If you poke and prod at Buddhist philosophy a bit, especially in terms of how it is actually practiced, you find all sorts of interesting things; you find out that it is alive.
Buddhist philosophy stresses that all life is constantly in flux, that everything is impermanent, and to cling to any given formation is vanity or folly and will only result in needless suffering.
Yet why doesn't Buddhism turn its own ideological knife onto itself? If all is impermanent, why wouldn't one commit suicide and liberate oneself from material suffering? Why wouldn't one liberate others by destroying them?
Because Buddhism is alive of course. One is to live, to attach to one's own formation by eating and drinking and carrying out daily practical actions, but to do this as gracefully and painlessly as possible. Contrary to letting others disintegrate around oneself, one looks after them more attentively than one looks after one's own self, with compassion.
One comes to terms with the existence of pain and suffering, yet one still avoids these things in its most extreme forms, as they are still useful means of communication for the body itself.
Curiously enough, when one comes to terms with death and disintegration, one lives ever more vigorously and gratefully, yet when one refuses death, life becomes ever more sterile and dead.
Similarly, Buddhist ideology condemns the formation of rigid identity, yet to live as a Buddhist in its purest form, one must cling rigorously to the identity of the disciplined meditator, on the noble path to enlightenment.
This is perhaps the most telling indicator of the gradual decay of the Buddhist philosophical system, though it has been carried on in various forms for the last 2500 years.
Consider the founding mythology of Buddhist thought, the account of Siddhartha, the original Buddha. You have a man that experiences this radiant, fresh form of enlightenment, and who feels compelled to share it. But as in the expenditure of great energy, which seeks to spread, it decays and weakens as it spreads.
The religion propagates itself through a vast unfolding mimetic process. Everyone sees this enlightened being's deeds, hears his words, experiences his radiance, and desires to become like him, following his teachings, retracing the steps he took to his own enlightenment. This works for some, but the original signal becomes more diluted over time. The original ecstatic vision generates rituals and practices to maintain this vision, but in many sects the focus drifts away from the original vision, and towards the rituals, practices, and idols themselves.
This intrinsic pressure to extend one's compassion and pursue truth becomes this guiding teleological image which exercises external control. This radiant cosmic vision fades, with a collective religious focus narrowing ever further to the self. One's efforts become ever more guided towards achieving enlightenment, towards doing the right things to achieve this state, to be like this saintly person and renowned like this saintly person.
But the saintly person is saintly out of necessity, because there is no other way. This person doesn't have to be told to be compassionate, or to think a certain way.
In the abstract, the heaven and hell concept makes its appearance: meditate and have compassion and do good works and one becomes enlightened, one reaches the heavenly end state. Fail to meditate and pursue egocentric sensual pleasures and focus on the self and suffer perpetually in a hell on earth.
Which is a pattern that can be found in the decay of all creative, energetic expenditures, effects which can be traced in changing ideologies, and ideologies' ever-shifting relation with practices. Buddhist philosophy has discovered that integration and disintegration are two sides of the same coin, and to favor either is to suffer greatly. But while the philosophy itself focuses on the arising and passing of individuals, it is clear that this same cyclic pattern occurs with greater bodies: with institutions, philosophies, religions, artistic and political movements, and even societies and civilizations.
2500 years ago, Buddhists faced similar, yet different problems. Today, there is less of an emphasis on the self - though to initiate change one certainly starts with the self - and more an emphasis on a systematic existential crisis, which concerns the nature of entire societies and ecosystems. Of course, to address such issues, we can draw from many ideologies and disciplines across time.
As even a very old religious ideology such as Buddhism still manages to produce artifacts and tools, signs which point the way, and mechanisms which help one get there. A hammer may be invented in an ancient society for some specific purpose, but the form and concept of the hammer can be passed for thousands of years, regardless of whether the cultural milieu within which the hammer was formed can be passed on as a holistic blueprint for living. The hammer will be made from different materials, and be used for different tasks, but its essence remains as a tool.
Vipassana meditation is a great tool that was produced by a great ideology, and a vast expenditure of energy. Its tool-set continues on as an echo, its waves weakened, but which still carry a signal, a means to organize information and conduct a practice to carry out one's own affairs in one's own time. There are many other tools like this, which is just as well, as there is much work to do.
