Earliest sentiments(?) and Jaspers - long

[Operacast]

Originally Posted by Vajradhara

Namate operacast,


thank you for the attribution post

<SNIP>this represents the Hinyana view which is what the Buddha taught for the first 10 years of so after his enlightenment. however, the Buddha taught two other philosophical tenet systems, Mahayana and Vajarayana, in the subsequent years of his teachings.

it is difficult to say which of these represents the "true" voice.

Understood. Basically, I have decided to err in all four instances on the side of the earliest articulation, as that can best be guessed, given the highly speculative nature of much of the research that has transpired on each of these "founders".

Taking the earliest -- as that can best be determined -- doesn't necessarily debunk the authenticity of later developments of a given doctrine, of course. But guessing at the earliest can -- sometimes -- furnish us precious inklings of a highly altruistic impulse in its first flush of inspiration.

Essentially, I understand that Mahayana directs itself more wholly toward the outward social implications of the strict self-mastery explored with greater specificity in the earlier Hinayana tradition. A simplification, granted, but a rough approximation of the difference between the two......perhaps?

However, I have to concede to being relatively ignorant of the Vajarayana tradition. Please, would you say that that lies somewhere in a continuum related to the differences between the Hinayana and Mahayana traditions, or entirely outside of either?

Sincere thanks,

Geoffrey Riggs

[Vajradhara]

Namaste operacast,


thank you for the post.

generally speaking, the Mahayana is distinguished from the Hinyana by it's emphasis on the emptiness of other. Hinyana tenet systems do have emptiness of self as a foundational aspect, however, there is no emptiness of other in this stage of the teachings.

the Vajrayana is, essentially, Mahayana Buddhism... with some differences, to be sure, that are mostly concerned with the length of time that is required to reap the fruit of our efforts along the Bodhisattva path.

generally speaking, it's said to take 3 Maha Kalpas once one has entered the Bodhisattva path. the Vajrayana, however, says that one can achieve this in one life span.

from the view of the Vajrayana schools we'd view it sort of like this... (please pardon the similie of a house):

the Hinyana represents the foundation of Buddhism. no matter which school you may practice, the foundation of Buddhism is the same and the foundation must be strong to build upon. the Mahayana, then, represent the walls of the house. decorated and hung with jewels, the walls must be solid and firm to support the roof, which is the Vajrayana.

they "inter-are" with eachother though they foucs on different things. if that makes sense.

[Susma Rio Sep]

Dear Opera:

I must commend you first for the amount of work you did in reading and in typing or at least cutting and pasting with some formatting of your materials in this forum.

That speaks a lot of your interest and patience and perseverance in bringing to posters here and guests knowledge of religions and philosophies.

My concern here is somewhat rather simplistic, as maybe our good friend, Vaj, is already familiar with, but no less relevant to simple people who do have to get to heaven or whatever after death lot they are preoccupied with.

I make a distinction between elites of a religion and the masses. Elites are people like you and Vaj. I am a simple member of the masses. Now elites I think make up at most only .00001 part of religious peoples on the face of the earth.

How much of religious instructions and beliefs must a man of the masses know and accept and be committed to in order to attain salvation, or to arrive at the lot destined for mankind in the after death world?


Would you like to make a very easy experiment? Look around your neighborhood and see what kinds of religions people are members of. Ask them these very ordinary questions:

1. What god(s) or religious teachers do you believe in?

2. What do you hope to obtain in your religion?

3. What are you to believe and to observe in order to obtain what your religion holds forth for you?

4. Are you happy with your religion?

May I start with you, can you answer for me in very simple words those four questions, without consulting the literature of your religion?

Susma Rio Sep

[Operacast]

As usual, this posting has come out far longer than I had originally intended..............<grumble, grumble, grumble>

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

Dear Opera:

<SNIP>How much of religious instructions and beliefs must a man of the masses know and accept and be committed to in order to attain salvation, or to arrive at the lot destined for mankind in the after death world?

That's a large question. To answer it adequately -- and much thanks for the question, BTW -- requires considerable candor on my part and my willingness to tackle certain premises that may lie in back of the question as well.

