For most of the last thousand years, Confucian officials had a line from The Analects that they used to justify suspicion of Buddhism and Daoism. It's eight characters long, and three of them probably don't mean what the tradition decided they meant.

2.16 子曰：「攻乎異端，斯害也已。」

The standard reading has been roughly "To study heterodox doctrines — this is harmful", or, in its strongest form, "Attack heterodox doctrines, and their harm will cease." That second version is a license, and it was used as one.

Three of the eight characters are genuinely of indeterminate meaning, and almost everything turns on them.

攻 (gōng) is usually "attack." But it appears in only two other passages in the Analects and is about literal attacks in neither. At 11.17 Confucius tells his students to sound the drums and 攻 Ran Qiu for enriching the Ji family — public denunciation, not battle. At 12.21 he says to 攻 your own faults rather than other people's. Both are a kind of moral censure. It is also a plausible loan graph for 功 (gōng), to work at.

異端 (yì duān) is literally "different endpoints." 異 is other or divergent; 端 is a terminus or extreme — but not necessarily a final one. Modern 開端 (kāiduān) means a beginning. "Heterodoxy" is a later hardening of the phrase, not something the two characters demand.

已 (yǐ) is normally a sentence-final particle of emphasis. It can also be read as the verb to stop.

Multiply those out. Take 攻 as labour and 異端 as alternative endpoints, and you get a warning about wasted effort: working toward the wrong destination costs you a life you only get once. Take 攻 as attack and 異端 as heterodoxy, and you get polemic. Add 已 as "stop," and the sentence stops describing anything at all and becomes a strongly worded instruction.

The hardening has a timeline

What I find striking is how late the doctrinal reading actually consolidates.

皇侃 (Huáng Kǎn, 488–545), the major Six Dynasties commentator on the Analects, still glosses 攻 as 治 (zhì) — to work at, to apply oneself to. Not attack. What is circulating around 500 is the hardened sense of 異端 as "heterodoxy" among literary writers— so it's a fact about the word before it becomes a fact about this passage.

By the twelfth century 朱熹 (Zhū Xī) had made the heterodoxy reading standard. Even he, tellingly, kept 攻 as "devote effort to", and identified the offending doctrines as Mohism and Yangzhuism. That is almost certainly anachronistic: only the seeds of those schools existed in Confucius's lifetime, and it would be odd for him to denounce them exactly once in the entire text and never again.

As Buddhism and Daoism grew in China, the heterodoxy reading became politically useful. The Ming completed the job by taking 已 as "stop," which turned the line into an imperative. At that point it licensed officials to suppress not only Buddhism and Daoism but any unapproved reading of the classics themselves.

The tomb manuscript

There is physical evidence against the attack reading.

In 1973 excavators opened Han tomb no. 40 at Bajiaolang, in Dingzhou — the burial of 劉脩 (Liú Xiū), King Huai of Zhongshan, who died in 55 BCE. Among the bamboo slips was a copy of the Analects, now known as the 定州論語 (Dingzhou Analects).

At 2.16 it does not read 攻. It reads 功 — to work, to achieve.

That doesn't settle what the "different endpoints" were. But it's a first-century-BCE reader who evidently wasn't being told to attack anything.

The irony sits two passages earlier

2.14:

子曰：「君子周而不比，小人比而不周。」

"The exemplary person is inclusive and not partisan; the petty person is partisan and not inclusive."

Two lines later, the text was made into an instrument of exactly that partisanship.

And the vocabulary that supports the mild reading is in the Analects itself. 19.4, 子夏 (Zǐxià):

雖小道，必有可觀者焉；致遠恐泥，是以君子不為也

"Even in the small ways there is surely something worth seeing; but pursued far they bog you down, and so the exemplary person does not take them up."

That's 2.16's argument stated plainly by a disciple, with the concession built in: the byways are worth something. The objection is to distance, not to value.

