Nothingness is still a form of Oneness because the matter making up the whole doesn’t particularly matter. Pure being and pure nothing may as well be the same because the only difference is their material makeup.
To answer your question, it is the psycho-physical aggregates which stop reforming after death because their essence has been destroyed. That is how I understand it.
>The 5 aggregates stop reforming after death because their essence has been destroyed
I don't think I get it. What even is this essence?
There's still other sentient beings being born and the new iterations of the aggregates are still giving rise to new consciousness and new identities. Shouldn't the continuous of conscious experience keep on going for as long as there are sentient beings being born? shouldn't nirvana therefore be temporary and last only a single life? what am I missing here?
The self does not persist, but the causal series of impersonal, impermanent psychophysical elements that the self is not do.
web.archive.org/web/20020603010533/http://www4.bayarea.net/~mtlee/
web.archive.org/web/20031220231547/http://www.drba.org/dharma/
web.archive.org/web/20071102120620/http://www.sutrasmantras.info/sutra0.html
web.archive.org/web/20040718233929/http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/
So buddhists are denying that the self dies with the body and the particular iteration of the aggregates and so is actually reincarnating?
I can't unsee the contradiction
Is it? Do you perceive an independently existing self, or do you perceive the five aggregates and impute self on that basis? Can you perceive a self without perceiving form, feeling, discrimination, mental factors, or consciousness? Is self the same or different as the aggregates?
Black person, the doctrine is that there is no *permanent* self, ie something unchanging that persists through time, what exists is an ever shifting process, like a river or the constantly changing pictures on a movie screen that give the illusion of permanence an a continuous object (when in reality it is only a series of distinct images succeeding one another)
To answer your question though >Some Buddhist traditions assert that vijñana (consciousness), though constantly changing, exists as a continuum or stream (santana) and is what undergoes rebirth.Some traditions like Theravada assert that rebirth occurs immediately and that no "thing" (not even consciousness) moves across lives to be reborn (though there is a causal link, like when a seal is imprinted on wax). Other Buddhist traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism posit an interim existence (bardo) between death and rebirth, which may last as long as 49 days
It's always the guys throwing free slurs giving bland, generic and unhelpful replies in these threads. See:
>The 5 aggregates stop reforming after death because their essence has been destroyed
I don't think I get it. What even is this essence?
There's still other sentient beings being born and the new iterations of the aggregates are still giving rise to new consciousness and new identities. Shouldn't the continuous of conscious experience keep on going for as long as there are sentient beings being born? shouldn't nirvana therefore be temporary and last only a single life? what am I missing here?
I think in the end what I want to know is what the point of reaching nirvana even is if "my self" fricking dies with my body anyway.
Black person, because nirvana stops the cycle of rebirth, there's nothing unhelpful in my first reply, the problem is you being a dumb Black personhomosexual and not getting it
>the cycle of rebirth
the cycle of what? what rebirths?
1 month ago
Anonymous
The mindstream, which is a continuum of moments of consciousness that cease as soon as they arise
1 month ago
Anonymous
But these moments which compose this specific mindstream are not the components of the rebirthed mindstream that will have different moments.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The mindstream is a serial continuity, the moments composing a mindstream yesterday are different from the moments composing it today, nothing substantially continues from moment to moment or life to life. You really can't even say moments compose a mindstream aside from arbitrarily considering a specific period of time a the mindstream.
1 month ago
Anonymous
I know, but I mean, we have our personal identity based on the continuity of moments we are conscious of having experienced. So yes, the moments of a mindstream would refer to the specific conscious life that has awareness of these moments. But the supposed rebirthed life has nothing of this continuity, it is a totally new mindstream that will be composed by totally new moments. So what is the link?
Thereis no inherently existing self to be annihilated, at death or in nirvana. There is as much continuity between lives as there is between childhood and old age.
The bardo isn't unique to tibetan buddhism, Vasubandhu describes it in the Abhidharmakosha, which is from the perspective of the Sautrantika school. I think Theravada is actually an outlier among the early buddhist schools for rejecting an intermediate state.
Three questions I should have added now that I think of it:
1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
I think its helpful to historicise certain aspects of Buddhism in order to answer that question (although practicing Buddhists won't like that).
Buddhism arose in the Late Vedic Period whenever Northern India was ruled by the Brahman priestly caste. The main teaching of the Vedic philosophy of the time was Atman, which means Self but also something like soul. They taught that the Atman carried on through an individual's many lives. In the Vedic religion the Atman is to be fully identified and joined with Brahman (ultimate reality) through ritual action and that is how a person achieves moksha (liberation), which is generally the goal of all Indian philosophies.
Now Buddhism was part of the wider sramana movement of ascetics who were rebelling against brahmanical society by partaking in self-mortifying practices as opposed to ritual. So in that context, the Buddha taught Anatta (anatman), non-self, to reject Brahman orthodoxy and state the idea that you become liberated by cutting all bonds off from the material world and renouncing all forms of identification.
Hope that helps.
1. Yes, he just stops existing and will not reincarnate because he has completely extinguished his Self.
2. In Buddhism they have levels of enlightenment. In ascending order
a) stream-enterer who will reincarnate but will eventually achieve nirvana
b) a once-returner who will reincarnate once more before achieving enlightenment
c) a non-returner who will reincarnate in a heavenly realm as a spirit/God before enlightment
d) an arahant is someone who becomes fully enlightened and won't reincarnate
3. Remembering past lives is what is called an iddhi which is literally psychic powers attained by extremely enlightened beings lol, other ones are things like teleportation and clairvoyance. I think the idea is that you so thoroughly overcome your identity that you achieve such a trascendent mode of consciousness that you can see beyond your conrete individual form into past lives, into the future, around corners etc etc.
>In the Vedic religion the Atman is to be fully identified and joined with Brahman (ultimate reality) through ritual action
This part isn't correct, the idea which the Hindu scriptures and schools teach is liberation through knowledge/gnosis, this is what the Upanishads (even pre-Buddhist ones) say and not liberation through ritual action. Ritual action only can lead to heaven but not moksha. The non-dualist Vedantins, the Bhakti Vedantins and the Tantrics all agree that it is knowledge/gnosis that liberates but they just explain the details of this and how one arrives at it in different ways.
>the Bhakti Vedantins
This seems strange. I have always conceived Bhakti as emphasizing something along the lines of conventional faith we find in Christianity.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>I have always conceived Bhakti as emphasizing something along the lines of conventional faith we find in Christianity.
They do emphasize the importance of faith but then so do the non-dualist Vedantins. Bhakti Vedantins like Ramanuja conceive of the word Bhakti as denoting the continuous remembrance of God at all times, like a meditation, so liberation happens through the individual striving through their willpower to maintain constant knowledge of God or the Absolute amidst everything else that occurs. Intellectual understanding is important as well since proper meditation on God in their view would sort of presuppose understanding their metaphysics and how they explain the nature of the soul and its relation to God etc, so knowledge is indispensable and central both in the initial acquiring of proper knowledge of the nature of God/soul and also in the act of seeking liberation. The Brahma Sutras don't mention the word Bhakti but they mention upasana (meditation) many times and when they do, Ramanuja and other Bhakti Vedantins interpret it as referring to that kind of continuous remembrance, which they compare to an unbroken stream of oil.