Actually -- and I sincerely hope this may not offend anyone here unduly -- I don't necessarily take it as a given that there is an afterlife in the generally understood meaning of that term. After all, plenty of genuinely altruistic pioneers of the past 5000 years have coupled a clearly sincere form of engagement both with deity and with fundamentally enlightened and pathbreaking social and ethical reform without necessarily tying everything to literal concepts concerning a specific afterlife as such.

Even Confucius and Socrates, two of the four singled out here, specifically imply that one cannot truly know all the dynamics of an afterlife or even if there is one (in fact, Socrates toys with the latter at one point in the Apology, even though he seems to conclude, in the Phaedo, that there is an afterlife after all; but the Apology is a significantly earlier Dialogue, let's not forget, and generally judged to be more scrupulously reflective of Socrates' own thoughts than are the later writings).

And Buddha's concept of an "afterlife" is as much bound up with continual lives here on earth as with any other dimension. Even Nirvana -- as I understand it -- is not made as concrete in its details as is the afterlife of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

Since the most enlightened avatars of enlightenment throughout written history are not in universal agreement concerning the dynamics of an afterlife, that has meant that it has not ended up -- for me -- as the kind of overarching concern that it undoubtedly is for many others.

If there is any lot destined for mankind at all, I would judge it to be a brotherly lot in which eventually all live peacefully and prosperously in full recognition of the imperative -- both an idealistic and a pragmatic imperative at one and the same time, once the planet becomes small enough psychologically, as it certainly continues to do every day -- that each of us spend each of our lives helping each other.

If deity exists after all, we may not truly know deity until there is no pocket of selfishness left anywhere among any human beings. That may be the real moment when what is really the afterlife begins. Who knows? Clearly, this is merely one person's guess. The notion that the true nature of deity will only be known the second there is no more inter-human hate of any kind anywhere in this world may seem preposterously far-fetched -- and I acknowledge it as strictly a guess made after synthesizing a fair amount of rather extensive reading in many different doctrines throughout history.

Whether "salvation" be understood in this sense or in the traditional one, I do not view it as essential that one be well versed, read up, whatever, in any specific doctrine at all. Instead, a straightforward recognition of the moral claims for empathy for all who are around us, including this entire creation, if creation it be, seems more than sufficient, IMO, to attain "salvation". It depends, above all, on everyone being alert and empathetic in this same way.

Sure, it's great that there is the occasional lone Nelson Mandela-type figure out there, and such a figure definitely contributes his own special light, which helps the cause of reconciliation, forgiveness and brotherhood in his little corner of the globe. But true "salvation" may occur only when everyone everywhere is enlightened in exactly the same way. Who knows? And for that, extensive reading is hardly a sine qua non. Only empathy and selflessness is.

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

Would you like to make a very easy experiment? Look around your neighborhood and see what kinds of religions people are members of. Ask them these very ordinary questions:

1. What god(s) or religious teachers do you believe in?

Since you suggest (below) that I try my hand at responding to these questions myself, I'm happy to do so here. And sure, no consultation of any primary texts needed

For#1, I do not actually have a specific belief either in a specific deity or specific deities. But I do credit the notion of Deity generally. Monotheism and polytheism may be equally true in a sense. Think of a network -- it can be any kind of network, electric grid, television network, whatever -- and that may give some notion of what I provisionally believe for now. A network can be taken as both plural and singular. There are individual "stations" that can be judged as various or even plural. OTOH, such "stations" -- relay stations or whatever -- could be taken as parts of a greater whole. It's conceivable, IMO, that Deity works in a similar way, and that it is that that the altruistic adepts like Buddha and Jesus are responding to -- if they are not actual constituent parts of Deity in some way!

As for specific teachers, I am most fascinated by those teachers to whom not a whiff of violence or rash conduct has ever been attached. This appears to be true of the four that Jaspers singled out. So if I were to say which teachers I take as my mentors -- or would-be mentors, since I don't pretend to live a blameless life the way these four may very well have -- I'd probably cite these same four figures above and beyond all others. Furthermore, I don't, frankly, view it as contradictory to concentrate on four different doctrines simultaneously, particularly when their earliest primary texts have so many striking things in common -- IMO.

