First off, there are many intepretations of enlightenment. It's one of those ineffable things, as is the value of life. For example, there is one buddhist story where two students work arguing about which should keep a cat. The teacher came in and said whoever speaks a word of zen will can keep the cat. Neither of them do so. So he rips the cat in half as a demonstration of zen, killing it. When i asked how can this be a demonstration of zen, I was pointed out that with reincarnation, the teacher has not truly killed the cat, only allowed a reincarnation to take place. I don't know if I buy quite that, but you can't tell me "This is enlightenment", because according to buddists themselves, there is no singular answer they can give. Like the seemingly cruel teacher, It could be his enlightenment is detachment from life in the heart beat sense but values life in the cosmic sense.
Second, you're saying Yang Chen. Yang Chen the avatar. The avatar is wrong talking about what it means to be the avatar. Look, I love Aang too, but if you're taking this route, then you're saying that all last 4 of the avatars before Aang have been collosal, complete lols worthy epic fails and Aang is the only one that got the dalai lama thing even remotely right.
This is both right and wrong in different ways.
Okay, first off, tell that nations don't matter to Hei Bai who lost his shit when his forest was gone because of fire nation industrialization. Tell that to Wan Shi Tong who was angered when the fire nation warfare. Or even La and Tui who are explicitly spirits of the water nation. The spirits are highly involved and interested in human politics, what they decide to do as nations involves what happens to the planet and karmic balance and all that, which the spirits are highly interested in.
Secondly. the Nations, in this case, are not the result of just geographics and politics but basic biology. Until colonization, the nations weren't just seperated by land, but by genetic code of people that is intrinsically tied to spirituality. Surely biology is part of the earth, is it not?
Third, you are right that the separation of nations is an illusion, but you're stopping at the illusion that humanity is separated from the planet. Humanity is part of the planet. This is literally made into a plot point in the Swamp episode.
...No. I'm sorry, but that's simply wrong. Most of the wars around the globe are about the planet. To achieve world peace, one thing that must be done is a well organized division of land and resources that everyone is satisfied with. To do that, we must be in agreement on what forests to cut, what to preserve, waht to grow, what to burn, who can live on what, where. I mean, hell, global warming is an environmental concern that will cause seriously disruptive shit to people in the future. If we don't stop harming the planet by melting the ice caps, we'll be screwed over ourselves. It all goes back to the theme of seperations being illusions. Like I said before, humanity is part of the planet.
If you want world peace, it is literally impossible to ignore the planet, because that is the thing we all live on. You do the wrong with a piece of land, you fuck up the livelihood of some other group of people. They're going to get rightfully angry about that, and you have a fight on your hands. World peace is broken.
You might want to rewatch the series, because there are a few environmental episodes, especially the with the panda monster. He is specifically angry that the fire nation messed with the forest. How does the avatar quell him? By promising that he will stop the fire lord and help restore nature to it's proper form.
It didn't develop significantly differently enough to make the planet spirit not fit within the narrative, which is why it's still applicable. As I said, if the writers didn't intend that and wanted to make the dalai lama thing the only possible interpretation....tough. They didn't do anything that rules out planet spirit, so that's still in.
Look, I wish I could do the whole 'reply to each part of argument individually' thing more, but it's been a busy day and I still have things to do, so I think we can essentialize our disagreement into this one point: Explain to me how exactly humanity is not a part of the planet. If you can convince me of this one point, one I feel the show itself strongly, and quite evidently, rebels against, then you've won the argument as I see it. Because if it isn't, then you're right, I can't think of why in the world the planet would care why something completely seperate from itself exists in any way. But I feel the show had been fairly determined in pointing out seperations are illusions. And on logical and practical level, it doesn't really make sense to me to say that we do not affect the planet when it is literally everything 99.999% of humanity interacts with. The only exceptions are astronauts who have left the orbit and do shit on the moon and stuff, and even that is only for the duration that they are gone. We come from the earth. When we die, we go back to the earth. In our lives, we destroy and restore the earth in different parts. By changing the earth, we change things for ourselves. The planet is our home. So lets go, give me a good argument on this one point, and you've got it. How isn't it part of us, and we a part of it?