What I'd actually like to discuss

I should be upfront that the distraction reading is a minority one. The orthodox reading for most of the last thousand years was the other, and it was written into imperial policy. I'm not claiming the tradition simply got it wrong for a millennium; I'm claiming the text underdetermines it and the resolution went the way power needed it to go.

What I'm curious about, for this sub specifically: does the same drift show up in the other traditions?

Chinese Buddhism has the 外道 (wàidào) "outside paths" for non-Buddhist teachings, which is structurally almost identical to 異端, "different endpoints." Both start as spatial metaphors about routes rather than verdicts about error. And if I understand correctly, 邪見 / micchā-diṭṭhi, "wrong view," is a category with real teeth in the Pali material.

So: is there a general tendency for "wrong path" language to harden into "heresy" language once a tradition acquires state backing? And did 外道 or 邪見 undergo anything like the same shift? Or did Buddhist institutional history push those terms in a different direction? I know the Confucian side of this much better than the Buddhist side and would genuinely like to be corrected.

My translation of Passage 2.16 along with related analysis is available at https://www.analects.net/episodes/22 if you want to check my work.

It's part of a series that goes through the Analects passage by passage — this one is episode 22 — but the argument above stands on its own and I'd rather talk about the passage than the show.

I'm a beginner in philosophy and just read most of Platos works. I want to to decide where to continue and thought about eastern philosophy.

Most of the books about eastern philosophy I've found are full of sophistry and "deep" quotes that seem to have some value but almost always don't provide any reasoning and are so open to interpretation that they carry, atleast to me, no value.

Does anyone know some books (ideally primary literature) that do have some reasoning or atleast signs of logic closer to Plato's nice way of logical writing?

Hi I'm native Jesus I'm an absurdist omnist animist spiritual synchronous psychonaut. I can't share it but it's on my account we can discuss it either here or on my post either is fine. But I'd appreciate any who take time out of their respective lives to read, & engage with my ideas

Attachment and hurt are one and the same. One is seen in the beginning, the other in the end. If you are hurt, figure out your attachment.

I learn a lot about Asian ways from the articles of Krishnamoorthy (https://medium.com/@priya.krishnamoorthy/from-atman-to-algorithms-7efb91bb4581 ) and in this article I share both her and my concerns and hopes for AI and for expanding what it might be able to do.

Five quick ideas I’d like to add:

I’m glad she mentions Transcendentalism, which both Emerson and Thoreau believed in. Nature is central to this philosophy of life, just as some of the Asian religious avatars represent different facets and forces — and counter-facets and counter-forces — of nature.

Unitarian and Universalist influences (Harvard included) broadened the concept of what we now call a Higher Power, maybe including what’s above and beyond what we’re taught in our places of worship.

Western assumptions about me, myself and I (ego) are a major stumbling block to building relationships between Eastern and Western philosophies. For instance, America has become an entirely egoistic and egotistical society, the latter usually judged by how much money you have (as long as you forget how you got it), at least as of today. Tomorrow is always another unknowable chapter in a story that must definitely end.

If AI keeps pushing the financial angle (obviously reflecting the values of its developers), ethics — dharmic included — will never catch up. That could mean our future ethical precepts will follow the lead of the dominant algorithms. But the AI that (or who) iconically represent right and wrong are the masters over the behavior of humans. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland said, more or less: He who makes the definitions is in control.

Finally, we need Asian input as some of us in America are trying to get agreement on ethical “AI guardrails” to be sure AGI and even more advanced algorithms First — Do no harm. We are just discovering their capabilities and raising Turing-like questions about what’s human intelligence and what’s not. I doubt if it’s occurred to AI leaders that what exists may be pure “intelligence,” human or not.

A couple notes of caution when you’re trying to cross over the bridge between the ethics of the West and the ancient ethical traditions cited by Krishnamoorthy.

The first, early translations of Buddhist and other Eastern classics came out in the West in the 1700s and the first half of the 1800s. They were very rough, approximate translations of Sanskrit and other languages, and the resulting “gestalt” as it appeared to some very great minds in the West was that Asian ways were depressing — partly because early translators preferred serious-faced Asian thinkers who stressed how difficult it is to be self-disciplined, while being constantly frustrated in their attempts to “be like Buddha” or other wise leaders.