>This part isn't correct, the idea which the Hindu scriptures and schools teach is liberation through knowledge/gnosis, this is what the Upanishads (even pre-Buddhist ones) say and not liberation through ritual action. Ritual action only can lead to heaven but not moksha. The non-dualist Vedantins, the Bhakti Vedantins and the Tantrics all agree that it is knowledge/gnosis that liberates but they just explain the details of this and how one arrives at it in different ways.
And all of those claim are quite late in the hindu chronology. And by the way brahmins defended rituals very very late in the history of hinduism.
1 month ago
Anonymous
> And all of those claim are quite late in the hindu chronology.
The formalization of those schools came later but their doctrines about this are based on pre-Buddhist scriptures like the Vedas and earliest Upanishads which affirm the same ideas about liberation through knowledge. People have always held that idea even before Buddha as shown by it being repeated throughout the early scriptures in addition to later ones.
>He who has realised and intimately known the Self that has entered this perilous and inaccessible place (the body), is the maker of the universe, for he is the maker of all, (all is) his Self, and he again is indeed the Self (of all). Being in this very body we have somehow known that (Brahman). If not, (I should have been) ignorant, (and) great destruction (would have taken place). Those who know It become immortal, while others attain misery alone.
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.13-4.4.14
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is a century or two before Buddha and it talks in numerous places about liberation through knowledge. There are even pre-Upanishad portions of the Veda that say the same thing, like in the Taittiriya Aranyaka of the Yajurveda which is centuries before the earliest Upanishads.
>By knowing Brahman one attains immortality here. There is no other way to its attainment
- Taittiriya Aranyaka 6-1-6
Only the Mimamsa school ever believed in liberation through ritual, most Hindu schools disagree with them. I understand that some Buddhists apparently prefer to believe that all Hindus held this view at the time because this makes Buddha’s teaching seem more revolutionary than it really was, but there is no evidence that it’s true and there is strong evidence that it’s not true, like the aforementioned as well as many other pre-Buddhist textual passages, as well as Buddha’s own attesting in the Pali Canon of the existence of Vedic Brahmins roaming the forests as monks while chanting mantras and subsisting off fruits.
>1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
He achieved parinirvana, which is the last death before you stop being reborn. He did not cease to exist, he still exists, just in a manner different from how he used to exist. He's neither here, nor there, nor neither, nor both. He has attained a state of limitless potentiality beyond all actualization. But, yes, he "disappeared" in a colloquial sense. Theravada tradition holds that his body literally poofed away, leaving only robes and sandals behind.
>2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
What monks do, like what they actually DO all day, is untie the karmic knot that causes rebirth. After one succeeds in doing that, there is no more rebirth. The physical body continues until it uses up its remaining karma (which was acquired in past lives), and then when it dies, parinirvana occurs.
If you mean this soteriologically or harmatiologically, in the sense of "but WHY are there souls in samsara", the answer is that we don't know. Mahayana theology posits that eventually ALL sentient beings will attain nirvana, but what happens after that is unknown. Both the Mahayana and the Theravada waffle back and forth as to whether or not a "chunk of nirvana" can "fall into samsara", resulting in a new soul trapped in ignorance. It's an open issue.
>3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
Buddhist epistemology conceptualizes thoughts as things. The Pali Canon says that they're made out of mind atoms. When you die, they continue on in the same way that your body does. Some of them break apart, but some of them break into pieces that continue with you. Imagine if you died, and your liver got transplanted into a new body: they would have a "past life liver". Now imagine if your memory of your 15th-birthday got transplanted into someone after you died: they would have a "past life memory". See how that works? >okay but WHY does that happen?
Buddhism has a whole cosmology and epistemology going on here, the tl;dr is that memories aren't necessarily "in time", hence why a Buddha can access past lives so easily (they can "think the right way" to pull them from the ether, in a sense).
>>He achieved parinirvana, which is the last death before you stop being reborn. He did not cease to exist, he still exists, just in a manner different from how he used to exist. He's neither here, nor there, nor neither, nor both. He has attained a state of limitless potentiality beyond all actualization.
That's not what the buddha said and it's completely idiotic to cling to the fantasy of potentiality by the non-enlightened people
>If there's no self then what is escaping the cycle of rebirth through nirvana?
the cycle of rebirths is just the aggregates rising again, because the condition for their non-arising is still not triggered
>1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
The buddha said it's a stupid question to ask whether he or any enlightened dude exists or not
>2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
being enlightened means there's no condition for birth, and the aggregate of consciousness can't arise anymore
>3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
He just said he thought about going back in the chain of births, when he was meditating.
I know this philosopher didn’t work within a knowledge of eastern thought (how could he?) but On the Nature of Man by Polybus has an interesting philosophic discourse at the very beginnings which I see as relevant to Buddhism and to the theistic religions.
>they say what is is a “unity” but disagree as to its name
If everything in the universe shares in the quality of not being real then that is essentially the same as it all sharing in the quality of realness. The essence which they share is very minor. The relevant part is that all share of it.
A soul joins heaven after death in Christianity and the physical-aggregates join non-existence in the exact same manner in Buddhism but it is a manner of the material composition of this realm.
It's a stupid religion full of contradictions and absurdities. Literally Buddha claimed psychic powers, ability to walk through walls, levitate and fly around to the sun and moon and speak with saints and devils. The whole religion is built on this fantastical cosmology of like 32 realms of existence with hungry ghosts, torture realms, deva realms etc. It's just moronic.
Also the whole idea is this is all so shit the highest aim is a sort of cosmic suicide.
> Jesus telling anyone to escape suffering > The main emblem of the religion is an implement used for crucifying people, and the idea is that you're supposed to carry your own
We aren't meant to escape from "the world" in Christianity? Why did so many saints commit suicide by Roman cop? Why is it easier for slaves and peasants to enter "heaven"?
Slaves and peasants don't have to go out and find suffering. It's where they already are. Escaping the "world" doesn't mean struggling less. Ask St. Anthony the Great if he "struggled less"
1 month ago
Anonymous
>Ask St. Anthony the Great if he "struggled less"
Oh wait is this the guy who founded western monasticism? But
[...]
said that monastic religion and renunciation were satanism. Why are you guys so dishonest?
In Christianity, when you have Faith in Jesus, you don't suffer anymore. Your body might be in tremendous pain, and yet you don't suffer. It's crazy how you can't see that Buddhism tries to achieve the same thing. You are arguing with the other anon over semantics.
You're addressing the problem wrong, you're viewing this from a the pointbof view of a sustantialist ontology, that is, from the notion that a substance is needed as the essence of a thing, this goes against the notion of anatta (no-soul) buddhism don't get rid of the 5 skhandas to "free" some soul or substance or thing, buddhism is a process oriented ontology,which take becoming and transformation into consideration, things get their identity not from an essence but from the relational process in which they exist and their natural quality to change, when you complete a process what you get is the result, and that's nirvana, completing the process of samsara let the tranformation onto nirvana, there's nothing left of samsara there, just like a butterfly is no longer a caterpillar, what you're asking, in a buddhist context, is like asking where's the caterpillar after he tranformed into a butterfly, the question doesn't make any sense because it doesn't take change and transformation into consideration, freeing yourself from samsara means that ypu changed in such a radical way your existence goes beyond samsara
There's good karma and bad karma. It's not the buddha who created the universe and karma.