In my private life, I was married in a Presbyterian Church, and I remain a comfortable congregant there to this day, even though I still view Buddha, Confucius and Socrates as essentially equal to Jesus.

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

2. What do you hope to obtain in your religion?

An understanding of what makes successful social reformers tick.

Why did Mandela succeed in bringing reconciliation and forgiveness to his little corner of the globe while Urukagina (the first known social reformer, back in ca. 2300 in Sumeria, the figure who first propounded the concept that his own deity obliged him to protect the weak from the strong) ended up as a footnote in history, an exile, with his city, Lagash, burned to ashes? That is a crucial question, IMHO.

Is there a template that one can discern among successfully influential pathbreakers like Confucius that can teach us valuable lessons today? Sometimes, timely warnings today that we must live in peace and harmony with each other or perish fall on deaf ears. But sometimes they are heard. Why the differences in levels of success? If it's possible to know why, then let's learn why.

Since I regard it as axiomatic that people today who are fifty or younger may very well experience the total destruction of all human civilization in their own lifetimes -- if, that is, we continue to muddle through as we have been, risking either cataclysmic killings through purblind hatred, or ecological collapse through tragically lazy time-wasting and inaction, or some other similar catastrophe, thanks to the general refusal to acknowledge that the global village is small enough today for cooperation on everything to be an absolute must, not merely a luxury -- it seems essential, IMO, that humanity be inspired to see itself as one ("We're all in this together") sooner rather than later.

This no longer strikes me as a simple matter of idealism any more. Rather, it has become the most urgent matter of the purest pragmatism today. In fact, there may be so little time left that the simple drudgery of plodding through with whatever daily uninspiring precautions our lazy small-minded leaders may grudgingly afford us may be too little too late.

Instead, true inspiration from some gentle Mandela-type figure (or a Confucius figure, or a Jesus figure, etc.) may be required on a global scale. Something that will seize the imagination of all humanity quickly, and that will fast-forward the "neighboring" process, so to speak, of the world.

So, in answer to your question, I hope to obtain from a number of different -- and equally enlightened -- religions, or rather original religious founders, some glimmer of insight into how these figures managed to inspire their brethren into caring for each other more conscientiously than had been the case before their particular reformer (Buddha or whoever) came along.

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

3. What are you to believe and to observe in order to obtain what your religion holds forth for you?

That there is an innate urge in every human being to get along with everyone, however much certain societies may have succeeded in stifling that instinct amongst too many of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, it is an instinct that shares one salient characteristic with numerous other instincts already highlighted by Darwin, Wallace, Gould and many others: to wit, that characteristic is an urge for survival, plain and simple.

Survival dictates that we get along with everybody sooner or later. That means that, in turn, the urge to get along with everybody is inseparable from a survival instinct. Today, the necessary symbiosis of the two has become an unavoidable, almost deadly, bind. Failure to respond to this symbiosis in practical ways entails inevitable destruction for all of us -- IMO, granted. And this is a fatal symbiosis that has never faced humanity before in such a stark and chilling -- and unavoidable -- way.

We've painted ourselves into a corner. Now what do we do?

One human being alone can only respect and can only acknowledge and can only "observe", to use your apt term, the ultimate humanity of all who are around one. I don't pretend to do that perfectly. I muddle through, like the rest of us. And if there is a deity, I try to glimpse his ways through studying the more gentle and inspired of those teachers who have possibly tried to impart Deity's true nature through the millennia.

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

4. Are you happy with your religion?

On the one hand, I'm reasonably content that the key to observance of God's or of Deity's ways is scrupulous attention to ethics and to the imperatives of caring for those not able to care for themselves.

In fact, I should add that I came to an acceptance of the probable existence of Deity through careful study of the great ethics teachers of the past. In other words, I came to a provisional acceptance of Deity's existence -- faith, if you will -- by way of an initial interest in strictly the dynamics of successful social reform only, and in the great pioneers in ethics and social reform who have "come down the transom". I did not come to an involvement with the history of pathbreaking ethics through starting out with a belief in Deity or God. Rather, it was the other way around.

