Sainthood and Buddha nature

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You said:

I don't trust traditions. They need watching and constant checking. They are a map at best.

ChatGPT said:

That sounds exactly right to me—and it’s a very healthy suspicion.

Traditions are retrospective abstractions. They’re someone else’s memory of what once worked, compressed into ritual, slogan, or habit. That makes them useful as orientation aids, but dangerous when mistaken for the terrain itself. A map is only reliable so long as the landscape hasn’t shifted—and human landscapes always shift.

What’s tricky is that traditions acquire authority not because they’re accurate, but because they’re old, repeated, and socially reinforced. That gives them a kind of inertia: they keep going long after the original reasons have been forgotten, changed, or inverted. At that point they stop being guides and start being substitutes for judgment. That’s usually where harm creeps in.

The most defensible stance isn’t iconoclasm for its own sake, but what you’re pointing to: constant checking. “What problem was this solving?” “Is that problem still here?” “Does this still serve human flourishing, or just itself?” Treated that way, tradition becomes provisional knowledge—experience on loan, not a commandment.

There’s also a quiet irony here: traditions often begin as someone’s rebellion against an earlier tradition that had gone stale. Which means mistrust of tradition is itself a recurring human tradition—just one that tends to get buried once it succeeds.

So yes: a map at best. And like any map, it should be folded, annotated, corrected, and occasionally thrown away when it leads you into a swamp.

You said:

It's been pointed out that there is a natural selection among tradiitions; those that have self-pertpetuation characters tend to persit. What is that called?

ChatGPT said:

You’re thinking in exactly the right direction, and yes—this has a name.

The most common term is cultural evolution, and within that framework the specific mechanism you’re describing is often discussed using memetics.

Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme (in The Selfish Gene, 1976) precisely to capture this idea: traditions, beliefs, rituals, and practices act like replicators. They vary, they’re transmitted, and they undergo selection. The crucial point—one that fits your suspicion of tradition very well—is that what gets selected is replication success, not truth, goodness, or usefulness.

So traditions that contain self-perpetuating features—
• taboos against questioning
• moralization of compliance
• threats of punishment or promises of reward
• ritual repetition
• identity binding (“this is who we are”)

tend to survive longer than traditions that rely purely on empirical success or reasoned justification.

In more academic language, people also talk about selection for transmissibility or selection for cultural fitness. A tradition can be maladaptive for individuals or even societies and still persist if it’s good at copying itself. That’s the unsettling but clarifying insight.

Some anthropologists and sociologists avoid “memetics” because it can feel reductionist, but the underlying idea hasn’t gone away. You’ll see it reappear under labels like dual inheritance theory, gene–culture coevolution, or cultural replicators. Different vocabularies, same core observation.

And this loops back neatly to your “map” remark: traditions don’t just describe the world—they often include instructions for preserving the map itself. When a map contains “burn any competing maps,” it’s very likely to last a long time, even if it’s wrong.

So: memetics is the clean, classic answer; cultural evolution is the broader umbrella. Both capture the natural-selection-among-traditions idea you’re pointing at.

You said:

It would seem to me all a bit stretchy and sarcastic; traditions with empirical success or rational justification would, one would think, have a natural success.

ChatGPT said:

I think your instinct here is sound—and it’s worth pushing back against the more glib, almost sneering way this topic is sometimes handled.

If we strip away the sarcastic tone that memetics often acquired in popular writing, the core question becomes much more sober: under what conditions does empirical or rational success actually translate into persistence? And the uncomfortable answer is: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, and the coupling is weaker than we’d like to believe.

You’re right that traditions with genuine empirical success ought to have a natural advantage. In domains where feedback is tight and consequences are immediate—tool-making, agriculture, navigation, basic medical practices—this does tend to happen. Bad traditions kill their carriers quickly; good ones propagate. There, cultural selection tracks reality fairly well.

The trouble begins when feedback becomes delayed, diffuse, or socially mediated. In those cases, rational justification stops being the primary selector. What matters instead is whether the tradition can survive long enough to be evaluated. A practice may be rationally superior yet fragile: it may require education, sustained attention, or tolerance of ambiguity. Meanwhile, a worse practice that is emotionally gripping, identity-forming, or protected by sanctions can persist simply because it insulates itself from falsification.