Then there's good activities to end suffering and bad activities to end suffering. Again it's not the buddha who created those and the 8 fold path.
Whoever created the universe and the mechanism of karma and rebirth did a sloppy job by allowing the backdoor that is the 8 fold path to get out of his evil creation.
>Whoever created the universe and the mechanism of karma and rebirth did a sloppy job by allowing the backdoor that is the 8 fold path to get out of his evil creation.
Did it though? This sounds incredibly arrogant, at least on paper. How do we know that this creator did not leave a purposeful backdoor for beings with strong enough will so they don't have to be stuck here against their will?
the good and bad refer to the place of the birth: the hierarchy is that the highest realms (=birth places) have the most pleasures because the pleasure there is not sensory but only like in meditation.
The lowest realms are full of suffering like anger, hate and delusion so they are called a bad place to get reborn into.
The drawback of the highest realms is that the devas are too busy enjoy themselves to understand buddhism so at the end they fall back in hell.
1 month ago
Anonymous
But isn’t the fact that good and bad refer to actions here in this world? Not good or bad places, but good or bad actions here and now, in the world.
1 month ago
Anonymous
yeah but good actions lead ppl to a good place of birth, bad actions lead ppl to a bad place of birth. That's all there is to it.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yes but how there is judgment of value of actions in what is an impersonal world or group of realms? Or there is a personal creator in Buddhism too?
1 month ago
Anonymous
okey what you want to know is the precise mechanism of karma. Sadly the buddha doesn't dwell much on this, because it's not needed to end suffering.
In any case, there's no judgement by anybody. When an action is done, it has a little flag attached to it and then there is ripening of the fruit of karma which makes ppl suffer and have pleasure.
To know more about karma you can read this https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/kamma.html
More generally, there's a ton of essays on this, it's classified here
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#kamma
1 month ago
Anonymous
Yeah, that’s the issue here. I can’t understand how this flag is supposed to be an impersonal conditioning despite ascribing a value that can only be ascribed by personal judgments.
I’ll read what the links you posted, thanks.
1 month ago
Anonymous
the first link has a long exposition due to the suttas, but the quick intro is here https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/karma.html
1 month ago
Anonymous
also in buddhism it's important to thin kin terms of ''tendencies''.
The point is that it's hard to pinpoint one act to one karmic result [=affliction], but everybody want sot know what some atomic action will bring as a karmic fruit. The buddha doesn't answer this.
1 month ago
Anonymous
Interesting article by Thanissaro, although I think he put too much emphasis on a Western distortion of the fatalistic conception of karma, which I have seen many Buddhists (Chan, Zen iirc) hold too. But at least he also recognized that this was common among Hinduists and these Asian Buddhists.
But yeah my main problem here is that the world’s mechanism conditions not only physically but also morally, making physical cause-effect relation be transposed to intentions, like human law (even human law is more concrete since intentions are not always punishable like physical effects). But I guess this is what is defined as one of the imponderables.
>>But why are there things such as good and bad karma?
it's the way the universe is set
>Why does Buddhism have a moral element to it at all if the point is to escape suffering?
the morality in buddhism is here to improve your meditative life. It's literally a tool to depollute the mind and prepare it for meditation. Again it's not the buddha who decided it's this way to escape suffering. It's just the way it is.
Look I get your point but if you go into a debate being that uncharitable a lot of the same complaints could be leveled at Christianity, especially the form Americans popularize.
I don't agree with Buddhism's final conclusion, at least the original one, but it has been around in Asia long enough that just like Christianity in the west more than enough life-affirming sects and ideas have grown out of it.
All of these beliefs about impermanence and illusion seem to go back to monism, in which case to me it seems nothing is stopping this thing from repeating in limitless forms infinitely. Who can really make heads or tails of the metaphysical though?
All of these beliefs about impermanence and illusion seem to go back to monism, in which case to me it seems nothing is stopping this thing from repeating in limitless forms infinitely. Who can really make heads or tails of the metaphysical though?
I mean we did come from a big bang, so science also seems to be in agreement with Monism >in which case to me it seems nothing is stopping this thing from repeating in limitless forms infinitely
This is true
I'm ignorant to all the different branches so I guess I hazard lumping ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, Advaita etc together. I guess the Buddha himself didn't see the point in conjecture on certain topics, but to me from everything I've read, the logical extreme of it all seems to either point to a grand container or a grand nothingness, but either way it all seems to point toward monism from my understanding. So if it really is just phenomenological or a grand dreamer, or just experience from alternate perspectives and if all of this is happening within the infinite (which I find difficult to deny) then this would render the idea of nirvana pointless in the literal sense, since the being would have no ultimate essence and eventually everything would play out again, unless there's this little slice of infinite that gets preserved for enlightened mentations, which seems to be suggested by other belief systems as well. Or maybe its meant to be taken metaphorically, that there is no death and rebirth because there is no longer a self to die and be reborn, or maybe it's the Dao that can't be spoken and therefore already corrupt the moment it meets the intellect, I have no idea.
There is only illusory dependent arising, there is no basis and no container can be established, but there is not nothing either, because things clearly appear. The illusory nature of everything does not make nirvana pointless, because we are still under the influence of this illusion and suffer because of it.
1 month ago
Anonymous
So nirvana then is the temporary conveyor out of illusion after which it isn't needed? The raft allegory? That much makes sense but the rest still doesn't. Thanks.
1 month ago
Anonymous
is only illusory dependent arising
The buddha never said dependent origination is illusory.
I'm ignorant to all the different branches so I guess I hazard lumping ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, Advaita etc together. I guess the Buddha himself didn't see the point in conjecture on certain topics, but to me from everything I've read, the logical extreme of it all seems to either point to a grand container or a grand nothingness, but either way it all seems to point toward monism from my understanding. So if it really is just phenomenological or a grand dreamer, or just experience from alternate perspectives and if all of this is happening within the infinite (which I find difficult to deny) then this would render the idea of nirvana pointless in the literal sense, since the being would have no ultimate essence and eventually everything would play out again, unless there's this little slice of infinite that gets preserved for enlightened mentations, which seems to be suggested by other belief systems as well. Or maybe its meant to be taken metaphorically, that there is no death and rebirth because there is no longer a self to die and be reborn, or maybe it's the Dao that can't be spoken and therefore already corrupt the moment it meets the intellect, I have no idea.
the official cosmology in buddhism is just a sequence of contraction and expansion of the universe, ie the pile of life realms.
It's what the buddha claimed when he determined his past lives. The official wording for ''the skill of remembering past lives'' is :
>16.1And moreover, sir, how the Buddha teaches the knowledge of recollecting past lives is unsurpassable. 16.2It’s when some ascetic or brahmin—by dint of keen, resolute, committed, and diligent effort, and right application of mind—experiences an immersion of the heart of such a kind that they recollect their many kinds of past lives. 16.3That is: one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rebirths; many eons of the world contracting, many eons of the world expanding, many eons of the world contracting and expanding. They remember: 16.4‘There, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn somewhere else. There, too, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn here.’ And so they recollect their many kinds of past lives, with features and details. 16.5Sir, there are gods whose life span cannot be reckoned or calculated. 16.6Still, no matter what incarnation they have previously been reborn in—whether physical or formless or percipient or non-percipient or neither percipient nor non-percipient—16.7they recollect their many kinds of past lives, with features and details. 16.8This is unsurpassable when it comes to the knowledge of recollecting past lives.