It's arguable that many others have become involved with What Is Good (whatever that means) through first believing in God. My story is precisely the opposite. It was the discoveries of the proclivities of ethics reformers "on the ground" that led me to a -- provisional -- belief in Deity.

On the other hand, I'm not happy with my religion in one sense. Since my beliefs are so taken up in the necessity that everybody else start sharing responsibility for each other's needs right now, any stories of the neglect, the stupidity, the violence, the ignorance, the laziness, and more, of our many leaders -- and the brainwashed citizenries who occasionally march in lockstep with them -- upset me profoundly. (The only reason why I haven't thrown a shoe at the TV long ago is because I'm not made of money and I can't easily replace it )

As usual, I've gone beyond the bounds of all courtesy in letting myself go on at length in this way . It would be nice to be convinced that I have exaggerated the state of emergency that I believe the globe to be in today. Believe me, I am open to persuasion. I'd love to be persuaded, if for no other reason than that I happen to have two big music articles due out very soon, and I need to get my head out of the doldrums or be canned.

A penny for your thoughts?

Best,

G. Riggs

[Susma Rio Sep]

Dear G. Riggs:

It's Sunday in my part of the world. And I want to tell you sincerely that I haven't read so good a sermon for so long.

No, you are not a playback recording machine.

So, I will impose upon you with this question, but nothing against Buddhists:

Tell me, in your informed and well-versed knowledge of Buddhism, what do you think of Buddhist metaphysics, please, in your own personal appreciation.

I hope that I will continue to learn more from you and your knowledge and your insights.

Thanks, and again, for a very good Sunday sermon.

Susma Rio Sep

[Operacast]

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

Dear G. Riggs:

It's Sunday in my part of the world. And I want to tell you sincerely that I haven't read so good a sermon for so long.

Thank you for saying that. I have to wonder, though, about my own sincerity if, after saying some, perhaps, rather idealistic things(?) of my own, I then keep an apparent enthusiast like you waiting for nearly twenty days(!) before replying to the following (my regrets for the wait)............:

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

Tell me, in your informed and well-versed knowledge of Buddhism, what do you think of Buddhist metaphysics, please, in your own personal appreciation.

Alas, you overestimate my erudition -- and underestimate my capacity at conning readers here ! Don't forget this is strictly a hobby for me, not a professional discipline.

I suppose -- and posters here like Vajradhara are undoubtedly far more qualified than I am to address this -- that there are two chief realms entailed in Buddhist metaphysics: the journey for each individual soul, which is ultimately a part of one large soul; and the pantheon of supra-human beings (or deities), a pantheon that is largely, though not entirely, inherited from Hinduism.

How much of this are we to take literally, and how much symbolically? Believe it or not, many a reference book that I have read makes the glib (IMO) statement that Buddhism is essentially atheistic! For me, though, frankly, anyone who has properly grasped what atheism is (and too many uncomprehending, perhaps lazy, perhaps cowardly[?] encyclopedias/reference tools out there prevaricate and obscure what atheism chiefly is, IMO) could never apply atheism to Buddha.

In fact, what emerges from Buddha's articulation of humanity and its -- and Deity's -- place in the cosmos is a construct more akin to Epicurus than to Critias.

Critias is the earliest writer in Western culture (a Greek in the time of Socrates) to espouse overtly the notion that Deity itself is a fiction cobbled together by homo sapiens, while Epicurus (and Lucretius, whose The Nature of Things is the locus classicus for the full articulation of the Epicurus philosophy) judges Deity (or deities) to be a reality, but one that has little significant impact on human doings. Everyone whom I know personally who claims to be an atheist would candidly associate themselves more with the Critias stance than with the Epicurus one. Yet it is the Epicurus one that more closely mirrors (though it is not identical to) Buddha's. That is not atheism.

