the buddha was wrong about some statements he made that science proved wrong. He said he was the buddha, not a geologist or an astronomer.

I agree there does seem to be a psychology to how we tend to pay more attention if some one sounds confident or presents something as indisputable, as fact. I just try to be careful not to let that psychology kind of carry me off such that I get lost in some one else's imperfect world view. My own is imperfect enough as is. Like you said, those kind of presentations can be good some times but if you had to regularly spend time around some one like that, it would seem more like a character flaw. Frankly I think the Buddha had a character flaw, but I'm not sure he could have gotten rid of it and still retained the state of mind, or non-state-of-mind or what-have-you, that he was in.

Well to be frank, it sounds like you haven't read many of the sutras or at least like you haven't read a lot on your own. There are plenty available here:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/

The megalomania is pretty hard to ignore - it's in almost every one. Again, he never admits to not knowing the answer to a question as far as I've read. There are ten thousand sutras and I've only read a good 100 or so but that's more than an adequate sample size in math. Admitting he didn't know wasn't part of what he did but rather he would often mansplain the heck out of questions like declaring there was a sky under the crust of the earth. Did I mention as he was dying he yelled at a monk to get out from in front of him because the gods were crying that he was blocking their view of the Buddha?

If you're worried about what you'd find don't be. I still love the guy and think he may have discovered what's necessary in all of us to achieve the state of non-suffering he achieved. I'm coming off more critical of him than I mean to be. But read the sutras. Know your faith. The buddha says in a sutra that Buddhism will become corrupted and fade when disciples pay attention to the words of other disciples but stop reading or paying attention to the words of the Buddha in the sutras. He says his words are directly connected to emptiness. Check out the Ani Sutta:

"In the course of the future there will be
monks who won't listen when discourses that are words of
the Tathágata -- deep, deep in their meaning, transcendent,
connected with emptiness -- are being recited. They won't
lend ear, won't set their hearts on knowing them, won't
regard these teachings as worth grasping or mastering. But
they will listen when discourses that are literary works -- the
works of poets, elegant in sound, elegant in rhetoric, the
work of outsiders, words of disciples -- are recited. They will
lend ear and set their hearts on knowing them. They will
regard these teachings as worth grasping and mastering.

In this way the disappearance of the discourses that are
words of the Tathágata -- deep, deep in their meaning,
transcendent, connected with emptiness -- will come about. " - Buddha

I don't mind if they're a jumble so long as I'm communicating individual ideas clearly. Buddhism is deep and profound and I've always held way for the possibility that it's the only route to enlightenment that takes you all the way there...For all of the Buddha's megalomania (and if you read the sutras he was undeniably megalomaniacal), he seems like the most harmless, altruistic megalomaniac who ever lived.

It's just good to remember that he was real, and make sure that the Buddhism you've been taught is the same Buddhism in the sutras. Depending on the sects, there's almost universally a good deal of divergence. The Buddha was pretty no-gray-area hardlined about the need to go into seclusion, to separate men and women, to follow the teachings to the T and not waste time delaying your extinction and reaching enlightenment. Give up everything and no dallying! A lot of sects second-guess all that and that's fine, but then it's a play off the Buddha's teaching, so we may not be talking about the same Buddhism.

Spam filter false positive. Now released. — Baden

As was my now-edited-out tirade-against-the-man a false positive. Some posts vanish and I mistakenly assumed I knew why...again, the problem with being a know-it-all.

You might have to allow for the fact that science is not all-knowing, either. — Wayfarer

Tell me about it. It's 2019 and I've yet to buy a non-malfunctioning printer.

But yeah, we've been at a roadblock for decades in most of physics, both large and small scale, minus some gravitational wave detections here and there of late. Still, it's progressing and when people talk about it not explaining everything I always have to wonder how much of that is about its failure to penetrate the mysteries of us - life, the mind, consciousness. It's true, we're stuck, but progress is being made there too. I look at it like Buddhists being minors trying to drill out of a cave while science is trying to drill in....or something like that. I expect there to be a merger at some point in the probably-distant future.

Well, in essence, I think he was a true master of the mind, enlightened, and the works, but just surmising that there were of necessity some side effects for a human to tinker with the natural, evolution-driven "settings" of their own minds like that. I'm also thinking he was perhaps the biggest megalomaniac in human history. Tell me how you'd respond if you complimented some one you were passing by on the street and he responded like this:

"Upaka the Ajivaka saw me on the road between Gaya and the (place of) Awakening, and on seeing me said to me, 'Clear, my friend, are your faculties. Pure your complexion, and bright. On whose account have you gone forth? Who is your teacher? In whose Dhamma do you delight?'

"When this was said, I replied to Upaka the Ajivaka in verses:

'All-vanquishing,
all-knowing am I,
with regard to all things,
unadhering.
All-abandoning,
released in the ending of craving:
having fully known on my own,
to whom should I point as my teacher?

I have no teacher,
and one like me can't be found.
In the world with its devas,
I have no counterpart.