So it's the same stuff going through a cycle, but there's a way to escape that cycle forever? Also how would you describe dependent origination because I feel like I've seen a few descriptions that seem to define it differently, one being related to perception of all things and one being the interrelated nature of all things, somewhat related by subtly different concepts.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>>So it's the same stuff going through a cycle, but there's a way to escape that cycle forever?
yeah that's the entirety of Buddha's teaching
There's only one dependent origination : it's the 5 aggregates are conditioned. To stay on the DN side of the suttas the full exposition is here
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.15.0.than.html
>interrelated nature of all things
that's a mahayana idea precisely to turn buddhism into a religion which has its core composed of a generic acosmic blob, like hinduism. But then they can't explain how illusion and suffering arise, the personalization of this generic blob into humans and the diversity of the flora and fauna, and they can't explain why figuring out that 100% of life stems from this generic blob makes suffering disappear.
acosmism is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acosmism
1 month ago
Anonymous
Thank you for the text references. This is a lot for me to digest but it's all very good.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>that's a mahayana idea
No, that's the Abhidharma karana hetu. "Everything is connected" is not the profound emptiness of Mahayana.
1 month ago
Anonymous
>>No, that's the Abhidharma karana hetu
? karanahetu is just the immediate causes of something under consideration, it's not all the entirety of all the dharmas ever
and interdependence is what he meant and that's definitely (proto-)mahayana
1 month ago
Anonymous
Any phenomena has as its supporting cause all phenomena other than itself, because they do not interfere in its existence. >interdependence
This isn't a Mahayana doctrine. Some modern Mahayana teachers have translated dependent origination as "codependence" or "inter being," but this really isn't accurate. Dependent origination means the same thing in Mahayana as it does in Theravada, the only difference is that Mahayana takes dependent origination to its logical conclusion of emptiness and nonarising.
1 month ago
Anonymous
The primary definition of dependent origination is the 12 links, ignorance, formations, consciousness, name and form, the six sense organs, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age and death.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.015.than.html >Where this exists, that exists, where this arose, that arises; where this does not exist, that does not exist, where this has ceased, that ceases
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.061.than.html
This is the most important teaching in the Buddhadharma
>Acquisition of a self (atta-pa.tilaabho): According to the Commentary, this refers to the acquisition of an individual identity (attabhaava-pa.tilaabho) on any of the three levels of becoming: the sensual level, the level of form, and the formless level. The term attabhaava-pa.tilaabho is used in a number of suttas — among them AN 4.192 — where it definitely refers to the type of identity one assumes on experiencing rebirth in a particular level of being. However, there are two reasons for not following the Commentary's equation of atta-pa.tilaabho with attabhaava-pa.tilaabho. (1) As AN 4.72 makes clear, there is a type of attabhaava-pa.tilaabho — rebirth in the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception — that would not be covered by any of the three types of acquisition of a self mentioned in this sutta. Thus the Buddha seems to be limiting his discussion here to the alternative selves posited by Potthapada. (2) In a later passage in this sutta, the Buddha refers to the acquisition of a self as something he can point to directly in his listeners' immediate range of experience. Thus the term would seem to refer to the sense of self one can attain as a result of different levels of experience in meditation here and now.
https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/attabhava
There's a sutta where the word is used
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel303.html#misc
Khandha Samyutta No. 117
It was said that one should know the feelings, their conditioned origin, their diversity, their outcome, their cessation, and the way to their cessation. Why was this said?
What are the feelings? These three: pleasant, painful, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant.
What is the conditioned origin of these feelings? Sense-impression is the conditioned origin of the feelings.
What is the diversity in feelings? There are pleasant feelings, worldly and unworldly; there are painful feelings, worldly and unworldly; and there are neutral feelings, worldly and unworldly.
What is the outcome of feelings? It is the personalized existence (attabhava) born of this or that (feeling), be it of a meritorious or demeritorious character, which one who feels causes to arise.
What is the cessation of feelings? It is the cessation of sense impression that is the cessation of feelings.
And it is the noble eightfold path that is the way leading to the cessation of feelings, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
If a noble disciple knows in such way the feelings, their conditioned origin, their diversity, their outcome, their cessation, and the way to their cessation, he will be one who knows this penetrative Holy Life, namely the cessation of feelings.
> dude there is an impersonal absolute reality where we all one and this world of appearances and thoughts is an illusion, except my thought about this being the case though that is totally not an illusion because I said so
Buddhism in a nut shell
You can admire this or that aspect of Buddhism obviously but you have to be a real idiot to be a Buddhist to be quite honest
Jews can't understand buddhism
https://old.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/1bqd422/i_an_observant_jew_just_went_to_a_buddhist_temple/ >I am an observant israelite. I follow the commandments of the Torah, believe in one G-d, etc. Over the years, I have grown a deep love for the Buddha's teachings. This began through basic mindfulness meditation, which I began practicing almost daily years ago. Later I began reading books about the Buddhas teachings and Buddhist psychology. Tonight, for the first time, I went to a Buddhist temple to attend a meditation session led by a monk. There were aspects I really enjoyed; the loving-kindness meditation, walking meditation, and breath meditation. However, there were aspects that made me feel very uncomfortable. In the beginning, it seemed like a prayer was being made to the Buddha (or at least the giant statue of the Buddha placed in the temple). At the end, everyone bowed on their hands and knees to the Buddha statue. Both of these things I could not do; as a israelite, we are forbidden to "worship false idols," and while I am not saying the Buddha is an idol, I cannot bow to a statue, and I cannot pray to anything except G-d. As a israelite, my relationship with G-d should be through the Torah, not through a figure. However, I also love the Buddha; as I said, I love his teachings. I left this meditation tonight, feeling like I can't go back there, I left feeling that my relationship with Buddhism is on pause. I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas as to how I can go forward on my path without abandoning my religious values.
how could somebody devouted to any particular brand of abrahamic faith even take buddhism seriously to begin with? the contradictions were there from the beginning.
https://suttacentral.net/sn22.95/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin
The Buddha uses the same metaphors here that you find in the Prajnaparamita Sutras to explain the illusory nature of phenomena.
>Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they’re freed. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘… there is no return to any state of existence.’”
good, thus the mahayana gurus who created the Prajnaparamita Sutras agree the arahants are fully englithened and the buddha didn't lie in the suttas nor did he leave out anything in order to be fully enlightened.
Buddhas, pratyekabuddhas, and arhats are all equal in liberation from the afflictive obscuration. Pratyekabuddhas and arhats have not completely eliminated the knowledge obscuration, and do not have the omniscience of a Buddha, which is the goal of Mahayana.
The buddha already gave the answer. for people who keep asking what is reborn:
“When a sentient being has laid down this body, Vaccha, and has not been reborn in one of the realms, I say they’re fueled by craving. For craving is their fuel then.”
Exactly.
Nothingness is still a form of Oneness because the matter making up the whole doesn’t particularly matter. Pure being and pure nothing may as well be the same because the only difference is their material makeup.