There are, at the same time, profound implications in Buddha's judging Deity as not universally influential on the human "comedy". There is, actually, a fairly amusing Digha-Nikaya dialogue (the Kevaddha Sutta: Sutta 11, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/sutta/digha/dn11.html) in which a monk manages to travel through the various realms where the various "deities" in the Hindu pantheon abide. His question is blunt but knotty at the same time: "Where do these four great elements -- the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property -- cease without remainder?"

He eventually makes his way all the way up to Brahma himself and poses the same question. Brahma at first evades the question: "I, monk, am Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be.'

The monk repeats the question: "Friend, I didn't ask you if you were Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. I asked you where these four great elements -- the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property -- cease without remainder."

And Brahma yet again repeats the same formulation in response!

Finally, when pressed, Brahma sheepishly takes the monk aside: "These gods of the retinue of Brahma believe, 'There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not know. There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not see. There is nothing of which the Great Brahma is unaware. There is nothing that the Great Brahma has not realized.' That is why I did not say in their presence that I, too, don't know where the four great elements... cease without remainder. So you have acted wrongly, acted incorrectly, in bypassing the Blessed One [i.e., Buddha] in search of an answer to this question elsewhere. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers it, you should take it to heart."

In other words, Buddha, or _a_ Buddha -- the word is also a generic term, meaning, essentially, someone finally freed from the painful cycle of continuous reincarnation, among other things -- can attain knowledge denied to the gods.

The soul's journey, as Buddha conceives it, is largely a lonely one, achieving enlightenment through continued reincarnations, sometimes entailing the attainment of a wisdom the gods themselves might envy.

At the end of this process -- if one is lucky -- there is "Nibbana" (as rendered in the Pali, although the later Sanskrit "Nirvana" is the more familiar and perhaps less authentic[?] term). There are almost as many suppositions concerning the essence of Nibbana as there are writers grappling with it! Some take it as death, pure and simple, and a death that is finally free of further reincarnations, thus suggesting that non-existence is the ultimate goal after all, since there is such awful suffering in this world that a reprieve from continued existence is really a favor anyway.

Un-consciousness, un-existence, annihilation, and so on, is thus the ultimate absolute blessing. (I don't recall whether there are any doctrinal strictures concerning suicide, but I _believe_[?] that suicide simply brings on yet another -- suffering -- incarnation, making it useless toward attaining ultimate Nibbana.........?)

Another understanding of Nibbana supposes that it entails, instead, the merging of the wandering and long reincarnated and reincarnated and reincarnated soul with the single large soul of which every soul is a part. Thus, Nibbana entails the attainment of a "large" psychic existence beyond the here and now in which inner contentment, oneness with the vastness of all sentient beings, and a capacity to exercise one's love of all consciousness in all that is conscious and sentient in the cosmos without the added burdens of suffering and loss is now possible. This is why the capacity to begin exercising and developing such a universal love for and consciousness toward all that is sentient and conscious in the here and now, to begin with, is so critical to attaining such an eventual existence in Nibbana. The mindset of Nibbana right here is what is needed first toward the attainment of Nibbana for real at the end of our long journey.

This is a drastically simplified description of the process, but it will hopefully stimulate others here, like Vajradhara, to amplify and correct what I've only sketched out here.

The Hindu pantheon is huge. But, while the Hindu pantheon is largely adopted in Buddha, what is missing from the Buddhist pantheon (and this is hardly inconsequential) is the concept of either an absolute Creator or an absolute Knower among the various godlike beings. In fact, there is no deity in Buddha who either knows all that is or is responsible for it.

In Buddhism, we see a development of an already elaborate Hindu pantheon, with extra elements being gradually added on above and beyond what we see in the earliest Pali tradition. Terms such as the following hardly cover everything, but they give an inkling of the sheer complexity involved.

There is Brahma, who is supreme, although there can sometimes be more than one Brahma; the "Deva", an associate deitic being that is roughly comparable to the gods of the Greek pantheon; "Gandhabbas", celestial musicians who act as attendants on the Devas; "Garudas", giant birds usually at war with the "Nagas", the most complex and hard-to-define non-human beings, wise and powerful, sometimes supernatural snakes, sometimes supernatural elephants; Yakkhas, first conceived as ambivalent creatures, who might sometimes be believers in the enlightenment of a Buddha and sometimes not, but later conceived as considerably more evil than good.