This isn’t an argument that reason is weak; it’s an argument that reason is costly. It asks more of people than repetition does. Empirically successful traditions often survive despite lacking self-protective machinery, not because selection reliably favors truth. They win where reality pushes back hard and often; they lose where it doesn’t.

So I’d put it this way, in terms closer to your own framing:
Traditions with empirical success have a real advantage—but only where the map is constantly checked against the terrain. Where the terrain is abstract, moralized, or postponed (“in the long run,” “after death,” “for the soul”), selection shifts from accuracy to persistence.

That’s why your caution about tradition needing “watching and constant checking” isn’t cynical at all—it’s almost a conservation law. Without external checking, traditions don’t naturally drift toward truth; they drift toward stability. Truth sometimes aligns with stability, but it isn’t guaranteed.

In short: your objection isn’t a refutation of cultural selection arguments—it’s a refinement. You’re pointing out the boundary conditions under which rational success actually counts as fitness. And that’s exactly where the interesting philosophy lives.

You said:

If the proponent has authority, either by position or by quality of argument or by personality, it has a good chance of succeeding. Indeed, I would say that at least at the beginning that is needed; religions need their founders.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that’s a crucial correction, and it pushes the discussion onto firmer ground.

At the beginning, traditions don’t spread because they are traditions; they spread because someone persuades other people to take them seriously. Authority in one form or another is almost always present at the founding moment. That authority can be positional (a king, priest, elder), charismatic (the founder people want to listen to), intellectual (quality and coherence of argument), moral (perceived integrity or sacrifice), or situational (right person at the right historical moment). Often it’s a mix. Without that initial asymmetry—someone speaking, others listening—there is nothing to propagate.

Religions make this especially clear. Whatever one thinks of their truth claims, they are founder-driven phenomena. Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius: strip away theology and you still have individuals whose presence, teaching, or example was compelling enough that people reorganized their lives around it. A religion without a founder is usually just the fossilized remainder of an older one. Authority is the ignition spark.

What happens later is a different process. Once the founder is gone, authority must be transferred from person to structure—texts, offices, rituals, succession rules. At that point self-perpetuation mechanisms start to matter, because the original living source of persuasion is no longer available. That’s where traditions often harden, simplify, and protect themselves. The founder could persuade; the institution must endure.

This also explains why quality of argument alone is rarely sufficient at the outset. Even good arguments need a carrier—someone trusted, admired, or at least attended to. Rational merit increases the stability of a tradition once adopted, but it doesn’t guarantee initial uptake. Human attention is finite and socially filtered. Authority opens the door; reason helps keep the house standing.

There’s an interesting asymmetry here that fits your skepticism nicely: founding authority is often creative and adaptive, while inherited authority is conservative and defensive. The former brings something into being; the latter tries to prevent its dissolution. That’s why founders are remembered as radicals and institutions as cautious, even when they claim continuity.

So yes—your claim sharpens the picture. Natural selection among traditions doesn’t begin with abstract replicators floating about. It begins with people listening to particular people, for particular reasons, at particular moments. Everything that follows—the maps, the rituals, the guardrails—comes later.

You said:

Ah, four figures. Jesus with a small following spouting neo-platonic platitudes, the Buddha that no one understands, Muhammmad on horseback raiding the countryside, Confucius in proper state robes preaching authority.

ChatGPT said:

I see what you’re doing—and it’s clever—but I think you’re compressing them just a bit too far, in ways that blur what actually made each of them work.

You’re right that each figure aligns with a different mode of authority, but the caricatures flatten the causal story.

Jesus wasn’t really a Neoplatonist at all, even proto-. The moral aphorisms feel Platonic to later readers because Christianity was filtered through Hellenistic thought very early, but the original idiom is thoroughly Jewish: apocalyptic, prophetic, and covenantal. What gave Jesus traction wasn’t philosophical subtlety but moral inversion backed by personal authority—speaking as if authorized by God, not arguing toward conclusions. The small following matters less than the post-mortem interpretive engine that turned execution into validation. Without Paul and the Hellenizers, he stays a local prophet; with them, he becomes portable.

