Creation

When Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, they chose word that would typically translate to law to translate the Sanskrit word dharma. In a Chinese religious context, then, it came to take on the full implications of the original Sanskrit word, as would be expected. Feel free to take it up with Kumarajiva or Xuanzang if you think they were wrong.

Not at all, I found you explanations about mental overstimulation very helpful. Whether or not I have the inner resolve to act on your advice is the question.

Fwiw, law = dharma.

Are you practicing his whole system? I'm thinking of people who are just practicing from his free videos. In my case I don't think I would have been able to get very far without movement exercises to help my tissues release. Not that I've gotten very far . I've seen Damo teach many variations of anchoring the breath, with hand positions, variations in the sequence of locations for awareness, physical stretches, and adding reverse breathing or song breathing as a next step. This speaks to freeform's point about being flexible/playful with it.

What do think facilitates this transition? I can imagine a person doing anchoring the breath exactly as Damo describes it for years and not necessarily making this transition.

For those interested in self-inquiry / nonduality, here is an interview with a teacher of mine that just came out: I find him to be unusually clear on many subtle aspects of the awakening process, particularly among those who maintain a secular presentation, perhaps some of you will too.

Hi Carson, welcome back. It was a pleasure to read about what you've been up to, and the progress you've made. What type of vipassana are you practicing?

A more useful question IMO is which teachers have experienced the actual meditative state of any particular jhana. What you define as "attaining" jhana is so incredibly hard that there is honestly very little chance any publicly teaching Westerner Buddhist teachers have done it, even those like Brassington that specialize in jhana. If they even know such an attainment exists they don't talk about it. It's not in the original Suttas (they only talk about the meditative states), for instance, so they would have to be in a lineage that teaches it to even know about it. But knowing, "Even though this teacher hasn't 'attained' nth jhana, they are at least accessing the corresponding meditative state regularly, and their method for doing so is sound", now that is a useful thing to know.

Available for free through the 31st: A story of spiritual awakening: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/23/thich-nhat-hanh-fragrant-palm-leaves/

You have always seemed to me like someone who gives 100% to what you are interested in. The thing about mind trainings is they help people who struggle with motivation to develop it. For those who are naturally motivated to practice but are still living a lay life, hitting the mind trainings as hard as everyone else might not be so important. Have you talked with your Drikung community about this? I have serious respect for the Drikung lineage's activities in the West. If you have received teachings on Vajrayana and Dzogchen, have you received instructions on integrating the practice with daily life? Just curious, what books on Mahamudra and Dzogchen have you read and gotten benefit from?

I like what he is saying here, about insight enabling you to accept your experience and experience wholeness: As far as I can tell, the third eye practices emphasizing one pointed concentration are potentially dangerous and not for beginners, but the ones that are more about developing discernment and clarity are more potentially useful for beginners. I recall a similar offer being made for this course when lockdown started in April-ish 2020, would appreciate any Bum who joined the course chiming in about their experience of it.

Not sure if you're still interested, but this mantra has cleared some seriously dark energy from my system. I really can't say enough good things about it. It's a bit long to say the least, and be advised there are a few errors in the text in the video.

No answer for you atm, but I wanted to mention the synchronicity of this post for me, thoughts like this have been prominent for me in the past day.

You might also be interested in the work of Meido Moore Roshi, who also emphasizes body-based methods in the lineage of Hakuin. I've never seen him mention the wheel of law though.

Say @freeform, what is the role of insight in your Theravada lineage? Insight into, say, the three marks, or links of dependent origination? As far as I can tell from the Suttas, this is what the Buddha said allowed the final end of samsaric suffering, and was different in his teaching from other teachers of his time, some of whom were quite accomplished at jhana/samadhi.

