Sucking sickness from Phurba

humble.student
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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PadmaVonSamba wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 1:04 pm At the risk of being accused of making a sweeping generalization, I will suggest that much of the propagation of Buddhism in Culturally Chinese countries relies on belief in miracles and magic. I personally would attribute this to the influence of esoteric Taoism, which sets the bar for “legitimacy”, I.e., if Taoism can perform miracles then Buddhism has to perform even better miracles in order to compete.
There is a revisionist current of Buddhist/religious history now that demonstrates that the opposite occurred: namely, that practices involving magic and mediumship filtered from tantric Buddhism into Taoism. Lower tantras contain all sorts of curious things that are not necessarily commonly practised nowadays. Refer specifically to the works of Hsieh Shu-Wei 謝世維.

Just putting it out there...
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PadmaVonSamba
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

humble.student wrote: Tue Mar 28, 2023 10:46 am
PadmaVonSamba wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 1:04 pm At the risk of being accused of making a sweeping generalization, I will suggest that much of the propagation of Buddhism in Culturally Chinese countries relies on belief in miracles and magic. I personally would attribute this to the influence of esoteric Taoism, which sets the bar for “legitimacy”, I.e., if Taoism can perform miracles then Buddhism has to perform even better miracles in order to compete.
There is a revisionist current of Buddhist/religious history now that demonstrates that the opposite occurred: namely, that practices involving magic and mediumship filtered from tantric Buddhism into Taoism. Lower tantras contain all sorts of curious things that are not necessarily commonly practised nowadays. Refer specifically to the works of Hsieh Shu-Wei 謝世維.

Just putting it out there...
I don’t see any reason to suspect that’s not the case, historically. The emphasis on magic in Taoism may indeed have developed from beliefs in Vajrayana Buddhism. Today, I think things have come full circle. Taoist temples are to be found everywhere in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, & Macau. That’s what people grow up surrounded by.

My suggestion, and again, this is a broad generality, is that in East Asian countries today where a sort of ‘miraculous Taoism’ is especially prevalent, the focus on miracles creates a criteria that says supernatural elements are what actually validate religions and spiritual paths. This view opens the door for con men.

The same thing happens in America with faith healers, Pentecostalists, tv evangelists peddling holy water in exchange for money. The difference is that their scam involves using Christianity rather than Buddhism. But we don’t have a tradition, regardless of how it evolved, that suggests there are those who have mastered the secrets of Christianity and develop supernatural powers.

And most of the time, these ‘miracle workers’ Christian or Buddhist (in appearance) , will simply claim that a greater power is simply working through them anyway.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

Post by mahabuddha »

Two words: Pla Cebo
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

Post by Tata1 »

mahabuddha wrote: Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:45 pm Two words: Pla Cebo
Placebo is a really stupid term. It sort of attributes the cause of healing to the only thing we are sure its not doing the healing. The placebo.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 3:05 pm
yagmort wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 2:03 pm
PadmaVonSamba wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 1:04 pm That’s actually not a logical question.
that's actually perfectly logical question.

the entire terma tradition is based on the belief that someone named Guru Padmasanbhava, who could leave imprints on the rock and do other miracles, hid many practice texts which other people are able to uncover later, sometimes those practice texts pop up in the mind of certain individuals and other people put their life to practice those teachings, like Düdjom Tersar. tell that to anyone and then say "but i don't believe Philippino on Indonesian healers can actually help people, those are scams" and see the response. don't be surprised if you'll hear the word "inconsistent"
Nobody said anything about miraculous happenings, terma etc. and it’s really not our obligation to even explain ourselves on that count.

We said don’t be so credulous, have some discrimination.

Believing the possibility or even reality of miraculous, unexplainable things does not mean we should uncritically accept any such claims. That’s all people are really saying, and you guys are trying to make it some referendum on people’s faith in Dharma more generally, that’s silly.

Thats not what people are saying here. The dude literally said that all "psychic" healing is fraudulent.

Personally i think that having such broad claims and strong opinions, particularly on someone ive never met or know nothing about is stupid. One way or the other. In favour or against.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

Tata1 wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 1:31 am
mahabuddha wrote: Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:45 pm Two words: Pla Cebo
Placebo is a really stupid term. It sort of attributes the cause of healing to the only thing we are sure its not doing the healing. The placebo.
What he’s referring to is the placebo effect.
A placebo, used in a blind study, is something which has no effect.

For instance, suppose there is a new medicine being tested that would help to relieve muscle tension. To test whether this medicine is effective or not, you use a test group. Let’s say, 100 people who have the same medical problem. You give 50 of them the potential new medicine and you give the other 50 a’sugar pill’ or placebo. It has no medicine in it. It’s called a blind test because no patient knows which type of pill he’s getting.

They used to tell every test patient that it was the actual medicine they were testing. But now, for ethical and legal reasons, the test patient must be informed that they may or may not be getting the real deal. 50-50 chance.

The doctor knows which patients got which pills. If the results are that the 50 who took the pill show measurable improvement, and the other 50, who got the placebo, didn’t improve, then you can determine that the results are from the new medicine.

But if 25 people from each group show improvement and 25 from each group don’t, you can’t say that the improvement is the result of the medicine, because just as many people got better without the medicine as those who did.