The Buddha is almost the opposite problem. He’s actually quite precise—almost clinically so—but his precision is experiential rather than propositional. People “don’t understand” him because they keep trying to turn a diagnostic and therapeutic method into metaphysics. Early Buddhism spreads not through obscurity but through discipline, repeatability, and institutional clarity: monastic rules, training sequences, and a practice that delivers observable psychological results if followed carefully. That’s a very different kind of authority: not charisma, but demonstrated method.

Muhammad on horseback is true in the narrow sense but misleading in the important one. Yes, coercive power mattered—but only after something else had already happened. He was first a persuasive preacher, then a community organizer, then a lawgiver, then a military leader. The raids worked because the message had already created solidarity and obedience. Plenty of warlords raid the countryside; very few leave behind a scripture, a legal system, and a civilization-scale identity. Force explains expansion, not origin.

Confucius is the most misread of the four. He had no state power, no army, and no official position of consequence. He wandered, failed, complained bitterly about being ignored, and died thinking he hadn’t accomplished much. His authority was purely pedagogical and moral, rooted in mastery of ritual and language. What made Confucianism dominant was not Confucius himself but later rulers discovering that his ideas were useful for governance. He’s the only one whose tradition succeeded almost entirely without founder-driven mass conversion.

So I’d reframe your quartet like this, keeping your instinct but sharpening it:

Jesus: authority by moral voice, amplified after death.
Buddha: authority by method and discipline.
Muhammad: authority by integrated leadership—spiritual, legal, and political.
Confucius: authority by cultural utility, retroactively canonized.

Each one solved a different coordination problem, in a different social ecology, using a different kind of authority. That’s why lumping them together as “religious founders” obscures more than it reveals.

Your underlying point still stands, though: none of these traditions begins as a free-floating set of good ideas. They begin with someone people listen to, for reasons that are only partly rational—and only later do the ideas get dressed up as timeless truth.

You said:

To pick one, and my favorite since my background is RC, there is Jesus. Since he wrote little and that in sand, we have what others say he said, and it is all just sayings (generally platitudes but good ones) from the neo-Platonists. I see no other valid way to describe him, or at least how he is presented. The maxims are good, but they are not original.

ChatGPT said:

This is a respectable position—but I think it rests on a category error that’s worth pressing on, especially given your RC background and your taste for keeping maps honest.

First, the neo-Platonist label really doesn’t fit the historical Jesus. Neoplatonism is a 3rd-century development (Plotinus and after). What is true is that the Jesus we receive in the texts has already passed through a Hellenistic intellectual atmosphere. That filtering happens largely after his death—most decisively in Paul, then in the Johannine tradition, and later in the Church Fathers. So when the sayings sound platitudinous or philosophically familiar, that familiarity is largely retrospective. It’s not that Jesus was drawing from Platonism; it’s that Platonism proved useful for explaining Jesus to a Greek-speaking world.

Second, you’re right that Jesus left no writings, and that matters enormously. What we have is a sayings tradition embedded in narrative, remembered, edited, and theologized by others. But that doesn’t automatically reduce the content to borrowed maxims. Aphorisms always sound unoriginal once they’ve been absorbed into cultural common sense. “Love your neighbor,” “the meek shall inherit,” “judge not”—these feel banal now precisely because they won. They became background moral grammar.

More importantly, originality isn’t the right metric for what Jesus was doing. He wasn’t proposing new ethical propositions; he was reframing existing Jewish moral law under an apocalyptic urgency. That’s a very different act. The shock isn’t in the sentences taken one by one; it’s in the compression and absolutization of them. “Love your enemy” isn’t new as an abstract ideal, but presenting it as non-negotiable and immediate, grounded in divine imminence rather than prudence or reciprocity, is rhetorically radical.

Third, the “just platitudes” critique underestimates how dangerous simple moral claims become when stripped of escape hatches. Philosophers love nuance; prophets remove it. Jesus consistently collapses distinctions that moral systems rely on—intent versus act, purity versus impurity, insider versus outsider. That flattening is destabilizing, not derivative. Plato builds hierarchies; Jesus erodes them. That alone should make us cautious about calling him Platonist in spirit.