I'll riff off of your riffing. The Suttas talk about dependent origination in terms of a specific process of links (usually twelve, the exact list varies), but Mahayana emphasizes the import of dependent origination is emptiness - the absence of intrinsic existence. So there is less emphasis in Mahayana on clearly perceiving the particular causal links in the chain of suffering, and more on removing perceptual distortions/projections. Armstrong, for instance, specifically mentions experiencing brief cessation, and as the mind restarted, clearly seeing the causal process behind experience, and that this is what really stopped craving in him. This has a different flavor from Mahayana accounts of awakening to the truth of emptiness, as I'm sure you know.

@freeform However they define jhanas (about which there is no small controversy), they are claiming several people who have trained their method can sit for 6-7 days straight and enter into states without breath or heartbeat. If true, that seems like real attainment, though maybe still not "attaining jhana" as your lineage defines it.

I found this particularly interesting also. A little digging suggests Bhante V has other students who can do this though, it just took them longer to get to that level. Very interesting indeed.

Got better and better as I kept listening. Thanks for sharing this. Six days straight in cessation is quite impressive, dismissed any doubts I had about "moving the goalposts".

I went through a phase of being really interested in OBE. I think of dreams and OBE as taking place with similar mechanics, the perception of a non-physical space, but in a dream you are experiencing the internal space of your own mind, an OBE a collective space. There are even different degrees of subtlety of this non-physical space, the "planes" spoken of in Western estocericism. A fellow named Kurt Leland goes into this in detail, he is the most interesting author on OBE, and for me Western esotericism generally, that I found during the phase that I was interested in this. His writings profoundly influenced my worldview. His astral projection log and dream interpretation guide on his site are pure gold. At some point I realized that some of my dreams took place in a "collective" space rather than my own mind, even without being lucid. But most are in my own mind. Hard to describe how I feel like I know this. All I can really say is the space feels different, and in particular interactions feel different if they are an aspect of me or an external being. Tibetan dogma says only advanced bodhisattvas can have dreams outside their own mind, I think this is completely mistaken. Daoist sleep practice contains instructions on Hun travel, it was going to be in a certain online academy in year two, but was removed. Another fellow, Fred Aaredema, who is a psychologist I believe, wrote a book on his attempts to explore OBE in a scientific way, as he had a knack for it. He tried to use it to remote view and had no conclusive results. But if you think of it in terms of planes, this is not so surprising - you are in an astral body on an astral plane, how could you expect to get reliable information on the physical plane by doing so? After all, a characteristic feature of a dream is that if you see numbers or letters, look away and look again, it will be different. It's not made of "matter" which has stability, but information is being conveyed symbolically. As far as telekinesis is concerned, I haven't looked into it. For the above reason, using a higher body to influence the physical is necessarily hard to do. Feel free to share any convincing evidence you've found. I recently encountered a new-ager who though she was controlling the movemement of a pendulum with the energy of her heart chakra. It was a fairly simple matter to demonstrate to her that this was not the case.

I don't find either of these particularly insightful.

Not discussing the Bodhisattva path, primarily.

Mayahana Sutras have a knack for self-promotion - "Whoever makes a copy, or even owns a copy of this sutra, will be blessed by all the Buddhas of the three times, will have a fortunate rebirth, etc.", that kind of thing. Better PR than the Nikayas ! Same as the Tantras - if you're going to recite something, well, one single recitation of the Vajrasattva mantra clears incalculable aeons of negative karma! How can the Mahayana Sutras compete with that?

Technically it's not the "Pali Cannon" but a slightly different recension, it's very close though. The name that applies to all such recentions is the "Nikayas", sometimes "Agamas". Two reasons it's largely ignored in Mahayana. One, they felt the Mahayana teachings superseded the "Hinayana" teachings, two Abhidharma was considered to have extracted the essence of the "Hinayana" teachings, so to the extent that it was still useful to learn something about them, rather than study the whole of the Nikayas, they just studied the Abhidharmakosha. In Tibet, they went one step further and didn't even really read the Mahayana sutras much, just the Tantras, which they felt superseded the Mahayana sutras. To learn what the Mahayana sutras taught, they just studied the scholarly compilations and commentaries such as the works of Nagarjuna and Asanga-Maitreya.

No, not at all.