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.