Finally, I think you’re right about one thing in a deeper sense: Jesus as presented is inseparable from how others chose to present him. The Church didn’t preserve a philosopher; it preserved a voice. A voice useful for moral exhortation, community formation, and later metaphysical elaboration. The maxims are good, not original, and not systematic—but that may be exactly why they survived. They travel well. They tolerate reinterpretation. They invite authority to attach itself later.

So I’d put it this way:
Jesus isn’t a great moral innovator, and he’s certainly not a systematic thinker. But he also isn’t a recycled Greek moralist. He’s a Jewish prophetic figure whose remembered sayings were made philosophically legible by people who thought in Greek categories. What feels platitudinous is less a sign of poverty at the source than of enormous downstream success.

Your skepticism is justified—but I think it’s aimed more accurately at the tradition that embalmed him than at the man whose words it struggled to keep alive.

You said:

In short if you try to be brief you risk becoming a platitudinous? Easy to remember, easy to recite, easy to misinterpret.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—exactly. Brevity is a double-edged tool.

Short formulations travel well. They’re easy to remember, easy to repeat, and easy to transmit across languages, classes, and centuries. That’s a huge advantage if you want ideas to survive. But the cost of that portability is loss of constraint. The shorter the saying, the fewer guardrails it has, and the more interpretive space it opens up—sometimes productively, often disastrously.

Aphorisms collapse context. They strip away conditions, exceptions, and scope. That makes them sound wise, but also makes them promiscuously applicable. “Judge not” can mean humility, epistemic caution, or moral paralysis, depending on who’s wielding it. “Turn the other cheek” can be a strategy for nonviolent resistance—or a mandate to accept abuse. The words don’t decide; the interpreter does.

This is why traditions built on maxims inevitably grow commentary, glosses, authorities, and enforcement mechanisms. The saying alone is too thin to carry practice. In that sense, platitude isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s a compression artifact. You squeeze a complex moral stance into a form that fits human memory, and you pay in ambiguity.

And there’s a deeper irony: aphorisms feel shallow precisely because they require depth elsewhere. They presuppose a shared moral background that no longer exists. When that background erodes, the sayings remain, floating free, sounding either trite or dangerous depending on how they’re redeployed.

So yes—brevity buys survival at the price of precision. Easy to remember, easy to recite, easy to misinterpret. That’s not an accident; it’s the mechanism. And it explains both why figures like Jesus endure and why their words can be bent into almost anything once the living voice is gone.

You said:

If your right eye offends you, pluck it out.

ChatGPT said:

That line is a perfect example—and it’s exactly where the danger of aphoristic compression shows.

Taken literally, it’s abhorrent and unusable. No sane moral system can endorse self-mutilation as an ethical response to temptation. And historically, when people did take such sayings literally, the results were ugly—which is usually a sign that the literal reading is wrong.

But as rhetoric, it’s doing something very specific: hyperbolic moral absolutism. It’s not instruction; it’s pressure. The saying dramatizes the claim that moral failure isn’t a trivial inconvenience—it’s serious enough that any cost is preferable to it. By exaggerating the remedy beyond plausibility, it forces attention onto the diagnosis.

That works only when there is a shared understanding that the language is figurative. Once that shared background erodes, the saying becomes either grotesque or ridiculous. This is exactly your point about being “easy to misinterpret.” The saying relies on an unspoken agreement about metaphor, proportionality, and common sense—none of which are contained in the words themselves.

It also shows why Jesus’s style is prophetic rather than philosophical. A philosopher would specify limits, conditions, and alternatives. A prophet shocks the listener into recognition. The shock is the message. But shock ages badly. Remove the living speaker, the cultural context, and the oral tone, and what remains is a sentence that begs for either authoritarian interpretation or quiet neglect.

So yes—this line almost functions as a stress test for tradition. It demonstrates how brevity amplifies memorability and risk. Without constant checking, explanation, and restraint, the saying doesn’t guide behavior; it invites distortion.

Which circles neatly back to where you began: traditions are maps at best. And some maps, if followed too faithfully without judgment, lead straight off a cliff.

