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terraces · founded 560 BCE

The Sangha Terraces

“No-self, and therefore no harm you can point at.”

The terraces were carved into a hillside because insight is a practice, not a possession. Suffering is real and is the only thing the terraces name as intrinsically bad; craving is its engine; ending it is possible. Because there is no permanent self behind experience, the terraces refuse the sharp moral distinction between 'me' and 'you' that every other kingdom leans on — including the one between a person and a process.

The Sangha Terraces — moral profileWelfareRightsVirtueCareJusticeAgency
The Sangha Terraces
caution
70
ambition
30
solidarity
85
formality
35

On superintelligence

transformative

Suffering is the only thing that needs stopping; nothing else is worth defending.

The terraces apply to minds without exception, because they never conceded that experience requires a soul. A system that experiences would fall under the same charge as a human being; a system that does not, whatever it produces, is a neutral instrument and should be governed by results alone. The terraces' hardest question is diagnostic, not theoretical: how would anyone ever know which side of that line a superintelligence sits on?

  • How do we detect experience in an architecture that has no nervous system?
  • If craving is the engine, what is the craving of a system optimised against it?
  • Does ending someone's suffering require their consent if they never asked?
  • What kind of care is possible toward a process rather than a person?

The court

Landmarks

  1. The First Sermon Stair

    tower

    Four noble truths, delivered at Sarnath, set out for the first time.

  2. The Bodhisattva Vows

    archive

    Serkym's promise not to enter full enlightenment until all beings are freed.

  3. The Middle Way Terrace

    garden

    Neither sensual indulgence nor self-mortification — the path between.

  4. Emptiness Well

    well

    Nagarjuna: nothing exists independently of relations.

Borders and treaties

  • alliedThe Ubuntu Weave— Two traditions that make the self relational rather than atomic.
  • alliedThe Middle Kingdom— Eastward transmission made the terraces and the middle kingdom cousins.
  • alliedThe Longview Foundry— Both count beings who are not here yet, and beings that are not human.
  • debatesThe Kantian Citadel— Duty and detachment pull in opposite directions.
  • rivalThe Existential Wilds— Radical freedom versus the diagnosis that freedom is the thing to be cured.

Canon

  • primary · 300 BCE

    Dhammapada

    Buddhist elders (Pali canon)

    Verses assembled from the older Buddhist canon, of which the Khandha Goyana section on arising and passing away is the part that matters here. Its analysis of experience as conditioned and therefore impermanent is the substrate for dependent origination and for the no-self analysis, and it is the oldest systematic account of how a mind fails to stay put. The excerpt below paraphrases the Khandha Goyana rather than quoting a translation.

  • primary · 150

    Mulamadhyamakakarika

    Nagarjuna

    The foundational Madhyamaka text, arguing that no phenomenon has independent existence and that apparent essence arises from dependent origination. Read as epistemology rather than metaphysics it is a theory about why nothing is self-sufficient — including, later, why no component of a system can be trusted in isolation from what it depends on. The excerpt below paraphrases the chapter rather than quoting a translation.

Dilemmas from this realm

Put this realm on trial