紅蓮的個人網站
this site sums and documents approaches to problems and topics which
i have found effective—topical reading lists, software instructions,
&c.disgust pheromones👍🏽 eye contact💖
i feel disgust for you irl💖
i feel disgust pheromone for you irl
it also collects a variety of junk opinion writing, some
old translations, reading notes, and contact information.
- contact: wildthyme at protonmail dot com
- bluesky: @pad.bsky.social
- letterboxd (run by my manager): laevigata
- anki leaderboard: Dark\Warrior
literate dotfiles
a tour of my arcane system configuration and the code that generates this site.
writing
雷帝招來books
translations (~2020)
- Mickaël Tempête, “Reading
Hocquenghem”
yayy
- Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer, Coming and Going Together: A Systematic Childhood Album
- Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer, L'Âme Atomique: Toward an Aesthetic for the Nuclear Era: Notice and Prelude
my opinions on buddhism
i'm writing this here in the hope that when my ideas inevitably change drastically, i'll be embarrassed enough to remember to update it. disclaimer: i'm not any kind of licensed expert, religiously or academically. in terms of sociology and habitus, my engagement should be understood as an extension of western fan theory culture. there's a language-game i like to play, one of locating tensions, trying to come up with elegant hypotheses to reconcile contradictions in material that will never not be somewhat contradictory. if i get something wrong and slander the dharma, i contritely beg the buddhas of the ten directions to look on me with mercy and apprise me of my error.
there are three things i see as afflictions on the history of sinitic buddhism:
- the shrinking of horizons of practice towards a nianfo/nenbutsu understood only as chanting, reaching an extreme in the school of shinran
- the converse dumbing down of meditative practice which is the trademark of the chan school
- the "pure mind" thought initiated by the awakening of faith 大乘起信論, which effectively dooms chan and huayan philosophy
instead, i most admire the founder of the tiantai school, zhiyi, and those who upheld orthodoxy in later ages. zhiyi's work acts as a reservoir of early medieval notions and practices, brought together by a holistic vision that militates against the narrowing reductions i take issue with. moreover, the perfect/sudden teaching of tiantai represents to me the capstone of buddhist thought. it pushes madhyamaka logic beyond itself, and in fact to its ultimate point, its dialectical summit. it grasps the profound intent of all the buddhas, the source of all provisional teachings. every other school fails at nonduality by sneaking in an ontological ground by the back door, something i would hazard they do always for ideological reasons and often because they wouldn't know how to think better if they tried (never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by malice). more and more, i'm convinced that buddhahood, as formulated in the tiantai scheme of "six identities," is a real thing that one could achieve a measurable degree of in this very body through dedicated and circumspect practice, but i'm not sure where you could find anyone who understands this the same way i do or an avenue for following up on it.
further, i am
- interested in the repentance-heavy early medieval paradigm of meditation and soteriology
- turned off by chan/shingon style esoteric patriarchal oral transmission lineages, and instead favor the confucian/tiantai position that you can grasp the sage's mind and receive transmission of the way through immersing yourself in texts
- able to assent to some of kūkai's notions, attracted to certain taimitsu rituals, but overall find the esoteric tricks for embodying enlightenment to be goofy hacks that won't make you a buddha
- willing to get on board with modern "human realm pure land"/"humanistic buddhism" only when somebody makes it a communism and not another yawnworthy liberal humanism