If you meet the buddha on the road, you must kill him.
The koan really strikes me in this situation. The character in the end accepts that he alone gets to make the final moral decisions for himself, regardless of what the labels are and what his teachings were. Many religious ceremonies are about abject submission, but many are also about the idea of "I freely give myself, and accept the consequnces of that submission" and so on.
Although I will add that I completely disagree with the hero. If he really was undecided, the current balance was hi... (read more)
Indeed. His willingness to kill Dolf without asking any questions or making any attempts to verify the Dark Lord's statements just shows that Hirou still hasn't learned anything.
7RobinHanson
I thought his conversion was too quick to be believable - he need to ask more questions, to have more back and forth in a random walk of opinion change.
2Vladimir_Nesov
There is nothing about status quo that makes it a preferable option in times of uncertainty, except that the expectation of the intervention may at some point be below or above status quo, which gives the decision.
If you meet the buddha on the road, you must kill him.
The koan really strikes me in this situation. The character in the end accepts that he alone gets to make the final moral decisions for himself, regardless of what the labels are and what his teachings were. Many religious ceremonies are about abject submission, but many are also about the idea of "I freely give myself, and accept the consequnces of that submission" and so on.
Although I will add that I completely disagree with the hero. If he really was undecided, the current balance was hi... (read more)