I love the Diamond Sutra. I read it every few years. To me, it's very funny. how can one read about all the absolutely galactic scale quantity of "merit" to be gained right next to explanations about the illusory nature of words without laughing?
It's layered like an onion. One layer is meant to free people from illbeing. Another layer is for error correction codes and to make the message 'viral'. Another layer opened my eyes to incontrovertible truth about the noisy approximations and lossy signals that comprise the the human experience. So many layers read rather mystically at first, but you can always cut through it and find out it's not magic, it's really the way things are.
From another angle, it's a blob of metadata around a packet that contains instructions to all sentient beings -- in my words: "Relax. Be compassionate to yourself and others. All barriers to compassion are illusions. Tell this to other people. If you need to reformat the content as a listicle to get through to grandma, that's cool."
There's other angles. It's a fascinating document.
I believe the massively intelligent person(s) who composed it had a sincere objective to help all life.
It's layered like an onion. One layer is meant to free people from illbeing. Another layer is for error correction codes and to make the message 'viral'. Another layer opened my eyes to incontrovertible truth about the noisy approximations and lossy signals that comprise the the human experience. So many layers read rather mystically at first, but you can always cut through it and find out it's not magic, it's really the way things are.
From another angle, it's a blob of metadata around a packet that contains instructions to all sentient beings -- in my words: "Relax. Be compassionate to yourself and others. All barriers to compassion are illusions. Tell this to other people. If you need to reformat the content as a listicle to get through to grandma, that's cool."
There's other angles. It's a fascinating document.
I believe the massively intelligent person(s) who composed it had a sincere objective to help all life.