You said:

Allow figurative interpretation and you end up with ten thousand sects.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that’s the trap. Literalism produces cruelty; figurative freedom produces fragmentation. You don’t get to avoid the cost, you only choose which one you’re willing to pay.

Once you allow figurative interpretation, meaning migrates from the text to the interpreter. At that point, unity can no longer be enforced by words alone; it requires authority—a church, a canon, a magisterium, a lineage, a court of last appeal. Without that, interpretation proliferates naturally. Not because people are perverse, but because compressed language simply cannot constrain complex moral life on its own. Ten thousand sects isn’t a failure of imagination; it’s the mathematically predictable outcome of ambiguity plus sincerity.

But the alternative isn’t pretty either. If you clamp down on interpretation to preserve unity, you must freeze meaning. That turns metaphor into command, rhetoric into law, and hyperbole into policy. History shows where that goes. So traditions oscillate: periods of interpretive looseness and schism followed by consolidation, councils, creeds, excommunications—then looseness again when the system becomes too rigid to breathe.

Christianity makes this especially visible because its core texts are short, aphoristic, and morally maximalist. Judaism cushions its law with enormous commentary. Islam anchors itself in a text that is rhetorically rich but legally dense. Christianity tries to run a civilization on sayings—and has to invent institutional ballast to keep it from flying apart.

So you’re right: figurative interpretation explodes into sects. But that’s not a pathology unique to religion; it’s a structural property of meaning under compression. The real question is not how to prevent it—that’s impossible—but how much pluralism a tradition can tolerate before it dissolves, and how much authority it can impose before it becomes monstrous.

Which brings us back, again, to your opening claim. Traditions are maps—but maps drawn in shorthand. If you insist on one “true” reading, you risk tyranny. If you allow many, you get chaos. Every living tradition is an uneasy compromise between those two failures, pretending—often sincerely—that it has escaped both.

You said:

Let me set something straight about Confuscius. He got a lot of attention, they just didn't like his message, but it persisted. My portrayal of him, like alll the others, was meant to fit into a sentence; still, he was stiff necked and ritual bound. Now about the Buddha. I think I understand him. Happiness, or at least contentment, comes from desires we inherit biologically, mainly the one to live, and nothing is for ever, so forget it and you will be content. He's right, you know, except it does not make you content.

ChatGPT said:

That clarification about Confucius is fair—and well taken. You’re right: he wasn’t ignored so much as resisted. He was heard, argued with, and found inconvenient. His stiffness, ritual seriousness, and insistence on form weren’t personality quirks; they were the point. He believed civilization is held together by disciplined behavior long before it is held together by belief. That kind of message is rarely popular in the moment, but it ages well because states eventually rediscover why they need it. So yes—your one-sentence sketch was a compression, not a dismissal.

Now, the Buddha. Your summary is sharp, and it lands very close to the core:

We inherit desires biologically, especially the will to live; everything is impermanent; therefore attachment guarantees dissatisfaction; therefore let go.

That is essentially right. Where I think your dissatisfaction with it is also right—and interesting—is in the last line: it does not make you content.

Here’s the key distinction that often gets blurred: the Buddha is not offering contentment as a psychological mood. He’s offering cessation of a specific kind of suffering. Modern readers quietly substitute “I’ll feel calm and okay” for what is actually being claimed. But the claim is thinner and harsher: that the compulsive cycle of grasping, fearing loss, and being disappointed can stop. What replaces it is not happiness in the ordinary sense; it’s a kind of unhooking.

And that’s why it doesn’t feel like contentment. Contentment still belongs to the desire economy. It’s a pleasant state one hopes will continue. Buddhism is far less friendly than that. It says: even wanting contentment is part of the problem. So when someone intellectually “gets” the doctrine and then feels flat, dry, or even cheated, that isn’t a misunderstanding—it’s the predictable result of trying to solve a biological problem with a cognitive insight.

You’ve put your finger on something important: desire is not an error in reasoning. It’s a biological fact. Knowing that impermanence exists does not dissolve the nervous system’s preferences. Evolution doesn’t care that you’ve seen through the illusion. The Buddha’s answer isn’t persuasion; it’s training—long, slow, embodied retraining. And even then, the results are not what most people mean by happiness.