To answer your question, it is the psycho-physical aggregates which stop reforming after death because their essence has been destroyed. That is how I understand it.
>The 5 aggregates stop reforming after death because their essence has been destroyed
I don't think I get it. What even is this essence?
There's still other sentient beings being born and the new iterations of the aggregates are still giving rise to new consciousness and new identities. Shouldn't the continuous of conscious experience keep on going for as long as there are sentient beings being born? shouldn't nirvana therefore be temporary and last only a single life? what am I missing here?
The self does not persist, but the causal series of impersonal, impermanent psychophysical elements that the self is not do.
web.archive.org/web/20020603010533/http://www4.bayarea.net/~mtlee/
web.archive.org/web/20031220231547/http://www.drba.org/dharma/
web.archive.org/web/20071102120620/http://www.sutrasmantras.info/sutra0.html
web.archive.org/web/20040718233929/http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/
So buddhists are denying that the self dies with the body and the particular iteration of the aggregates and so is actually reincarnating?
I can't unsee the contradiction
The self existing is a directly observable reality. "People" that think the self doesn't exist are NPCs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question
Is it? Do you perceive an independently existing self, or do you perceive the five aggregates and impute self on that basis? Can you perceive a self without perceiving form, feeling, discrimination, mental factors, or consciousness? Is self the same or different as the aggregates?
The relative self exist, the self as an eternal, unchanging thing is just an abstraction of the mind
Black person, the doctrine is that there is no *permanent* self, ie something unchanging that persists through time, what exists is an ever shifting process, like a river or the constantly changing pictures on a movie screen that give the illusion of permanence an a continuous object (when in reality it is only a series of distinct images succeeding one another)
To answer your question though
>Some Buddhist traditions assert that vijñana (consciousness), though constantly changing, exists as a continuum or stream (santana) and is what undergoes rebirth.Some traditions like Theravada assert that rebirth occurs immediately and that no "thing" (not even consciousness) moves across lives to be reborn (though there is a causal link, like when a seal is imprinted on wax). Other Buddhist traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism posit an interim existence (bardo) between death and rebirth, which may last as long as 49 days
It's always the guys throwing free slurs giving bland, generic and unhelpful replies in these threads. See:
I think in the end what I want to know is what the point of reaching nirvana even is if "my self" fricking dies with my body anyway.
I'm not Buddhist but I'd guess that it's because the goal of Buddhism isn't immortality but to eliminate suffering. This is obviously evil
Black person, because nirvana stops the cycle of rebirth, there's nothing unhelpful in my first reply, the problem is you being a dumb Black personhomosexual and not getting it
>the cycle of rebirth
the cycle of what? what rebirths?
The mindstream, which is a continuum of moments of consciousness that cease as soon as they arise
But these moments which compose this specific mindstream are not the components of the rebirthed mindstream that will have different moments.
The mindstream is a serial continuity, the moments composing a mindstream yesterday are different from the moments composing it today, nothing substantially continues from moment to moment or life to life. You really can't even say moments compose a mindstream aside from arbitrarily considering a specific period of time a the mindstream.
I know, but I mean, we have our personal identity based on the continuity of moments we are conscious of having experienced. So yes, the moments of a mindstream would refer to the specific conscious life that has awareness of these moments. But the supposed rebirthed life has nothing of this continuity, it is a totally new mindstream that will be composed by totally new moments. So what is the link?
Thereis no inherently existing self to be annihilated, at death or in nirvana. There is as much continuity between lives as there is between childhood and old age.
The bardo isn't unique to tibetan buddhism, Vasubandhu describes it in the Abhidharmakosha, which is from the perspective of the Sautrantika school. I think Theravada is actually an outlier among the early buddhist schools for rejecting an intermediate state.
There's no bardo in the suttas to begin with, besides a small weird mention about the fruit of stream entry or something before a new brith.
Bardo is really an idea by the chinese and the North indians slowly developing Mahayana.
The cycle IS what is no(n)-self my good chap
Three questions I should have added now that I think of it:
1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
I think its helpful to historicise certain aspects of Buddhism in order to answer that question (although practicing Buddhists won't like that).
Buddhism arose in the Late Vedic Period whenever Northern India was ruled by the Brahman priestly caste. The main teaching of the Vedic philosophy of the time was Atman, which means Self but also something like soul. They taught that the Atman carried on through an individual's many lives. In the Vedic religion the Atman is to be fully identified and joined with Brahman (ultimate reality) through ritual action and that is how a person achieves moksha (liberation), which is generally the goal of all Indian philosophies.
Now Buddhism was part of the wider sramana movement of ascetics who were rebelling against brahmanical society by partaking in self-mortifying practices as opposed to ritual. So in that context, the Buddha taught Anatta (anatman), non-self, to reject Brahman orthodoxy and state the idea that you become liberated by cutting all bonds off from the material world and renouncing all forms of identification.
Hope that helps.
1. Yes, he just stops existing and will not reincarnate because he has completely extinguished his Self.
2. In Buddhism they have levels of enlightenment. In ascending order
a) stream-enterer who will reincarnate but will eventually achieve nirvana
b) a once-returner who will reincarnate once more before achieving enlightenment
c) a non-returner who will reincarnate in a heavenly realm as a spirit/God before enlightment
d) an arahant is someone who becomes fully enlightened and won't reincarnate
3. Remembering past lives is what is called an iddhi which is literally psychic powers attained by extremely enlightened beings lol, other ones are things like teleportation and clairvoyance. I think the idea is that you so thoroughly overcome your identity that you achieve such a trascendent mode of consciousness that you can see beyond your conrete individual form into past lives, into the future, around corners etc etc.
>In the Vedic religion the Atman is to be fully identified and joined with Brahman (ultimate reality) through ritual action
This part isn't correct, the idea which the Hindu scriptures and schools teach is liberation through knowledge/gnosis, this is what the Upanishads (even pre-Buddhist ones) say and not liberation through ritual action. Ritual action only can lead to heaven but not moksha. The non-dualist Vedantins, the Bhakti Vedantins and the Tantrics all agree that it is knowledge/gnosis that liberates but they just explain the details of this and how one arrives at it in different ways.
>the Bhakti Vedantins
This seems strange. I have always conceived Bhakti as emphasizing something along the lines of conventional faith we find in Christianity.
>I have always conceived Bhakti as emphasizing something along the lines of conventional faith we find in Christianity.
They do emphasize the importance of faith but then so do the non-dualist Vedantins. Bhakti Vedantins like Ramanuja conceive of the word Bhakti as denoting the continuous remembrance of God at all times, like a meditation, so liberation happens through the individual striving through their willpower to maintain constant knowledge of God or the Absolute amidst everything else that occurs. Intellectual understanding is important as well since proper meditation on God in their view would sort of presuppose understanding their metaphysics and how they explain the nature of the soul and its relation to God etc, so knowledge is indispensable and central both in the initial acquiring of proper knowledge of the nature of God/soul and also in the act of seeking liberation. The Brahma Sutras don't mention the word Bhakti but they mention upasana (meditation) many times and when they do, Ramanuja and other Bhakti Vedantins interpret it as referring to that kind of continuous remembrance, which they compare to an unbroken stream of oil.
