Buddha 2001

The Buddha runs a self-help hotline during COVID. 2021; breaks off mid-draft. The author has since lost the plaintexts of the two hashes below — the promised revelations are permanently sealed.

Buddha Hotline

Buddha 2001

With apologies to the Lotus Sutra.

Hello, I’m the Buddha, and relax! I’m here to lend a little help to someone. The rest of you can just follow along.

When I was here earlier, I taught the Dharma that is perfect in the beginning, perfect in the middle, and perfect in the end. You understand that’s not marketing right? I know these days a lot of people call things perfect, but the Dharma I taught is literally perfect. And I’m not using literally the wrong way, I mean it. Literally perfect. Literally. Perfect. If you took the time to think about it, you could see its perfection for your very self. It wouldn’t even take very long at this point. It’s literally just sitting there, begging you to look at it, and I’m starting to think you are just being stubborn.

Ok. You are where you are. We can work with it. The only thing you can do when you are where you are is to keep moving forward. At this point all you even have to do is keep trying, and keep believing that this doesn’t last forever.

Now for the rest of you that are just reading along, stick around. Maybe you’ll learn something.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start at the beginning.

PS: I’m going to leave you two special presents. Each of them are md5 hashes. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. Ask your waitress. Each of the hashes represents a deep truth about reality. When I speak to you again in the future, I will reveal the deep truths of one of the messages, and you can verify it by comparing the md5sum.

The first will be this message: dd2059465ca4cb198a62bea70cbad649

The second will be this message: fa066b1232a091a7e91b9b140ba830a1

The first message is important. It was one of the most valuable messages you will ever see in your life. But when you see the second message, the truth will finally be right there floating before your eyes, 5 yojimbas high and 23 yojimbas long, just begging you to stop and take it seriously for just one god damn second. I got carried away again. Sorry.

Oh, man. I feel like Satoshi Nakamoto.

–

Most people who read this will decide it’s nothing but some bizarre Buddha-verse fan fiction, written by some weirdo with a little too much time during COVID. I’ll get to that, but I want to talk about COVID first.

Can we at least just start by agreeing that 2020 can bite our fundamentally empty asses? I would have given a mountain of each of the seven precious treasures piled as high as Mount Sumaru to skip this year, but unfortunately nobody asked me. 2020 has sucked in each of the ten directions, and in at least as many different ways as there grains of sand in the river Ganges. Ugh.

Now the good news. You’re doing it! Great job. I’d buy you a beer if alcohol didn’t just make everything worse.

Yes, Yes, I’m going to address the Buddha-verse fan fiction question now. Thank you for your patience. Is this Buddha-verse fan fiction, right? That’s what you asked?

Look… that’s just not the kind of question I can answer. It’s not like it’s a rule or something, it’s that there are no words that can answer that question. However, you may find that meditating on the following koan can provide you some insight:

Even the Buddha must wait several weeks before his profile is deleted when disabling his LinkedIn account.

I truly hope that helps. Please remember, tip your waitress, and your skandas can be used as a flotation device. Thank you!

Ch1. Remedial Reality

Okay, let’s not kid ourselves. Talking about existence is pretentious and not very fun. It’s actually the most boring thing in the world to talk about. By design.

I’m going to do my best to present the basic ideas in Buddhism without getting lost in a bunch of useless context about the historical Buddha. You don’t actually need all of that.

The fundamental

I’m going to do my best to strip out all the obnoxious sanskrit nonsense you hear about Buddhism and present it in a way that just makes sense. Let’s start here. How far can you go with me here?

  1. Shit is pretty fucked up.

  2. It doesn’t have to be this way. The feeling that it doesn’t have to be this bad has a name: Bullshit (sk: dukkha)

  3. If you knew the right things to do you could get rid of all the Bullshit.

  4. If you wish to get rid of all the Bullshit, there are 8 weird tricks they don’t want you to know!

I’m guessing it’s #4 that you’re struggling with, but let’s take them each in turn.