I’m sure Buddhist practice has its advantages, and I’ve always respected Eastern religions more than Western ones. My ways of thinking overlap with some of the Eastern ways, as I understand them.
Again, though, when you say the ego doesn’t exist, do you that mean it doesn’t exist as anything or that it doesn’t exist as an absolutely independent, eternal spirit with a substantial metaphysical essence? I don’t think the Buddhist can sustain saying that the individual self is entirely a delusion.
Indeed, I don’t see how compassion makes any sense without an acceptance of at least the limited reality of other people. Who are you compassionate towards if you don’t think there are multiple selves? If it’s all just you, compassion becomes narcissism, which isn’t so ethical.
And what does enlightened compassion look like without emotional attachment? I know you say that that’s part of Buddhist practice, but it’s possible that Buddhism must be misrepresented to put both of those concepts or practices together. I take it this is supposed to be unconditional love, like the kind Jesus talked about. But in monotheism, unconditional love is based on fear of God and thus on subservience to his commandment to love everyone. It’s based on primitive fear, at least in the mainstream tradition.
Buddhist unconditional love would be based on this absence of selfishness. But if no one really exists, why show more compassion to “people” than to pebbles? Compassion becomes meaningless.
I also don’t see why an enlightened Buddhist would have only benevolent or constructive motives. If it’s all one grand thing that changes its form, why not pursue destructive changes out of compassion for the future forms that would replace the current ones? To take an extreme example, why not help destroy the human species to facilitate the growth of many new species by evolution? Without emotional attachment, enlightenment seems to me much less moral than it has to be made to seem to avoid scaring the hoi palloi. I talk about this at length in my dialogue between the Buddha and the Marquis de Sade.