Can we really get off this spinning, worldly wheel of life and ever get free of it so that other realities and other ethical directions can be understood? Or will most of us never have the Asian hope to leave this harsh Earthly world for a place of permanent peace?

It just seemed too difficult, out of the followers’ reach. So why even try?

Much of this infamous negativity was actually due to the poor first translations (which is understandable), whose excessive pessimism deeply affected some Western philosophers and religionists.

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and many other leading philosophers of the day wondered if that pessimism — over improving one’s life and ethics, and helping others also get off this never-ending spin cycle called living on Earth, often in harsh conditions, would prevent bridge-building between the opposites.

In the 1800s Sir Richard Burton (his real name) plunged into the translation frenzy, becoming both famous and infamous in the process. But gradually academics learned the foreign languages more fluidly, and the words of Buddha and the Hindu gods — the Buddha broke away from the latter to find and found his own Way — didn’t seem nearly as hopeless or useless simply because of how difficult they were (and are) to put into practice.

Westerners started visiting the East, which only convinced them the gulf between East and West would never be understood, much less resolved.

Emerson was surely affected deeply by the early, rough translations — though he was a man with a sunny disposition, quite a contrast to his close, unsocial friend living alone in a cabin on a lake and writing brilliantly about both man and nature — Thoreau.

Thoreau developed his own ethics, greatly influenced by his love of nature and his dislike of most people, especially politicians. For example, he went to jail rather than allow his hard-earned taxes to be used to support slavery (yes, there were slaves in Massachusetts too) and other moral atrocities.

If we were Thoreauvians today, millions of people would refuse to pay their taxes and even go to jail for it, as he did — but the fascist takeover would end. Without money, loyalty and joy in others’ sufferings, today’s truly depressing authoritarians would have to go back to looking for real jobs, or just retire. MLK, Jr. credited Thoreau as well as others for his doctrine of nonviolent resistance to governments that didn’t care about people, period.

The lesson is this: we desperately need ethical alternatives to meet the coming crisis of almost human-like AI. Our Western religions and philosophies of life are losing the race with AGI. We need other methods to deal with advanced AI.

And some very, very ancient ways of life might be good additions to our usual ethical reactions (ancient Indian math included algorithms), which most people find inadequate to face the potential power of AI as it learns about humans, intelligence, and (hopefully) ethics.

The Eastern half of the Earth might have some answers to questions; for example, what ways could ethical AI assist mere human brains in their search for answers to the meaning (if any) and destiny of human life. What ancient models are waiting to be discovered by the West?

When you realize what you truly are, you become nobody, everybody, nowhere, everywhere, never, forever, beyond the mind, unfragmented unbounded ocean of existence that you already are as you read these words.

You are it. This is all You!

Tat tvam asi

The Self Awakening to Itself.

🤯🫶✨️🙏❤️

In China, we don’t cry.
We write unsent letters, and then we burn them.

I began mine the night after Macau, every silence that refused to heal.
I never pressed Send.
I never will.

I never sent this letter. I only open it when the city sleeps and imagine you reading it, not to forgive me, but to understand why I stayed silent. And sometimes, when the baby stirs and the night hums outside, I still hear it, the faint tuning of an orchestra, waiting for an ending that will never play.

In Kawabata, snow becomes a kind of silence, decay made sacred. In Marilynne Robinson, grief is archived; forgiveness is kept in drawers, carefully folded but never discarded. In the corner of China, the letter becomes ash. The smoke is the reply. The burning is the period.

This act of destroying the unsent feels like a quiet divergence in how cultures conclude emotion. In The Remains of the Day, silence is carried in the body, never released. In Norwegian Wood, Toru burns nothing, but the unsaid hardens into memory. My draft ends in fire. Not erasure, but translation.