>This part isn't correct, the idea which the Hindu scriptures and schools teach is liberation through knowledge/gnosis, this is what the Upanishads (even pre-Buddhist ones) say and not liberation through ritual action. Ritual action only can lead to heaven but not moksha. The non-dualist Vedantins, the Bhakti Vedantins and the Tantrics all agree that it is knowledge/gnosis that liberates but they just explain the details of this and how one arrives at it in different ways.
And all of those claim are quite late in the hindu chronology. And by the way brahmins defended rituals very very late in the history of hinduism.
> And all of those claim are quite late in the hindu chronology.
The formalization of those schools came later but their doctrines about this are based on pre-Buddhist scriptures like the Vedas and earliest Upanishads which affirm the same ideas about liberation through knowledge. People have always held that idea even before Buddha as shown by it being repeated throughout the early scriptures in addition to later ones.
>He who has realised and intimately known the Self that has entered this perilous and inaccessible place (the body), is the maker of the universe, for he is the maker of all, (all is) his Self, and he again is indeed the Self (of all). Being in this very body we have somehow known that (Brahman). If not, (I should have been) ignorant, (and) great destruction (would have taken place). Those who know It become immortal, while others attain misery alone.
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.13-4.4.14
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is a century or two before Buddha and it talks in numerous places about liberation through knowledge. There are even pre-Upanishad portions of the Veda that say the same thing, like in the Taittiriya Aranyaka of the Yajurveda which is centuries before the earliest Upanishads.
>By knowing Brahman one attains immortality here. There is no other way to its attainment
- Taittiriya Aranyaka 6-1-6
Only the Mimamsa school ever believed in liberation through ritual, most Hindu schools disagree with them. I understand that some Buddhists apparently prefer to believe that all Hindus held this view at the time because this makes Buddha’s teaching seem more revolutionary than it really was, but there is no evidence that it’s true and there is strong evidence that it’s not true, like the aforementioned as well as many other pre-Buddhist textual passages, as well as Buddha’s own attesting in the Pali Canon of the existence of Vedic Brahmins roaming the forests as monks while chanting mantras and subsisting off fruits.
>1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
He achieved parinirvana, which is the last death before you stop being reborn. He did not cease to exist, he still exists, just in a manner different from how he used to exist. He's neither here, nor there, nor neither, nor both. He has attained a state of limitless potentiality beyond all actualization. But, yes, he "disappeared" in a colloquial sense. Theravada tradition holds that his body literally poofed away, leaving only robes and sandals behind.
>2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
What monks do, like what they actually DO all day, is untie the karmic knot that causes rebirth. After one succeeds in doing that, there is no more rebirth. The physical body continues until it uses up its remaining karma (which was acquired in past lives), and then when it dies, parinirvana occurs.
If you mean this soteriologically or harmatiologically, in the sense of "but WHY are there souls in samsara", the answer is that we don't know. Mahayana theology posits that eventually ALL sentient beings will attain nirvana, but what happens after that is unknown. Both the Mahayana and the Theravada waffle back and forth as to whether or not a "chunk of nirvana" can "fall into samsara", resulting in a new soul trapped in ignorance. It's an open issue.
>3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
Buddhist epistemology conceptualizes thoughts as things. The Pali Canon says that they're made out of mind atoms. When you die, they continue on in the same way that your body does. Some of them break apart, but some of them break into pieces that continue with you. Imagine if you died, and your liver got transplanted into a new body: they would have a "past life liver". Now imagine if your memory of your 15th-birthday got transplanted into someone after you died: they would have a "past life memory". See how that works?
>okay but WHY does that happen?
Buddhism has a whole cosmology and epistemology going on here, the tl;dr is that memories aren't necessarily "in time", hence why a Buddha can access past lives so easily (they can "think the right way" to pull them from the ether, in a sense).
>>He achieved parinirvana, which is the last death before you stop being reborn. He did not cease to exist, he still exists, just in a manner different from how he used to exist. He's neither here, nor there, nor neither, nor both. He has attained a state of limitless potentiality beyond all actualization.
That's not what the buddha said and it's completely idiotic to cling to the fantasy of potentiality by the non-enlightened people
>If there's no self then what is escaping the cycle of rebirth through nirvana?
the cycle of rebirths is just the aggregates rising again, because the condition for their non-arising is still not triggered
>1. Did the buddha, whatever he was after reaching nirvana, cease existing upon death?
The buddha said it's a stupid question to ask whether he or any enlightened dude exists or not
>2. How could "he", whatever the frick "he" was after reaching nirvana, not just experience rebirth and the stream of consciousness once again (not just get re-hijacked into samsara again like "we" will if "we" die without reaching enlightenment)?
being enlightened means there's no condition for birth, and the aggregate of consciousness can't arise anymore
>3. How could he remember things from "his" past lives?
He just said he thought about going back in the chain of births, when he was meditating.
it's moving towards a collective dissolution into oblivion
I know this philosopher didn’t work within a knowledge of eastern thought (how could he?) but On the Nature of Man by Polybus has an interesting philosophic discourse at the very beginnings which I see as relevant to Buddhism and to the theistic religions.
https://archive.org/details/hippocrates04hippuoft/hippocrates04hippuoft/page/3/mode/1up?view=theater
>they say what is is a “unity” but disagree as to its name
If everything in the universe shares in the quality of not being real then that is essentially the same as it all sharing in the quality of realness. The essence which they share is very minor. The relevant part is that all share of it.
A soul joins heaven after death in Christianity and the physical-aggregates join non-existence in the exact same manner in Buddhism but it is a manner of the material composition of this realm.
It's a stupid religion full of contradictions and absurdities. Literally Buddha claimed psychic powers, ability to walk through walls, levitate and fly around to the sun and moon and speak with saints and devils. The whole religion is built on this fantastical cosmology of like 32 realms of existence with hungry ghosts, torture realms, deva realms etc. It's just moronic.
Also the whole idea is this is all so shit the highest aim is a sort of cosmic suicide.
Me
>your friends and family don't matter, only escaping your suffering by any means necessary does
jesus taught this exact thing you dumb christer
> Jesus telling anyone to escape suffering
> The main emblem of the religion is an implement used for crucifying people, and the idea is that you're supposed to carry your own
We aren't meant to escape from "the world" in Christianity? Why did so many saints commit suicide by Roman cop? Why is it easier for slaves and peasants to enter "heaven"?
Slaves and peasants don't have to go out and find suffering. It's where they already are. Escaping the "world" doesn't mean struggling less. Ask St. Anthony the Great if he "struggled less"
>Ask St. Anthony the Great if he "struggled less"
Oh wait is this the guy who founded western monasticism? But
said that monastic religion and renunciation were satanism. Why are you guys so dishonest?
In Christianity, when you have Faith in Jesus, you don't suffer anymore. Your body might be in tremendous pain, and yet you don't suffer. It's crazy how you can't see that Buddhism tries to achieve the same thing. You are arguing with the other anon over semantics.
