Anthrocentrism

hello jason!!!!
The Six Realms are an allegorical description of conditioned existence, or samsara, into which beings are reborn. The nature of one’s existence is determined by karma. Some realms seem more pleasant than others — heaven sounds preferable to hell — but all are dukkha, meaning they are temporary and imperfect.
but
according to the traditional teachings the only way to liberate from the conditioned existence is through a birth in the human realm.
can it get anymore anthropocentric?

Things are a bit more complex than the 6 realms of Buddhism 101. There are more heavens, hells, and possible types of rebirth to be liberated from than you would imagine. There are Nagas that have become liberated as well as beings from other classes. This does not touch on the other planets etc.

you are both right but my point was that being a human in the human buddhist teaching is a very good thing…..

Thank you, Jason! In conversations with comrade sorcerers their anthropocentrism and
Earth-centrism maddens me. The physical Mundum AKA Kosmos ends neither 60 miles “up” where space begins nor 890 million miles “up” where Saturn orbits. My gut feeling is it’s infinite in fact, both in space and time, making humanity as small as possible: i.e., in comparison, of zero size and duration. But I’ll let the cosmologists and physicists puzzle out the truth of such things.

Fascinating subject. I can see both sides, but since Jason has already presented the non-anthropocentric case – which I also think tends to dominate in our modern understanding of the world – let me present the other side. I tend to think of this in terms of Daoist idea of Man as the being which stands between Heaven and Earth. If you look around this world, humans are in fact uniquely unique: with our faces, throats, and hands adapted for symbolic manipulation, our lack of adaption to any specific ecological task, and our grasp of abstraction, we are beings which can recognize our transcendence and universality even while being fully physical beings. There may be other planets or realms where other beings have these properties – I dont know and it doesnt really matter, because for us “Human” is the great symbol of this synthesis.

For me, the great value of reflecting on the cacophany of worlds and realms is not so much that it decenters Humanity, but that it decenters our personal and specific experiences. It encourages me to let my humanity expand so that it can accept and include any of the vast possibilities of experience that reality offers. Indeed, true humanity calls for such a universality.

Some great comments and a good musing. I was thinking exactly the same thing about what you appreciated in Tibetan Buddhism (ie Lamaism or Tantric Buddhism, I am guessing). I love and relish the idea that we are not special – each creature has its own experience and while it is distinct – and certainly we react differently, it is nice to be reminded of our place. As human it is too easy to let your worldview come back to the tight orbit of your own being and experience. I like something that continually reminds me of the vastness of existence. Similar to what solxyz said, I think.

This is exactly why Hermeticism feels uncomfortable to me. It reflects a religio/political hierarchy that I have never accepted.

This is funny because I always considered Buddhism the most anthropocentric and human-oriented of the various world religions. (Which I don’t consider a bad thing.). Apart from the emphasis on the preciousness of human birth, it also more or less uniquely denies the reality of an absolute God, teaches that human teachers are more important than the gods, and traces its lineage to a fully human founder – admittedly, this gets blurred a bit – whose attainment can theoretically be equalled by any ordinary human. There are also the various stories of realized humans teaching, or sometimes smiting, the gods.

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