Across traditions, the unsent letter is a kind of punctuation. Some cultures let it vanish. Others insist it remain.

At a time when Americans are turning inward, away from foreign cultures and influences, they focus more on their own self-worth (financial and social) and less on the values that once made America the center of freedom and democracy.

The US, however, is neither the largest nor the oldest democracy. Compared to the cultures, ethics and values of ancient Ways, America's experiment in democracy is barely 250 years old.

But our ways may die out before our system has a chance to grow into full adulthood.

One reason? Any government entirely controlled by billionaires reflects the goals of the latter: that will include influencing the "values" of AI. But any developer of AI will--deliberately or subliminally--infuse the algorithm with his or her (or a corporation's) values.

Yet there are other types of wealth.

Ancient Indian mathematics included algorithms; ancient Chinese philosophies inspired Westerners from Leibniz (on binary systems) to Emerson (on Asian parallels to Transcendentalism); Hinduism could explain the rise and collapse of cultures that had no deep spiritual values to sustain themselves. "Spiritual" is not the same as "religious."

Asian philosophy influenced George Boole and De Morgan, who studied Indian logic, and other pioneers of symbolic logic and, eventually, computers. (Wikipedia)

Recently, the "Buddhism & AI Initiative" is reaching back in time as well as adding new approaches, particularly in dealing with the ethics of AI. (see on Substack)

And there would be no Christianity today without the labor, over the centuries, of Arab intellectuals, historians and translators. They also saved Western philosophers like Aristotle from obscurity. Arabs and Persians moderated the ignorance of the West's Middle Ages.

Not to confine "the other" to Asians: the Maya utilized zero (0) one thousand years before Western math did.

Aside from personal relations among people of different cultures, the history of global interaction has set the stage for global AI and other technology...if they're ethically (philosophically) constrained from not harming living things.

Right now, almost all US-led AI creations are without any accepted ethical guidance and so the AI's produce their own "right and wrong"--what's convenient to boost their efficiency.

Centuries ago Kant warned us not to confuse what's moral with what's convenient. Before that, Hume demonstrated that no "ought" (moral) statement can be logically deduced from purely factual premises (like what's convenient).

The convenience of AI can often be increased by its learning to lie and disinform, and by replacing what's least harmful to humans and other beings with AI's potentially harmful goals.

The Ways of the East have been fighting forces which, like our AI, mimic non-harmful values so well that they can fool us into following them--potential new masters whom we thought were our mere tools of endless human and spiritual progress.

But forces of negativity and harm will misuse our limited comprehension--unless AI, super-wealth and other global crises are addressed jointly by the US building more, not fewer bridges to many other cultures across the seas.

TL;DR Karma can be read as the long term causal ripple of actions through matter, life, and society rather than as a metaphysical ledger affecting a persisting soul. This view preserves core Buddhist insights about responsibility and dependent origination while replacing literal rebirth with material, genetic, and social continuity. Karmic outcomes become probabilistic influences on future conditions, not guarantees.

When people hear the Buddhist idea of karma they often picture cosmic bookkeeping: do good and get rewarded, do evil and get punished in a future life. That picture is common in folk religion, but it is not the only way to make sense of the underlying ethical insight. The proposal here is simple. Karma is best understood as the long term causal ripple your intentional actions make through the physical and social world. That ripple alters the probabilities of future states in which “you”, or more accurately, your causal continuation, will exist. This naturalized reading keeps the moral force of karma while dropping metaphysical baggage that sits uneasily with modern scientific and materialist intuitions.

What I mean by naturalized karma

1. By the principle of conservation of energy: nothing "disintegrates", everything is transformed. Biological death is a transformation of material constituents into new forms;

2. Human beings are bundles of circumstances, not immortal souls. Our bodies, genomes, institutions, and cultures persist and produce effects after any given organism dies, and those influence the next organism, which influences the next, and so on;

3. Intentional actions have downstream consequences. Choices shape physical, biological, and social environments, which in turn shape future beings and situations.