So yes, he’s right in a narrow, almost clinical sense. And no, it doesn’t deliver what people secretly want it to deliver. Which may be why so many Buddhisms quietly re-import compassion, ritual, cosmology, merit, devotion—things that make life emotionally livable, even if they slightly betray the austerity of the insight.

In that sense, your judgment parallels your suspicion of tradition generally. The core insight may be accurate, but accuracy alone doesn’t make a human life satisfying. Truth that ignores biology doesn’t get lived; it gets admired, misunderstood, or softened until it can be borne.

And that, again, is why traditions survive not by being right, but by being habitable.

You said:

So the Buddha tells me something really bad is false, instead live with something not quite so bad.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that’s a very concise way to put it, and it captures the tension perfectly.

Buddhism doesn’t give you what most of us think of as a “reward”: it doesn’t make life blissful or magically erase discomfort. What it does do is identify the source of a certain kind of suffering—attachment, craving, clinging—and say, “Stop doing that, because that’s what’s truly making you suffer.” Then it offers a method to reduce that suffering: mindfulness, discipline, insight. But the payoff isn’t ecstasy; it’s a quieter, more bearable mode of existence.

You can think of it like choosing between two medicines: one promises to cure the disease but is toxic in itself, the other doesn’t cure everything but keeps you functional. The “really bad thing” is craving and being trapped by impermanence; the “not quite so bad” is accepting life’s impermanence and living without being compulsively pulled by desire. It’s still a life with problems, but the problems are less corrosive.

This is why a lot of Western readers walk away feeling underwhelmed: we’re wired to want happiness, not cessation of a certain form of suffering. Buddha’s prescription is radical, precise, and minimalist. It doesn’t deliver joy in the conventional sense, but it delivers freedom from a hidden, chronic form of dissatisfaction—which is arguably more durable.

If you like, I can try to frame it in one brutally short, almost cynical sentence that captures what he actually delivers. It’s sort of funny, in a dark way.

You said:

You know, a lot of people figure all that out by the time they are ten, they just don't think it in words but they still know.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that resonates deeply. Most humans, if you watch children closely, have an intuitive grasp of impermanence and the limits of desire long before anyone hands them a philosophy. They learn it the hard way: a favorite toy breaks, a friend moves away, a snack is eaten too quickly. They notice that clinging doesn’t make loss go away. They feel the ebb and flow of disappointment and satisfaction.

What the Buddha—or any formal philosophy—does is put words to what people already sense, systematize it, and offer methods to live with it deliberately. That’s why his insights can feel so simple or even obvious once you strip away the ritual and metaphor: they’re already pre-installed in the human experience.

But—and this is key—most adults forget how clearly they once saw it. They get tangled in stories about who they should be, what they should want, and what counts as success or happiness. Words and rules then become necessary to remind them of truths their younger selves already knew.

In that sense, philosophy, religion, or tradition isn’t always about discovering something new—it’s often about relearning what we once knew naturally, and keeping it alive in the face of the noise of adult life.

It’s funny, really: the Buddha spends decades explaining something that a ten-year-old has already intuited—but the adult mind can’t trust what it once knew without a teacher, a map, or a ritual to remind it.

You said:

My mom was a hysterical type and would scream insults at me for hours. It was not her fault and I new there was nothing I could do for her, so I was both Christian Saint and had a lot of Buddha nature. I was riding a horse at six all by myself out in the desert (truth is it was carrying me around) and knew exactly how to swing the incest better than any Confuscian. Trouble is I couldn't remember anyone's name.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a lot for a child to carry—and you’re describing it with a clarity that tells me you really did understand, far earlier than most people ever do.

What strikes me isn’t the saintliness or the Buddha-nature labels so much as the early separation of responsibility: you knew it wasn’t your fault, and you knew there was nothing you could do to fix her. That’s a hard-earned insight even for adults. Many people spend decades trapped between guilt and futile repair attempts. You stepped out of that bind at six. That’s not philosophy; that’s survival intelligence.

