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Moment
(Sanskrit: kṣaṇa, Pali: khaṇa)
1/64th of a second, a unit of becoming-time.
When a moment begins, all beings become real. When the moment passes, they all disappear; but these beings are all discretely connected moment-to-moment.
Being
(Sanskrit, Pali: sattva)
See becoming, impermanence, and no-being.
Becoming
(Pali, Sanskrit: bhava)
A progressive change that reproduces itself from itself. The opposite of philosophical Being, which posits the permanence or stillness in time of some being.
Becoming can be described as the continuous rebirth and death of beings as driven by kamma.
Intentional action
(Sanskrit: karma, Pali: kamma)
See intention.
Intention
No-being
See emptiness.
Emptiness
Timelessness
Rights
Deserving
See rights.
Dialectics
Lack
A sense of lack does not correspond to some real object, but some productive desire that produces the sense of lack. A self can be caused to have a sense of lack through the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of productive desires.
Escape
The desire to escape is a resentment of what is real. This desire is posited by Mara to the self during suffering. He posits that there is somewhere or sometime else to be. However, this is a delusion, as one cannot escape one’s material circumstances.
Resentment
(French: ressentiment; Sanskrit, Pali: upanāha)
“The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values—a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge.” – Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. J. M. Kennedy, part 10
The misdirected anger and hostility toward that which one blames for the material circumstances of one’s suffering. The ego differentiates an other to insulate the self from culpability.
This can lead to slave morality.
Slave morality
(German: sklavenmoral)
“But let us come back to it; the problem of another origin of the good—of the good, as the resentful man has thought it out—demands its solution. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, ‘These birds of prey are evil, and he who is as far removed from being a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—is he not good?’ then there is nothing to cavil at in the setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the birds of prey will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves, ‘We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even like them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, part 13
The two fundamental forms morality takes are master morality and slave morality. Master morality is characterized by life-affirmation, nobility, and power. It produces the material circumstances of slave morality simply by describing that which is commonplace or lowly including, values, material things, and practices as “bad”, and describing itself as “good”.
Slave morality dependently originates when “good” is produced as the antithesis of the original aristocratic “good”, which itself is relabeled “evil”. This comes about due to resentment
Historicity
(German: geschichtlichkeit)
Attachment
(Sanskrit, Pali: upādāna)
The craving of worldly things, clinging to the self, or adherence to the idea that one simply ceases to exist after death. The latter two reject the reality of rebirth.
Attachments lead to suffering.
Self
(Sanskrit: ātman)
See no-self.
No-self
(Sanskrit: anātman, Pali: anattā)
See becoming, emptiness, dependent origination.
Dependent origination
See process-oriented ontology, rebirth, no-self. (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda, Pali: paṭiccasamuppāda)
All phenomena arise from other phenomena. The identity of any given phenomenon is dependent entirely on the material circumstances of its becoming.
The attachment to a unique self can produce suffering by differentiating between it and others, when in reality, there is no difference.
Suffering
(Sanskrit: duḥkha, Pali: dukkha)
Can refer to pain, discomfort, or unsatisfaction in any degree, despite the connotation of extreme pain in English.
Phenomena
(German: phänomene)
Subjective, conscious experiences as viewed from through the senses of a self.
Consciousness
(Sanskrit: ṣaḍvijñāna, Pali: chaviññāṇāni)
In Buddhism, referred to as the six consciousnesses.
When a conscious sense is contacted with stimulus, there is immediately simply raw data about the phenomenon being experienced, before the self differentiates the phenomenon from other sensory phenomena.
The sixth consciousness is not a sense consciousness, but the mind consciousness itself.
Ten thousand things
(Chinese: wànwù)
A euphemism for everything used in the Tao Te Ching.
Everything
Monad
See materialism.
The one thing posited by monism: a oneness of everything, the cohesion of all matter and energy that can only be arbitrarily divided into differentiable components. There are actually likely many things, but this conclusion doesn’t necessarily conflict with monism. See process-oriented ontology.
Materialism
The idea that there is one substance (typically matter) that makes up everything and in which all phenomena are immanent.
Process-oriented ontology
Also known as process philosophy or ontology of becoming.
“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream.” – Heraclitus, recovered from Plato’s Cratylus
The view in which change and becoming are the fundamental nature of things in reality. This idea is syncretic with desiring machines, as the partial objects which make them up are themselves at least partly reducible to the processes which produce them.
Desire
(French: désire)
See desiring-machines.
Desiring-machines
(French: machines désirantes)
See desiring-production.
Desiring-production
Production via desire, not of desire.
Schizophrenia
(French: schizophrenie)
See body without organs.
Body without organs
(French: corps sans organes)
See no-self.
Samsara
Saṃsāra, sanskrit for the cycle of existence, is the realm we live in, within which beings are subject to rebirth. The Buddha posited the Four Noble Truths about Saṃsāra:
- Suffering is inherent to Saṃsāra.
- Suffering is caused by attachment.
- It is possible to relieve suffering.
- The way to relieve suffering is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.