You're addressing the problem wrong, you're viewing this from a the pointbof view of a sustantialist ontology, that is, from the notion that a substance is needed as the essence of a thing, this goes against the notion of anatta (no-soul) buddhism don't get rid of the 5 skhandas to "free" some soul or substance or thing, buddhism is a process oriented ontology,which take becoming and transformation into consideration, things get their identity not from an essence but from the relational process in which they exist and their natural quality to change, when you complete a process what you get is the result, and that's nirvana, completing the process of samsara let the tranformation onto nirvana, there's nothing left of samsara there, just like a butterfly is no longer a caterpillar, what you're asking, in a buddhist context, is like asking where's the caterpillar after he tranformed into a butterfly, the question doesn't make any sense because it doesn't take change and transformation into consideration, freeing yourself from samsara means that ypu changed in such a radical way your existence goes beyond samsara
It's escaping the karmic system, not yourself. Karma means adversary. Good deeds can bring bad karma.
in a just world, mass replying would warrant an automatic permaban. homosexuals like you are the biggest piece of shit Black folk on IQfy smdh
>if there's no real ship, what keeps getting rebuilt?!
thats how you sound
This exact problem is Buddhism version of problem of evil.
What determines what is good and what is evil in Buddhism?
There's good karma and bad karma. It's not the buddha who created the universe and karma.
Then there's good activities to end suffering and bad activities to end suffering. Again it's not the buddha who created those and the 8 fold path.
Whoever created the universe and the mechanism of karma and rebirth did a sloppy job by allowing the backdoor that is the 8 fold path to get out of his evil creation.
>Whoever created the universe and the mechanism of karma and rebirth did a sloppy job by allowing the backdoor that is the 8 fold path to get out of his evil creation.
Did it though? This sounds incredibly arrogant, at least on paper. How do we know that this creator did not leave a purposeful backdoor for beings with strong enough will so they don't have to be stuck here against their will?
But how can things be good and bad for an impersonal cosmic force?
the good and bad refer to the place of the birth: the hierarchy is that the highest realms (=birth places) have the most pleasures because the pleasure there is not sensory but only like in meditation.
The lowest realms are full of suffering like anger, hate and delusion so they are called a bad place to get reborn into.
The drawback of the highest realms is that the devas are too busy enjoy themselves to understand buddhism so at the end they fall back in hell.
But isn’t the fact that good and bad refer to actions here in this world? Not good or bad places, but good or bad actions here and now, in the world.
yeah but good actions lead ppl to a good place of birth, bad actions lead ppl to a bad place of birth. That's all there is to it.
Yes but how there is judgment of value of actions in what is an impersonal world or group of realms? Or there is a personal creator in Buddhism too?
okey what you want to know is the precise mechanism of karma. Sadly the buddha doesn't dwell much on this, because it's not needed to end suffering.
In any case, there's no judgement by anybody. When an action is done, it has a little flag attached to it and then there is ripening of the fruit of karma which makes ppl suffer and have pleasure.
To know more about karma you can read this https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/kamma.html
More generally, there's a ton of essays on this, it's classified here
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/index-subject.html#kamma
Yeah, that’s the issue here. I can’t understand how this flag is supposed to be an impersonal conditioning despite ascribing a value that can only be ascribed by personal judgments.
I’ll read what the links you posted, thanks.
the first link has a long exposition due to the suttas, but the quick intro is here https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/karma.html
also in buddhism it's important to thin kin terms of ''tendencies''.
The point is that it's hard to pinpoint one act to one karmic result [=affliction], but everybody want sot know what some atomic action will bring as a karmic fruit. The buddha doesn't answer this.
Interesting article by Thanissaro, although I think he put too much emphasis on a Western distortion of the fatalistic conception of karma, which I have seen many Buddhists (Chan, Zen iirc) hold too. But at least he also recognized that this was common among Hinduists and these Asian Buddhists.
But yeah my main problem here is that the world’s mechanism conditions not only physically but also morally, making physical cause-effect relation be transposed to intentions, like human law (even human law is more concrete since intentions are not always punishable like physical effects). But I guess this is what is defined as one of the imponderables.
But why are there things such as good and bad karma? Why does Buddhism have a moral element to it at all if the point is to escape suffering?
>>But why are there things such as good and bad karma?
it's the way the universe is set
>Why does Buddhism have a moral element to it at all if the point is to escape suffering?
the morality in buddhism is here to improve your meditative life. It's literally a tool to depollute the mind and prepare it for meditation. Again it's not the buddha who decided it's this way to escape suffering. It's just the way it is.
Look I get your point but if you go into a debate being that uncharitable a lot of the same complaints could be leveled at Christianity, especially the form Americans popularize.
I don't agree with Buddhism's final conclusion, at least the original one, but it has been around in Asia long enough that just like Christianity in the west more than enough life-affirming sects and ideas have grown out of it.
All of these beliefs about impermanence and illusion seem to go back to monism, in which case to me it seems nothing is stopping this thing from repeating in limitless forms infinitely. Who can really make heads or tails of the metaphysical though?
>All of these beliefs about impermanence and illusion seem to go back to monism
Why?
I mean we did come from a big bang, so science also seems to be in agreement with Monism
>in which case to me it seems nothing is stopping this thing from repeating in limitless forms infinitely
This is true
Buddhism isn't monistic, there is no substrate to reality. The universe is cyclical and was never created.
I'm ignorant to all the different branches so I guess I hazard lumping ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, Advaita etc together. I guess the Buddha himself didn't see the point in conjecture on certain topics, but to me from everything I've read, the logical extreme of it all seems to either point to a grand container or a grand nothingness, but either way it all seems to point toward monism from my understanding. So if it really is just phenomenological or a grand dreamer, or just experience from alternate perspectives and if all of this is happening within the infinite (which I find difficult to deny) then this would render the idea of nirvana pointless in the literal sense, since the being would have no ultimate essence and eventually everything would play out again, unless there's this little slice of infinite that gets preserved for enlightened mentations, which seems to be suggested by other belief systems as well. Or maybe its meant to be taken metaphorically, that there is no death and rebirth because there is no longer a self to die and be reborn, or maybe it's the Dao that can't be spoken and therefore already corrupt the moment it meets the intellect, I have no idea.
There is only illusory dependent arising, there is no basis and no container can be established, but there is not nothing either, because things clearly appear. The illusory nature of everything does not make nirvana pointless, because we are still under the influence of this illusion and suffer because of it.
So nirvana then is the temporary conveyor out of illusion after which it isn't needed? The raft allegory? That much makes sense but the rest still doesn't. Thanks.
is only illusory dependent arising
The buddha never said dependent origination is illusory.
the official cosmology in buddhism is just a sequence of contraction and expansion of the universe, ie the pile of life realms.
It's what the buddha claimed when he determined his past lives. The official wording for ''the skill of remembering past lives'' is :
>16.1And moreover, sir, how the Buddha teaches the knowledge of recollecting past lives is unsurpassable. 16.2It’s when some ascetic or brahmin—by dint of keen, resolute, committed, and diligent effort, and right application of mind—experiences an immersion of the heart of such a kind that they recollect their many kinds of past lives. 16.3That is: one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rebirths; many eons of the world contracting, many eons of the world expanding, many eons of the world contracting and expanding. They remember: 16.4‘There, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn somewhere else. There, too, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn here.’ And so they recollect their many kinds of past lives, with features and details. 16.5Sir, there are gods whose life span cannot be reckoned or calculated. 16.6Still, no matter what incarnation they have previously been reborn in—whether physical or formless or percipient or non-percipient or neither percipient nor non-percipient—16.7they recollect their many kinds of past lives, with features and details. 16.8This is unsurpassable when it comes to the knowledge of recollecting past lives.
https://suttacentral.net/dn28/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=none&highlight=false&script=latin#15.10
So it's the same stuff going through a cycle, but there's a way to escape that cycle forever? Also how would you describe dependent origination because I feel like I've seen a few descriptions that seem to define it differently, one being related to perception of all things and one being the interrelated nature of all things, somewhat related by subtly different concepts.