The reason the 25 who got placebos show improvement is the “placebo effect”. This means that, in this example, the 25 who didn’t get the medicine felt their muscle tension relax and improve simply because they thought they had taken the real medicine.

What this means in the context of this discussion. Is that the patient experiences the intended and hoped for results from this phurba thing, because he thinks it works. He is already convinced that the lama has social healing powers. Spitting out a mouthful of red juice only helps convince the patient that it’s real.

The placebo effect doesn’t work where an actual imposed source of the illness, such as a parasite or virus or fracture is the cause. But there are many documented examples of a sort of “mind over matter” scenario, where the patient really does almost think themselves back to health. It will piss off a lot of people when I say that this is all Reiki healing is.

But every doctor will tell you that a positive attitude helps speed up recovery time after an operation. That’s why, statistically, people tend to do better after an operation when they think others are praying for them, or hod us watching out for them or whatever.

The biggest problem with faith healing is when people avoid or postpone seeking proven methods of treatment for themselves or their children until irreversible damage is done. So, even if a spiritual healer isn’t doing it for money, it can still have very negative consequences.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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Tata1 wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 1:34 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 3:05 pm
yagmort wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2023 2:03 pm
that's actually perfectly logical question.

the entire terma tradition is based on the belief that someone named Guru Padmasanbhava, who could leave imprints on the rock and do other miracles, hid many practice texts which other people are able to uncover later, sometimes those practice texts pop up in the mind of certain individuals and other people put their life to practice those teachings, like Düdjom Tersar. tell that to anyone and then say "but i don't believe Philippino on Indonesian healers can actually help people, those are scams" and see the response. don't be surprised if you'll hear the word "inconsistent"
Nobody said anything about miraculous happenings, terma etc. and it’s really not our obligation to even explain ourselves on that count.

We said don’t be so credulous, have some discrimination.

Believing the possibility or even reality of miraculous, unexplainable things does not mean we should uncritically accept any such claims. That’s all people are really saying, and you guys are trying to make it some referendum on people’s faith in Dharma more generally, that’s silly.

Thats not what people are saying here. The dude literally said that all "psychic" healing is fraudulent.

Personally i think that having such broad claims and strong opinions, particularly on someone ive never met or know nothing about is stupid. One way or the other. In favour or against.


First, -one person- made the statement that psychic surgery is categorically a scam. While I wouldn't go that far, certainly anyone with a bit of critical thinking skills can figure out (hell, read traditional texts if you want warnings about fakes, for that matter) that most people who claim to perform miracles probably can't. Whatever the other parts of someone's worldview, if they haven't figured that out they are missing a basic understanding of how people are generally.

Interesting concept though, not assuming you know someone's level of knowledge, opinion etc., perhaps we can try applying it by leaving assumptions about other people's knowledge and sticking to what they say, or at least what we perceive them to say.

PVS and Climb Up have taken the time to actually expound on some stuff, maybe it's worth taking the time to respond to that instead of going back to very beginning of the conversation and dwelling on one person making a (frankly not entirely unreasonable) categorical statement.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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I looked this guys fb up. Seems completley fake and cringe to me. He also seems to be connected to the made up aro gter lineage.
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PadmaVonSamba
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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Tata1 wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 1:34 am Personally i think that having such broad claims and strong opinions, particularly on someone ive never met or know nothing about is stupid.
Knowing or not knowing the person shouldn’t make any difference.

Anecdotal evidence is not the same thing as empirical data. It’s easy to assume that one thing is the cause of another thing simply by appearances, maybe they happen at the same time, when in fact they may not be connected at all.

A recent example is the belief that autism is connected to vaccines. It was a reasonable assumption simply because signs of autism begin to occur during the same age as when children start getting vaccines. But the actual data didn’t support this assumption. Still, many people who only rely on anecdotal evidence believe there is a connection.

The Buddha taught a lot about not clinging merely to appearances. It’s the whole basis for understanding sunyata or emptiness of phenomena.

Historically, probably every culture relied at one time or another on a kind of logic that assumes that if the cause of something can’t be determined, then any convincing explanation must be true. For example, if I have headaches, it must be because I am possessed by demons, or caused by the will of God. But this explanation is only convincing if I already believe in Gods and demons, for which there isn’t any proof of either to begin with. It’s just one assumption built upon another. In other words, it’s a system of analysis that says whatever one believes is true must be true simply because one believes it. And that’s completely faulty.

Claims of spiritual healing have never been verified using empirical data. Sure, there are loads of books full of very convincing anecdotal accounts. But it’s not the same thing. Unless you have all the information, false conclusions are more likely to occur than not.

A year and a half ago a gang of people in masks knocked me unconscious, stabbed me with a knife, and took something that belonged to me. That’s anecdotal evidence. It all really happened. And to hear about it, 99 out of 100 people would assumed I was robbed. But if one examines all of the data concerning the event, one would discover that it was actually a surgical operation that saved my life. And there is actual verifiable evidence that it occurred, whether someone hearing about it knows me or not.
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Re: Sucking sickness from Phurba

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Toenail wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:40 am I looked this guys fb up. Seems completley fake and cringe to me. He also seems to be connected to the made up aro gter lineage.
It seems to me, this is a good point to get this topic locked.

I hope, this topic has been discussed sufficiently now. Topic locked
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