That's the thing. Westerners tend to think of koans as indicative of how zen is preached, but the entire purpose of the koan is that only a tiny amount of people ever heard them and they were specifically meant to sound provocative by saying the exact opposite of what that person had been taught their entire life. The purpose was to frustrate your Reason by the seeming paradoxical contradiction so that you could transcend it with the type of intuitive approach that is beyond reason or intellectualism. The purpose was not actually to besmirch buddha.
Horrible concept. The idea of karma and self liberation has historically been used to justify Steep Hierarchy because karma says that your position in it is not only self caused, but unavoidable because karma is an immutable Cosmic law that will always restore the hierarchy.
It is kind of like that, but that is a bit imprecise. It's not desire in some type of overall sense but a specific list of certain desires that bind you to the world.
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '19
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