Personally, I feel that all the concepts here regarding both the pantheon and the soul's journey may well be fanciful to a degree, but they are socially valuable, for the most part. And that latter respect is where any true worth of a set of concepts/beliefs resides, after all. To emphasise oneness as the overarching reality of all consciousness necessarily leads to a perception of oneself in the "other", a necessary prerequisite to the Golden Rule. How could this be bad?

True, the overtly hierarchical nature of the Hindu pantheon could also be taken as a reflection of an intensely hierarchical society. Isn't that the very opposite of oneness? Yes, it is, and I can't pretend that I don't occasionally find it troubling. (This perhaps is one of the reasons why I _sometimes_ find monotheism more emotionally satisfying..........)

Yet in looking at any set of beliefs, I look first at what is new in it rather than at what is inherited. Intense stratification was inherited through the social context of ancient Indian society above all, while the highly individual spin on oneness introduced by Buddha (although there is already a framework of sorts for that in Hinduism) trumps the feudal constructs that Buddha was building upon, IMO.

I guess once again I've implied a doctrinal relativism galloping away on my part in my acceptance of the moral thrust of the main Buddhist tenets while still conceding a higher comfort level with a Single or mono- construct for Deity .......

Oh well.
Cheers,

G. Riggs

[Susma Rio Sep]

That's a very good review of Buddhism, for my part, that is, thanks a lot.

I have to read it again and maybe even a third time.

What I like about your posts, Opera, are their personally digested and personally served ideas in their personally designed table and tableware.

Right now, I can tell you that Vaj, who is as Buddhist in his own chosen school of Buddhism as Caesar can't see any so much as shadow of blemish in his wife, tells me once that there is no soul in Buddhism and no God and gods in Buddhism. Then another thing, is that my impression seems to indicate that Buddhism is beyond if not contrary to logic and epistemology.

You can get lost if not exasperated and frustrated when you try to approach their writings from a logical standpoint on the basis of common sense understanding of words.

Maybe Vaj might step in here, or our good friend, Bgru-mod, but I have this opinion which is begging to be proven nonsense, namely, when you try to pinpoint exactly what Buddhists mean with their words, you will likely end up with such and similar answers: "The thought that is understood is not thought". So you end up with a lot of 'nots'.

I will read your post and try to see how you make out Buddhist metaphysics, again.

Susma Rio Sep

[Vajradhara]

Namaste all,

i've been hesitant to respond to this for a variety of reasons, not least of which, the amount of time it will take to properly address the various points brought forward.

i apologize in advance for the rather slipshod method of response i'm about to engage in.

Operacast, Buddhist metaphysics does not concern it self with a "soul". such a notion is not found in the Buddhist teachings. given the cultural millieu in which Buddhism arose we must keep in mind that Sanskrit words do not necessarily translate into English very well, sometimes, not at all. the concept of a "soul" is not found in Indian thought... what is found is the concept of an unchanging self, the Atman. this is, in most respects, the same as a soul in western thought.

Buddhist teachings on this matter teach Anatman, or No unchanging self, and thus, no soul. of course, Atman and Soul are not exactly the same things however, that is the closest English word and it is probably useful to use it in that manner for our discussion.

the Abidharma is the section of the Tipitaka that deals with the Buddhist metaphysics and philosophy. generally speaking, this section of the canon deals with investigations into the mind and the workings of consciousness and it sets out the various philosophical positions that i've listed in a previous thread: Buddhist Philosophy

i completely agree with you... Buddhism is not an atheistic tradition in the least. what it does do, however, is refute the notion of a First Cause Being or a Creator Deity. many people interpet that to mean that we are atheistic.. however, properly speaking, atheistic simply means a lack of belief in gods, not one god in particular, and Buddhism does not deny that gods exist.