>>So it's the same stuff going through a cycle, but there's a way to escape that cycle forever?
yeah that's the entirety of Buddha's teaching
There's only one dependent origination : it's the 5 aggregates are conditioned. To stay on the DN side of the suttas the full exposition is here
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.15.0.than.html
>interrelated nature of all things
that's a mahayana idea precisely to turn buddhism into a religion which has its core composed of a generic acosmic blob, like hinduism. But then they can't explain how illusion and suffering arise, the personalization of this generic blob into humans and the diversity of the flora and fauna, and they can't explain why figuring out that 100% of life stems from this generic blob makes suffering disappear.
acosmism is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acosmism
Thank you for the text references. This is a lot for me to digest but it's all very good.
>that's a mahayana idea
No, that's the Abhidharma karana hetu. "Everything is connected" is not the profound emptiness of Mahayana.
>>No, that's the Abhidharma karana hetu
? karanahetu is just the immediate causes of something under consideration, it's not all the entirety of all the dharmas ever
and interdependence is what he meant and that's definitely (proto-)mahayana
Any phenomena has as its supporting cause all phenomena other than itself, because they do not interfere in its existence.
>interdependence
This isn't a Mahayana doctrine. Some modern Mahayana teachers have translated dependent origination as "codependence" or "inter being," but this really isn't accurate. Dependent origination means the same thing in Mahayana as it does in Theravada, the only difference is that Mahayana takes dependent origination to its logical conclusion of emptiness and nonarising.
The primary definition of dependent origination is the 12 links, ignorance, formations, consciousness, name and form, the six sense organs, contact, feeling, craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age and death.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.015.than.html
>Where this exists, that exists, where this arose, that arises; where this does not exist, that does not exist, where this has ceased, that ceases
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.061.than.html
This is the most important teaching in the Buddhadharma
For general knowledge and to put this in the archive, Selfhood or ''personal nature'' is attabhava in pali
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.09.0.than.html#fn-9
>Acquisition of a self (atta-pa.tilaabho): According to the Commentary, this refers to the acquisition of an individual identity (attabhaava-pa.tilaabho) on any of the three levels of becoming: the sensual level, the level of form, and the formless level. The term attabhaava-pa.tilaabho is used in a number of suttas — among them AN 4.192 — where it definitely refers to the type of identity one assumes on experiencing rebirth in a particular level of being. However, there are two reasons for not following the Commentary's equation of atta-pa.tilaabho with attabhaava-pa.tilaabho. (1) As AN 4.72 makes clear, there is a type of attabhaava-pa.tilaabho — rebirth in the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception — that would not be covered by any of the three types of acquisition of a self mentioned in this sutta. Thus the Buddha seems to be limiting his discussion here to the alternative selves posited by Potthapada. (2) In a later passage in this sutta, the Buddha refers to the acquisition of a self as something he can point to directly in his listeners' immediate range of experience. Thus the term would seem to refer to the sense of self one can attain as a result of different levels of experience in meditation here and now.
https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/attabhava
There's a sutta where the word is used
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel303.html#misc
Khandha Samyutta No. 117
It was said that one should know the feelings, their conditioned origin, their diversity, their outcome, their cessation, and the way to their cessation. Why was this said?
What are the feelings? These three: pleasant, painful, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant.
What is the conditioned origin of these feelings? Sense-impression is the conditioned origin of the feelings.
What is the diversity in feelings? There are pleasant feelings, worldly and unworldly; there are painful feelings, worldly and unworldly; and there are neutral feelings, worldly and unworldly.
What is the outcome of feelings? It is the personalized existence (attabhava) born of this or that (feeling), be it of a meritorious or demeritorious character, which one who feels causes to arise.
What is the cessation of feelings? It is the cessation of sense impression that is the cessation of feelings.
And it is the noble eightfold path that is the way leading to the cessation of feelings, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
If a noble disciple knows in such way the feelings, their conditioned origin, their diversity, their outcome, their cessation, and the way to their cessation, he will be one who knows this penetrative Holy Life, namely the cessation of feelings.
> dude there is an impersonal absolute reality where we all one and this world of appearances and thoughts is an illusion, except my thought about this being the case though that is totally not an illusion because I said so
Buddhism in a nut shell
You can admire this or that aspect of Buddhism obviously but you have to be a real idiot to be a Buddhist to be quite honest
That's Advaita Vedanta not Buddhism
moron
Jews can't understand buddhism
https://old.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/1bqd422/i_an_observant_jew_just_went_to_a_buddhist_temple/
>I am an observant israelite. I follow the commandments of the Torah, believe in one G-d, etc. Over the years, I have grown a deep love for the Buddha's teachings. This began through basic mindfulness meditation, which I began practicing almost daily years ago. Later I began reading books about the Buddhas teachings and Buddhist psychology. Tonight, for the first time, I went to a Buddhist temple to attend a meditation session led by a monk. There were aspects I really enjoyed; the loving-kindness meditation, walking meditation, and breath meditation. However, there were aspects that made me feel very uncomfortable. In the beginning, it seemed like a prayer was being made to the Buddha (or at least the giant statue of the Buddha placed in the temple). At the end, everyone bowed on their hands and knees to the Buddha statue. Both of these things I could not do; as a israelite, we are forbidden to "worship false idols," and while I am not saying the Buddha is an idol, I cannot bow to a statue, and I cannot pray to anything except G-d. As a israelite, my relationship with G-d should be through the Torah, not through a figure. However, I also love the Buddha; as I said, I love his teachings. I left this meditation tonight, feeling like I can't go back there, I left feeling that my relationship with Buddhism is on pause. I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas as to how I can go forward on my path without abandoning my religious values.
Certain devout Christians would say the exact same thing.
how could somebody devouted to any particular brand of abrahamic faith even take buddhism seriously to begin with? the contradictions were there from the beginning.
>buddhism's not a religion it's just a philosophy bro
>
https://suttacentral.net/sn22.95/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin
The Buddha uses the same metaphors here that you find in the Prajnaparamita Sutras to explain the illusory nature of phenomena.
>Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they’re freed. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘… there is no return to any state of existence.’”
good, thus the mahayana gurus who created the Prajnaparamita Sutras agree the arahants are fully englithened and the buddha didn't lie in the suttas nor did he leave out anything in order to be fully enlightened.
Buddhas, pratyekabuddhas, and arhats are all equal in liberation from the afflictive obscuration. Pratyekabuddhas and arhats have not completely eliminated the knowledge obscuration, and do not have the omniscience of a Buddha, which is the goal of Mahayana.
>If there's no self then what is escaping the cycle of rebirth through nirvana?
That's what we'd ALL like to know...
The buddha already gave the answer. for people who keep asking what is reborn:
“When a sentient being has laid down this body, Vaccha, and has not been reborn in one of the realms, I say they’re fueled by craving. For craving is their fuel then.”
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.009.than.html
Buddhism won.