I posted this as a reply to Tucker's post:

Tucker —
I’m glad to finally find a writer who calls out the uselessness of ideas and the importance of problems. Everything in this world operates by one fundamental principle plus the problems, just like in math. Answers are made by the problems/questions, and that means it’s actually impossible to get an answer without having the problem. That makes answers without problems not only useless but harmful. They make society become darker over time in that it’s harder or impossible for people to judge right and wrong, and everything becomes ambiguous when the problems are not visible. But this essential information is totally missing from modern education.

If you don’t mind two pieces of minor feedback I would like to see if I can contribute to you and your audience somehow.

Re: start with good people. We can judge whether a thing is good or bad based on whether it has a good or bad result. But what are the concrete criteria of good and bad? How can we distinguish the good people from the bad? I have learned the answer, but I’m afraid to say it here as it’s hard for the majority to understand and to accept due to its nature. The criteria of good and bad is how true it is. If a person is more truthful, let’s say 51% truthful, then they are able to recognize 51% of cases they encounter correctly, and will be able to act knowing things correctly rather than through ignorance. I have heard the percentage of the results they come to get in life is directly and exactly proportional to and a function of the percentage of truth in their consciousness versus falsehood, i.e. their degree of truthfulness. One big problem nowadays is how we can distinguish truth from falsehood. We not only do not know our own degrees of truthfulness but humans can’t really distinguish good, true teachings from bad teachings. It requires a truly Enlightened Being (i.e. a Buddha) or an individual with an extremely high level of truthfulness to be able to tell true from false when they see the matter. That brings me to my second point.

You quoted D.T. Suzuki about Buddha’s teaching. The problem is that it has been thousands of years since Gautama Buddha came to this world. Have you heard of the game of telephone? Or seen what happens when a photocopy is taken of a photocopy? When Buddha appeared he told people the truth that he could see with his own eyes at the time. However, those who heard what he said had a huge gap in level of consciousness between them and him. So they couldn’t see and understand the truth precisely and couldn’t transmit it precisely. As a consequence they changed the meaning slightly and lost or deteriorated some of the truth. Over thousands of years, the Truth Buddha taught has been changed or deteriorated significantly. But one big problem is that before we learn what Buddha’s teaching actually is we don’t realize why the existing Buddhism is quite different than his real teaching. A second big problem is that it’s really quite impossible for people who believe in a lie (who have falsehood in their consciousness) to be able to understand Buddha’s teaching correctly. So this is a barrier and it is why I was initially anxious about posting this. I want to tell you that meditation, the five precepts, the eightfold path, and the four noble truths are not Buddha’s actual teaching. His teaching can be summarized in only two parts — very simple things actually–but throughout all of the thousands of meetings I’ve had with Buddhist monks they have never been able to answer what Buddha’s real teaching is. Firstly, Buddha never claimed he was enlightened through meditation, which makes sense because it’s not possible to produce enlightenment through meditation, itself. It would be like saying a tree could produce seeds by making leaves but no fruit. Meditation throughout all of history has never produced an enlightened being. Real enlightened beings can see and say the truth or answer any kinds of questions on the spot with totally concrete answers that can be verified. However people who rely on meditation alone can only give answers without problems. Secondly, the precepts. Buddhist monks can’t keep the precepts even from the moment they wake up in the morning. The precepts all generally have in common the theme “don’t lie”. Yet, they claim they know Buddha’s teaching and/or they claim they are doing their diligence to find it out and to inform it correctly to society. The reality is different. They not only don’t know Buddha’s teaching but they really don’t want to know either. What is the difference between their teachings and Buddha’s real teaching? Look at the four noble truths and the eightfold “path”. The Noble Truths don’t actually have the truth in them. For example, life is not suffering, itself. Life has every way in it. If you live knowing life, life can cause itself to be pleasurable. If you live without knowing life, life exhausts itself. The noble truths also talk about the “end” of suffering. They say that’s Nirvana. However every living creature receives influence from its environment and every living creature suffers — even those who have experience Nirvana many times. Nirvana means that the individual finishes/ends all of the agony and illusions. But when the Buddha went to a cold environment he still felt cold. When he didn’t eat, he felt hungry. When he went to a hot environment he still sweat. These things feel a certain way and constitute what he called suffering. How about the Noble Truths’ “way” to end suffering, the Eightfold Path? This one is funny. There’s literally no way in the eightfold path because they are all answers without problems. The way starts from the causes that exist in the problems and goes to the answers. But without teaching being based in problems/questions there is literally no way of life to follow in those teachings and they can no longer be used for the purpose of a living being. They are only useful for the dead.

I have too much to say about the above. But I wanted to tell you the fact that Modern Buddhism is very, very different from what Buddha actually taught. Monks just put what they wanted into the scriptures. These days how can we verify the difference between monks’ words and the words of the Enlightened Being? We can’t, really, and Buddhism these days has devolved into nothing more than a religion. As a result they’re involved in causing society to deteriorate. Seeing this reality, who could possibly agree with me? And which monks would want this truth to come out? They rely on people for donations to survive. That’s one reason they recommend meditation. If someone sponsors them to meditate enough maybe they will be Enlightened? But it’s nothing more than deception.

If not meditation, how can people experience Nirvana and how can they attain Enlightenment? Gautama Buddha didn’t explain much about this. However he kept pointing out “what exists” (facts) and how the world operates and told people to learn it. That’s because he knew that “what is” is the way to make people be Enlightened. The problem is that people can’t recognize “what is” before they’re Enlightened. And without an Enlightened Being to reveal facts as they are, who or what can we learn from without pure trial and error, much like Gautama did?

Your article, having been able to distill success into three steps/aspects, reminded me very strongly of the answer to that question which I got from a man who claims that he attained a Perfect, supreme Enlightenment some 30–40 years ago in 1984. He has since passed away but he left his teachings for free. I wanted to share his short explanation of the four steps by which Enlightenment can be achieved, here. I hope you can read and enjoy it and that you can get something great out of it.
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First, ”To achieve Enlightenment you must first be free from lies.” That is, truth must appear. Having to get rid of lies to achieve Enlightenment means having to open your eyes to truth.

Second, ”You have to see ‘what is’ ” Where is right and wrong?

Right and wrong don’t exist in words, they are appearing through ‘what is’. When a good thing occurs its a good thing and when a bad thing occurs it’s a bad thing.
No matter how good we say something is, if we don’t know ‘what is’ it’s difficult to make something good happen. So you have to see what is. You have to know how ‘what is’ comes to be. You have to know how the law of cause and effect is making ‘what is’ better or worse. You have to know the meaning inside it.
Third, ”There must be conscience and courage.”

I constantly emphasize that there is nothing as difficult or as lonely as revealing ‘what is’ in the world. The lives of the saints in the past was like that and we can also see that in our society there were many people with the correct way of thinking who tried to make the world better who were like that.
If you want to make the world better you have to teach ‘what is’ but those who tried to teach ‘what is’ properly were all abandoned in the world. So it means that if there is no conscience and courage, no matter how much they have opened their eyes to ‘what is’, they can’t do anything about it.

Fourthly, ”There has to be endless love inside oneself”

There has to be endless love to go to others and teach them. There has to be conscience and courage to endlessly want to go to others and teach them. It won’t happen if either one of these two are absent.

https://tathagatablog.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/the-way-of-en...