flâneur

"The best minds of my generation are idiots. They have such idiot compassion."

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What would the bad boy of Buddhism say about the compassion that frontier AI sells?

Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa said this in the mid-1970s, critiquing the self-preserving flavor of compassion he saw infiltrating Western intellectual and spiritual counterculture. Many Eastern religious ideas were being repackaged for American and European audiences, who were eating them up. Their translators gained large followings of Western intellectuals and artists; Trungpa probably adapted Howl’s famous opening lines in part to knock a dent in his student Allen Ginsberg’s ego. But he was also calling out how Western students of Buddhism were misapplying principles like non-judgment…

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