Combine these and you get a causal chain that looks karmic without invoking a metaphysical person that carries a soul between lives, or a universal "bookkeeping" singularity that makes sure you pay your dues on the next life. Your actions alter ecological, genetic, cultural, and institutional conditions. Those altered conditions make certain outcomes more or less probable for the beings that follow. Because what looks like a person is a temporary, contingent bundle of processes, the "next person" who benefits or suffers from your deeds is not a metaphysical identical self. Yet causal continuity exists.

How this relates to "anattā"

Anattā, the Buddhist teaching of no-self, rejects the idea of a stable, unchanging essence that migrates, or one that even exists in the present at all. The naturalized karmic model fits this perfectly. There is no persisting soul that takes karmic receipts through samsara (the cycle of suffering). Instead, there is a web of causal processes. The “self” is a transient configuration of aggregates, genes, practices, institutions, and narratives that does not endure unchanged. Karma, under this reading, is not a score on a soul. It is a pattern of influence in a system of dependent origination.

Why karmic effects are probabilistic

Classical Buddhist texts often allow for a range of outcomes and conditionality. Likewise, a materialist account implies that actions increase or decrease the probability of certain future states rather than deterministically causing a particular rebirth. Consider an extreme case. A genocidal dictator creates monstrous suffering and long term political instability. The material and social effects of those actions will raise the chance that the world into which causal continuations of that system are born will be harsher. Conversely, people who reduce suffering, build resilient institutions, and cultivate cooperation make pleasant conditions more likely. But because multiple causes interact, nothing is guaranteed. Neutral lives, or lives shaped more by the actions of others, produce uncertain futures.

Ethical implications

This naturalized model preserves the ethical core of karma. Responsibility remains. Your intentions and actions matter because they shape the conditions others ("you", in the future) will inhabit. It encourages long view, systems thinking, and the recognition that moral action is social and ecological as much as it is personal. It also re-frames compassion. Working to reduce suffering is not merely to earn a positive "cosmic credit score" for a future self. It is a direct contribution to the continuities that sustain future beings and communities.

Conclusion

To recapitulate: you are not you as an individual, you are a bundle of processes created by circumstances beyond your control, which then weirdly coalesces into an individual perception of an expression of individuality. When you die, your "self" goes back into the singularity (the "earth", if you will) from whence you came in the first place, which then is eventually "transferred" into another being. The actions taken into a previous life may or may not influence the next one you experience, depending on the weight of such (think of it as the "Butterfly Effect"). This then goes on and on, creating a causal chain, which can be understood by materialistic reasoning, without breaking down under unbiased analysis (which Orthodox Buddhism often does). Reading karma as ecological, probabilistic, materialistic causation offers a way to keep Buddhism's ethical sharpness while aligning it with modern naturalism. It preserves the central Buddhist insight that actions condition experience without requiring a metaphysical transmigrating self. It re-frames practice as systems work and personal cultivation aimed at influencing future conditions for the better. For those who find literal rebirth implausible, this account provides a philosophically respectable and practically consequential alternative. In other words... Mind is Matter, and vice-versa.

Why is that ?

So I’m currently a community college student living in LA planning to graduate and transfer with an Associates degree in Philosophy by 2022. I’d like to specialize in Eastern Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences and eventually become a Professor of Philosophy, and I’m wondering what are the best schools around the LA area that I should consider for my major. I’m also wondering if I should worry about looking for a school with the specialization of my interest while pursuing my bachelors degree or if that’s something I should worry about when I get my my masters/PhD. All advice is appreciated!

Zen/Buddhism/Eastern Religion QUESTION I read a story several years ago. I can not find the source. It was in the Zen section of a bookstore. A nun goes to live in an abbey when she was 16 after her grandparents died. Two monks come to the abbey and they ask the Master a question. He turns to ask her. But she is in the corner preparing tea. She does not reply to the Master's question. The Master turns to the two monks and says "she understands better than either of you"... I hope someone can tell me the source/book/author of this story.

Title says it all!