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(FROM THE BUDDHA AND HIS TEACHINGS BY Venerable Nārada Mahāthera)
The doctrine of Kamma and rebirth is the keystone of the philosophy of Plato. Beings are forever travelling through “a cycle of necessity”; the evil they do in one semicircle of their pilgrimage is expiated in the other. In the Republic, we find Kamma personified as “Lachesis, the daughter of necessity,” at whose hands disembodied beings choose their incarnations. Orpheus chooses the body of a swan. Thersites that of an ape, Agamemmon that of an eagle. “In like manner, some of the animals passed into men, and into one another, the unjust passing into the wild, and the just into the tame.”
The Grinch who stole happiness
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His Highness of Pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer
Don’t get your hopes up
“In the Presence of Schopenhauer,” by Michel Houellebecq (Polity Press)
Every volume by Arthur Schopenhauer, and in particular “The World as Will and Representation,” should carry a warning label: Not to be read before the age of 30, especially by those maintaining a “Romantic” outlook on life. Why? because the German philosopher (1788-1860) isn’t out to bolster our illusions but to dispel them. In other words, no dangling carrot of false hope. In “The Pessimist’s Handbook” he writes: “For the safest way of not being miserable is not to expect to be happy.”