Well, with all due respect for your fondness for quoting yourself, that's not a very good definition of "a dragon", if that's what you're citing it as, which I personally would normally take to mean "a true dragon", as opposed to some greater (or lesser) draconic manifestation.
> >Most Kralori aren't really trying to do this directly,
>
> Which is no surprise as I never hinted that they did.
Believe it or not, not all of my comments we All About You, Peter, but some of them were trying to elucidate one of the subjects under discussion, to wit the Kralori religion.
> >and even those that are are not, as a rule, becoming
> >a manifest dragon as a way station to this goal.
>
> There is no distinction between becoming a dragon and becoming
> one with the Cosmic Dragon.
That's incorrect. A True Dragon is only a tiny fraction of an Ancestral Dragon, much less of the Cosmic Dragon; they're not One in any useful sense.
> The Kralori draconists do turn into dragons, the transformation is
> permanent and they do explicitly make it the ultimate goal of
> their practice. The RW parallel of draconic status is Buddhist
> enlightenment. So for the Kralori not to turn into dragons etc
> would be the equivalent of saying that Buddhists do not become
> enlightened, are enlightened briefly if they do become enlightened,
> and not to express enlightenment as the ultimate goal of their
> practice.
If you want to bandy Buddhist analogies, a better one would be that "becoming a (true) dragon" is comparable to having achieved uninteruptted meditation on an Insubstantial Deity, for example, to wit, an intermediate, important, but not ultimate objective of the practice.
In illustration of this, Godunya, for example, is a true dragon (I'm tempted to say "at least a true dragon", but that's to open another worm can unnecessarily), but is not presently one with the Cosmic Dragon, having like the prervious Emperors delayed this for the mundane and spiritual benefit of empire and people. (Setting aside any other complication in G's case.)
[assorted draconic sources]
> While it is flawed in that it makes Dragonewts too
> understandable, it still shows great commonalities between
> them and Kralori draconism.
This is a fairly direct contradiction; if you agree that these sources give an erroneous impression of their comprehensibility, then you should acknowledge the unreliability of them as any sort of a basis for point-by-point comparison. Personally I'd suggest caution in interpretting the above information (and no, caution does not mean "bin it all"), as much of it may be EWF perspective,
> >And what they are saying leads to more head-scratching
> >than anything else.
>
> In which case, how do _you_ explain the similarities between
> Kralori draconism and dragonewt religion if the dragonewts
> are incomprehensible and the Kralori are not?
At no point did I say that the one was entirely comprehensible, and the other entirely in-. It's fairly clear to me which is the more tractably understandable, however, from a human PoV. (What with the Kralori being human, and all.) Nor do I particularly want to even get into the question of how "deeply similar" the two are right now, beyond my observations about the (at least) superficial differences, by which I stand.
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