For I am an arahant in the world;
I, the unexcelled teacher.
I, alone, am rightly self-awakened.
Cooled am I, unbound.

To set rolling the wheel of Dhamma
I go to the city of Kasi.
In a world become blind,
I beat the drum of the Deathless.'

[...]

"When this was said, Upaka said, 'May it be so, my friend,' and — shaking his head, taking a side-road — he left.

xxxx

I have to hope that story is true because it strikes me as perhaps among the funniest moments in human history.

Well, I still see it as kind of having won the religion race, just for having made perhaps the least number of outlandish claims compared to the other faiths. But yes, the science contradictions are frustrating. At the same time, it works in terms of moderating the body, the mind. The challenge is looking past the lore and fanaticism to the actual practioners, who, if they're practiced and serious, live as hermits. These guys live in the woods for years and they're still lucid, sharp - the practice works, but the goal is to become a recluse, or an "island unto oneself" as the Buddha is quoted. It's become too political, and fanatical in most sects though so that's all we see in the media.

Just to be clear, when I'm talking about the Buddha's apparent dishonesty I'm saying it may be a little more complicated than that - if he actually "put an end to suffering," if we follow that premise, it may follow that some weird stuff was going on along with that. The premise I'm making I guess is that he did something really interesting to his brain and this "ignorance" he got rid of may have included becoming unable to admit ignorance on anything, even to himself, so it wasn't a lie, but some crazy neurological thing....

Some say that the Buddha knows everything that can be known; others that he knew everything that was conducive to the attainment of Nirvāṇa (the cessation of all suffering.) O

My impression for the longest time was that it was the latter - in my encounters and studies with buddhist teachers in the past, they tended to steer clear of making many science-contradicting statements and stuck with matters related to mind, suffering, etc. Even the Dalai Lama recently said that if Buddism is found to contradict science, buddhists must change their beliefs. I agree with that, but from reading the sutras, it's not clear that the Buddha would have agreed. Perhaps not for a rational reason, but again because to admit he was wrong, that there are things he does not know, is not possible for him or it would change some necessary condition in his neurology, would destroy his enlightenment. Again conjecture, but I think I've made my point based on making the premise that he did in fact end suffering...

But both Hindus and Buddhists seek the state variously known as mokṣa, vimukti, nirodha, or Nirvāṇa, signifying release or escape from the endless cycle of birth and death.

I found that suspicious as well, that the religion of his place and time just happened to be what he claimed to be the truth. I lend way for the possibility that some as-of-yet-not-understood scientific oddity is reincarnating us all and that attaining enlightenment involves accessing that, but I think back to that quote made by...some scientist (Neil Degrasse Tyson maybe??) asking what's more likely, that nature bent its rules for something to happen, or that some one misunderstood something. Perhaps the buddha understood his own mind so well, so perfectly, he thought to extend that confidence to the natural world at large. Or again, maybe he couldn't help it?

I suppose I understand where you're coming from in that presentations with too many qualifiers are distracting, if that's what you mean. I'm not sure what you mean by "pure" unless you're referring to lecturers or other presenters who believe what they're saying but are just adding in qualifiers to be scientific/political - that would be an awkward way to talk.

However, it's too often in my book that teachers, doctors, and buddhists talk about something for which they have no proof as if it were fact. That's annoying primarily because we're not machines able to immediately add asterisks to potentially false information - it's been evidenced, rather, that we believe everything we hear as true at least momentarily as we decide whether or not to accept it. I have to wonder where the Buddha got his information on earthquakes and rebirth - I leave way for the possibility that something inexplicable was going on, but again, I wonder just what the Buddha had to do to his brain if he really removed suffering, that most natural and fundamental part of being conscious.

I'm unsure of the exact meaning of "ignorance" in buddhism and I'm not claiming any deep knowledge of its subtler, more profound usages in the practice, but just going off the quotes and teachings attributed to the Buddha in the sutras that I've read, he seems at odds with Socrates at least in that he is repeatedly quoted referring to himself as all-knowing. According to the sutra covering his awakening (https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/buddha.html#awakening) :

"'All-vanquishing,
all-knowing am I,
with regard to all things,
unadhering.
All-abandoning,
released in the ending of craving:
having fully known on my own,
to whom should I point as my teacher?"

He says this to a passerby he met shortly after his enlightenment who complimented him on his fine demeanor and asked which teaching he followed. The Buddha went on to make some near-godly claims about himself and the passerby left shaking his head awkwardly. It seems a pretty comical story if it's true.

Again, I think the Buddha was a phenomenal human being not to be underestimated, who may very well have gained mastery over suffering. What I'm interested in is, if he really put an end to suffering, whether this inability to admit ignorance on anything by necessity came with the package. As in, whether not knowing creates suffering and that is something fundamental to being conscious.

It would explain why we've seen no Buddhas in the time since the technological age would have made it possible to accurately record their existence - anyone intelligent enough to become the Buddha would have enough education about the natural world to know enough to know how much they don't know.