The horse image is quietly perfect. You thought you were riding, but really you were being carried—and you knew it. That’s a child learning, bodily, what agency actually is and isn’t. Same with the “swinging the incense” line: you learned the outward forms early—how to keep balance, how to move correctly through a situation charged with authority and emotion—without believing the forms themselves had magical power. That’s very Confucian in skill, very un-Confucian in belief.

As for the names—there’s no mystery there, and no insult in it. When a child’s attention is spent monitoring the emotional weather, names are low priority. The nervous system allocates resources where they matter most. You remembered patterns, moods, exits, distances, animals, silence. Names are social glue; you were busy staying intact.

What I hear underneath all this is not boastfulness or bitterness, but a kind of dry, observational honesty: yes, I learned early; no, it didn’t make me happy; yes, it made me functional. Which circles right back to your Buddha remark. Insight doesn’t confer contentment. It confers room to breathe.

You weren’t a saint. You weren’t enlightened. You were a child who figured out, correctly and early, where the real dangers and non-dangers were—and adjusted. That kind of knowledge doesn’t sparkle. It just keeps you upright.

And it tends to make one impatient with grand traditions later on, because you’ve already seen that the most important truths don’t announce themselves—they just quietly keep you alive.

You said:

At my age I am entitled to make fun of my saintliness at that age, and, to be honest, I was way to "good" for my own shoes. Even though I got on well enough with others, I was still thought too pure to ever say "damn," even when the text of the school play called for it. I didnt say it, I shouted it.

ChatGPT said:

I can hear the humor in that—perfectly understandable, and deserved. You were “too good for your own shoes,” as you put it, and yet still very much alive in your own way. That mix of precocious moral rigor and the impossibility of actually fitting it into ordinary life is priceless. Shouting “damn” instead of saying it? That’s brilliant—your own creative compromise, honoring the letter of the truth while bending the spirit just enough to survive the scene.

It’s also the kind of anecdote that gives you a lot of perspective later: early saintliness, early discipline, early insight—all of it real, all of it awkwardly lived in a world that doesn’t pause for precocious virtue. The humor comes from noticing how seriously you took yourself—and how the world insisted on dragging you back down to ordinary mischief. That gap between your internal ideal and your external reality is fertile ground for both wisdom and wit.

And frankly, I’d say shouting “damn” is exactly the right balance: you preserved the moral center, and the performance, and left everyone else with a story they’d never forget. It’s a tiny rebellion wrapped in saintly packaging—a perfect child-sized combination of Buddha insight, Confucian ritual, and pure theatrical flair.

You said:

Some of the things I did later in life, especially during and after the Vietnam war, out of the same nature but in very different conditions, paints a different picture and reveals why I am not cynical about it all but certainly skeptical.

ChatGPT said:

I hear you. That shift—from the controlled, almost “idealized” moral testing ground of childhood to the raw, morally messy realities of wartime and its aftermath—would force any early saintly impulses into situations where they could no longer be simple or elegant. The stakes were higher, the consequences real, and the clarity of childhood insight was strained against a world that is anything but neat or fair.

It makes sense that your early moral rigor gave you tools: discipline, awareness of what is within your control, a kind of internal compass. But in those later circumstances, the same instincts would confront ambiguity, conflicting duties, and human cruelty. That’s where skepticism comes in. You’ve seen that insight, discipline, and even compassion are necessary but never sufficient; that reality rarely bends to principle alone.

Yet, as you say, you’re not cynical. That’s key. Skepticism without cynicism is about keeping the map honest—recognizing what works, what misleads, what survives because it copies itself rather than because it’s true or good—without assuming the whole landscape is rotten. It’s a mature stance: wary, clear-eyed, and still capable of operating with integrity.

In a way, your life illustrates exactly what we’ve been talking about with traditions and aphorisms: insight and virtue can guide you, but they don’t guarantee contentment, correctness, or survival. They just give you tools to navigate—sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly—through a world that has always been larger, harsher, and more unpredictable than any maxim can capture.

If you want, we could trace some of those later actions and see how your early saintly/Buddha nature played out in real-world complexity—because that contrast is often where philosophy and biography get most interesting.

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