The next Buddha will be a sangha

“Contemplating the More-than-Human Commons”—Walsh:

“As the grand, centralized market/
state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own
dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach
by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”3
Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading
rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and
the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state
and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South
America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It
seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its
survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet."

Here in Cambodia any area of rural land which is not private or inside a national park seems traditionally free and available for seasonal rice farming by anyone who is prepared to do the work. The global market system has only penetrated the capital city, and everything else including the traffic, is a kind of free-for-all mostly regulated by the community and the influence of the monasteries.

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The next Buddha Maitreya is already here. Just throwing this out there as kind of a cool idea. No need to point out how this idea is impossible. This isn’t a Christian Phrophetic forum. The internet is Maitreya Buddha. Just think how unknown the Buddhas real teaching was among the every day Joe Smoe before the internet. If you lived in 1980 and weren’t a SERIOUS scholar or regionally in a Buddhist area although it was possible you would have to put a lot of work and travel into studying the dharma. Today it’s in everyone’s pocket. Just a cool thought.

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Agree …the internet (for one thing) is Maitreya Buddha, anything to do with mind and communication, remembering the age is 2000 years long.

The internet is also a double edged sword there’s a lot more other-Buddhisms too, so EBT is just a needle in a haystack once again. How many Buddhists actually follow EBT? When I google Buddhist monestaries in my area all I get is Mahayana Diamond center.

How many people in the west think that body scanning for tension points until they’re all gone that they learned on a goenka retreat is the dhamma?

If you go on the reddit buddhist subreddit, it’s either mahayana or traditional vipassana based views.

If you ask an average Westerner what they know about Buddhism, they’ll bring up the Buddhist statues, or Compassion or Diamond sutra.

Most internet Buddhists I see are more worried about where they’ll be reborn than understanding the dhamma.

So while the internet has made Buddhism more accessible, you still have to dig deep, very very deep, at a shot at understanding what the suttas could be getting at. You have to cut through Mahayana, Western commercialized Buddhism, Traditional Theravada Buddhism and the Vipassana movement, then you have Thai Forest which also has a variety of interpretations, and then you have to actually read the suttas, sort through a variety of sutta interpretations, since you can easily misunderstand dependent origination, and then hopefully you have a workable practical interpretation you’ll be able to apply.

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I don’t think anything you said is wrong, but I do believe even people with incomplete or inaccurate “understandings” of Buddhism (not to dismiss other systems as such) still have better Kammic results with that exposure than without. Of course I’d prefer everybody have access to the perfectly accurate Dhamma but it seems like even we people who value the EBTs don’t have that, at least from my understanding.

Having the true Dhamma be a needle in a haystack is better than it not being in the haystack at all, which was the situation that existed for most Buddhists throughout history, let alone for the billions born outside of those times and regions where Buddhism was/is popular. The internet is without a doubt the best thing to happen to the Dhamma since the Buddha Gotama himself. At least nowadays the committed truth-seeker has a reasonable chance of finding what they’re looking for with enough applied effort and discernment.

The unfortunate reality is that the true Dhamma will never be popular. It cannot ever be popular by its very nature; any popular Dhamma will necessarily be a diluted, domesticated Dhamma and will thus cease to be the true Dhamma. Most people aren’t even looking for the true Dhamma, which is precisely why they will not find it. Having arrived at the haystack of Buddhism, finding the needle in that haystack is a relatively trivial obstacle to overcome compared with all the myriad emotional, spiritual, philosophical, and cultural barriers that commonly prevent people from being interested in and seeking out the Dhamma in the first place. Upon becoming so interested, whether or not someone actually finds the true Dhamma will, in a certain sense, always serve as the ultimate litmus test of whether or not she was truly interested in the Dhamma or if she was just looking for a new religion to better suite her preferences and sensibilities.

One of the things I’m most grateful for in this life is being able to even appreciate and value the Dhamma… If you believe in rebirth you have to believe that a life that allows you the compassion and open-mindedness required to appreciate Buddhism AND also have exposure to it, is extremely rare. Compared to the unimaginable time spent in non-comprehending suffering these few decades are a short window of incredible opportunity.