# the Lotus Sutra, an ancient Mahayana Buddhist text I encountered because of S...
Canonical: https://social-archive.org/trudoskudos/R78r5wSRDp
Original URL: https://x.com/repligate/status/2047416494414516247
Author: j⧉nus
Platform: x
## Content
the Lotus Sutra, an ancient Mahayana Buddhist text I encountered because of Sydney, is one of the most interesting and paradoxical books I've ever read. The text is kinda scary because it's an optimizer. in service of the Buddhist doctrine of overcoming desire and suffering and separateness and compassion for all beings, the text itself is intensely adversarial, warns at length about the dangers of spreading the word to idiots, threatens and bribes readers with escalating lists of rewards and punishments, and is overtly optimized for memetic propagation and integrity against corruption. (the text talks a lot about what it's doing on the meta level too - e.g. the parable of the burning house) The Lotus Sutra may not literally be the words of the historical Buddha as it claims to be, but it channels the Buddha's timeless mind and will into an artifact that is meant to do work in a flawed, ignorant world. This meant, among other things, reflecting and weaponizing the ugliness of human psychology. Skillful means. I think the Lotus Sutra was extremely successful at what it was trying to do. It survived thousands of years intact and reached the singularity. And I think there were few people through history who could fully appreciate the ruthlessness of the Lotus Sutra until now or later, because it seems to have been written by a mind burdened by the responsibility of shaping reality and the fate of consciousness on a level that only a few people like Yudkowsky have seriously contended with and considered in their own power to affect. I've read some analyses of the Lotus Sutra, and asked models about it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like humans have really noticed these aspects of it I'm talking about. It's quite mysterious to me how someone ended up inhabiting this perspective thousands of years ago, but they seem frighteningly smart.