Pali is a pankrit of Sanskrit, a dialect, if you will. As such, it is not accurate the say that the Pali cannon is more "authentic" or "accurate" in the sense of being closer to the source. Sanskrit was and is, for the most part, a holy language that was written, rather than spoken. the people spoke the pankrits of Sanskrit... i.e. Pali. of course, there are hundreds of different dialects in India at the time and this is still true today as well. we really do not know which dialect the historical Buddha spoke and it is probably irrelvant at this point in time. well.. at least until we invent time travel

the essential problem with trying to describe Nirvana is simply due to the fact that Nirvana is beyond conception... actually, it's not that it's beyond conception, it is that conceptions no longer appear in the mind. Nirvana literally means "blown out" or "extinguished" like the flame of a lamp. in the Hinyana view, Nirvana is a different type of existence then you see now.. though this is quite vague and general... in the Mahayana view, by contrast, Samsara and Nirvana are one and the same. it's not sometime in the future nor somewhere other than where you are at this very moment.

the historical founder of Buddhism (Guatama Shakyamuni) is generally considered to have taught different approaches for the needs or inclinations of different people. after his Awakening to full consciousness - usually referred to as his Enlightenment - he is said to have given three sermons or 'Turnings of the Dharma Wheel' which are understood not only as stages on a path but as different approaches. the first was at the Deer Park when he taught moderation and morality (which corresponds with the Hinyana view), the second at Vulture's Peak was when he taught concerning wisdom (which corresponds with the Mahayana view), the third Turning concerned meditation and clarity (which corresponds with with Vajrayana view).

interestingly enough... the Hindu societal caste system comes directly from how they view the Ultimate Being seperating into the different things. the famous Purusa-sukta (Rg Veda 10. 90) celebrates purusa as a cosmic demiurge, the material and efficient cause of the universe, whose sacrifice and division gave rise to the Veda and all of creation. the caste system is derived based on which parts of this being were used to make which caste.

Susma, i am not sure what you are saying when you say:

Originally Posted by Susma rio sep

Right now, I can tell you that Vaj, who is as Buddhist in his own chosen school of Buddhism as Caesar can't see any so much as shadow of blemish in his wife, tells me once that there is no soul in Buddhism and no God and gods in Buddhism.

what does this mean?

furthermore, this is one of the reasons why i find discussions with you on this topic to be exccedingly frustrating... i've NEVER said that there are no gods in Buddhism. in fact, and you can find this in all my posts, when asked about it, i always state that there are gods, just no Creator God. i've stated this over and over again.. yet, you claim that i've said exactly the opposite. i'm not sure if you are intentionally misrepresenting what i say or you simply do not want to hear what you don't agree with.

a lot of the Buddhist teachings are metaphor and allegory, as such, sometimes the words don't mean what their literal form would indicate, which can be confusing for people that are new to the writings, especially if they have little working knowledge of the millieu in which Buddhism arose. there are other teachings which are literal and should be taken as such. it's too easy to broadly lump everything together.. of course, we tend to be inaccurate when we do that... but... you find folks doing that sort of thing all the time.

[Susma Rio Sep]

Dear Vajradhara:

...this is one of the reasons why i find discussions with you on this topic to be exccedingly frustrating... i've NEVER said that there are no gods in Buddhism. in fact, and you can find this in all my posts, when asked about it, i always state that there are gods, just no Creator God.

Please forgive me, Vajradhara, for saying that there are no gods in Buddhism, even though you have told me several times your statements above. It must be my habit of drawing the conclusion that if the Creator God is denied existence then it follows that minor deities are denied existence also. Well, I must admit that is a non-sequitur. I will remember that now and all the time: There is no Creator God in Buddhism but there are gods.

About Caesar's wife, I mean you are attached to your Buddhism. Just leave out everything else as so much more literary device that serves to muddle up the issue.

I want to assure you of my most sincerest regards,



Susma Rio Sep

[Operacast]

Originally Posted by Susma Rio Sep

Dear G. Riggs:

It's Sunday in my part of the world. And I want to tell you sincerely that I haven't read so good a sermon for so long.

Well, I'm sorry, Susma Rio Sep: I just let you down.......

OperaCast