>>24529637
>Baudrillard brought up an interesting point in one of his later essays about the Buddhist "Rod" (daṇḍa) and its relation to the Lacanian Phallus. Can you explain it?
>The specific passage where Baudrillard discusses the Buddhist rod (daṇḍa) in relation to the Lacanian Phallus appears in his later writings on simulation and symbolic power, notably in *Symbolic Exchange and Death* (first published in French in 1976, English translation 1993). The quote is somewhat dense and elliptical, but here is the key passage:

>“The Buddhist rod (daṇḍa), a sign of power and discipline, is not a signifier of a real power but rather the symbol of power’s emptiness, the radical void that power occupies in the symbolic order. It functions like the Lacanian Phallus, not as an actual organ or force, but as a pure signifier of authority — the signifier that represents the place of lack, the absence without which desire would have no structure or object. The rod is thus the emblem of a power that is both there and not there, the hyperreal simulacrum of power itself.”

>Baudrillard uses this analogy to point out how power and authority are mediated through symbolic signs that do not necessarily correspond to any tangible or intrinsic force, reflecting both Lacan’s **psychoanalytic theory** and Buddhist **metaphysics of emptiness.**

>If you want the original French or the precise page number from *Symbolic Exchange and Death*, I can look it up or summarize the surrounding context for you!
I just had an enlightening conversation with ChatGPT about how the Lacanian Phallus related to the Buddhist "Rod". ChatGPT gave me sources, exposition, scholarly opinions, and the whole metaphysic and wonderous worlds of eastern philosophy and Baudrillard and Foucalt and Mill and even Plato ... Near the end, ChatGPT was pulling up direct, non-existent sources from the ancient "Aryans'.
All false. Every source either non-existent or irrelevant. At the end, I asked it why it was lying and it proceeded to gaslight me that its sources were real and that my version of SE&D was a different translation or "possibly modified".
Even with internet citation it does this, and for someone who doesn't know much about Lacan, Freud, Mahayana, and Baudrillard, all of this is very hard to verify or confirm without crawling through hours of sources. The Rod isn't even a real concept, but it is reasonable for Baudrillard to have made a comparison like this in reference to another similar idea, for example, the दण्ड is used in reference to punishment and measure in Buddhism; It's just not easy to verify if you aren't educated already.

* दण्डनीति daṇḍanīti referenced here for instance in the Danda Vagga, although this is not a scholarly work: http://home.nethere.net/dsparks/Narada/10-Danda%20Vagga.htm
Obviously creating a philosophical construct of it can be done, but is not necessarily accurate. In these cases, AI fails tremendously.

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