Apech

Hi @S:C, Since @Daniel was quoting me I guess I should explain what I meant. I think that systems like Samkhya, Vedanta and so on are setting out to describe reality - or put simply answer the question 'what is it?' and at the same time 'who/what am I?' - and in terms of Advaita Vedanta which is perhaps the most developed form of this kind of thought we find positive statements about what it is (brahman) and what the self is 'atman' and that they are not-two. In other words we can find in those systems of thought statements about the nature of 'being' which is what I would call an ontological solution to the problem of existence. In Buddhism on the other hand there is a positive reluctance to do this (despite the abhidharma) - which is why I said it wasn't offering an ontological solution but a soteriological one. I think in terms of Sila or moral conduct, I understand this in terms of cultivation. Morality/ethics is a way of shaping our selves to be worthy vessels for wisdom. I am not saying that this is arbitrary as for instance treating others with respect and kindness is reflective of how we would see our relation to them if we were Buddhas.

Very often where terminology breaks down or is insufficient things are expressed in the negative - i.e. not what they are but what they are not. Its not that unusual as for instance in Christian Theology the nature of the Godhead is 'ineffable' or indeed 'unknowable' because the limits of human intellect are acknowledged. At that time of course there was no Buddhist club. In fact even now I am not aware of any compulsion to be Buddhist or accept anything being placed on anyone. So I don't understand why you think this is a projection of failure - as you put it. I think you are probably aware that the first teachings of the Buddha are the Four Noble Truths and the first of these is 'suffering exists' - this is what I was referring to. I was making the point that he did not start with an ontological solution to life - but simply suggested that his audience notice that the reason they were even listening or asking him to teach was that they were aware that there was something unsatisfactory about their present state. I think so, yes. 'Real' and thus 'reality' is a tricky word. If you want to contrast 'non-dual awareness' with 'non-dual reality' then are you suggesting that an awareness of something does not actually mean that it is real? If there is only Purusha why is there a world? If there is only Prakriti how are we aware of anything? They emerge together - this is called primordial wisdom 'yeshe' or 'prajna'. What I think is I don't agree. I think you have just abstracted 'awareness' as if it is somehow not real or an aspect of the real. But then we haven't really established what is meant by real anyway. I think it is important not to allow these kinds of ideas to become abstruse speculation. Although I acknowledge that my own limitations may be a problem. I know that I don't know at least.

Yes I was being silly. Sorry if I caused offence but I have a silly sense of humour.

I believe the main sense is that they are not what they appear to be. Although the English word illusory is probably taken to mean that there is nothing there at all. It is not just reserved for emotions of course - the world itself is often described as illusory. In a Buddhist text I use it calls the body 'the illusory body'. I think the Sanskrit word 'maya' applies which is the world as a display - an appearance - kind of smoke and mirrors I suppose. But then no one tells you to cross a busy road without looking or throw yourself off a cliff (though some misguided people have done just that!). I think the sense in which it should be understood is that the emotion, say anger for instance - is just an effect produced by movement of energy and a sense of self attached. Its a big subject of course because one might say there are things that you should be angry about - but in the end its about seeing through the 'display' to what is actually going on.

me too

Buddhism has made me cry - I'm serious - it released a lot of pent up feeling in me (perhaps not enough because I still go on about non-dualism). I think although thw word illusory is very popular with Buddhists it should be banned because it gives the wrong impression.

Bold underlines, different colours, brackets, CAPITALS, rhetorical questions and ... More emphasis less convincing. This is a conversation not a contest.

That @Daniel is the 64,000 dollar question. And is probably beyond my capacity to answer in a very satisfactory way. In fact great masters of many paths also say it is ineffable ... the Dao cannot be named and so on. The Buddha himself said after his awakening that what he had realised was so profound etc. that he could not teach it. (Later he was persuaded to teach but he did not start by teaching any ontological explanation of what was real but just by pointing out to people that their lives were unsatisfactory and that there was something you can do about it). An old teacher of mine used to describe it as 'a field of sentient power' - a continuum. But even that is criticisable as sounding like a monism - since there is only one field. But he would say that yes, the field is one but not one as in the head of a series (1,2,3 ... and so on) but unified within itself, a one without a second to quote Shankara. Obviously to say something is 'literally' true means technically 'as written' and so means it can be defined clearly in terms. But terms are by definition to do with finites, names of things or functions which can be separately identified. A dog, a spoon and so on. So terms cannot be applied to the absolute. And actually if we were to say the absolute is a 'one' a monism, then you would have to say everything else is not it and end up with a world of things entirely separate from their origin. Buddhists would define the non-dual reality as the mind of the Buddha (in calm equipose) - this is how it is usually expressed although the condition of calm equipose is unnecessary. This is called the Dharmakaya which means something like true-body or true level. The original duality is said to be subject/object (which is like the Purusha/Prakriti dualism of Samkhya) and in Buddhism these are said to co-emerge ... that is, as the phenomenon appears so too does the consciousness of it. They emerge in mutual dependence. The realisation of this in meditative contemplation is the realisation of non-duality. So that which is literally non-dual is the basis for consciousness, buddha-nature itself and the realisation of it is the final release from the duality of cyclic (samsaric) existence and from dukkha. Does that go anyway to answering your question? Please let me know.

if thy eye be single then your whole body also will be filled with light

i watched a podcast in which a very nice gentle catholic said that Buddhist and Muslim say that Jesus is a liar (in his claim to be the son of god) - I put a comment that I had never heard any Buddhist say any thing like this and he replied that he was just using colorful language. But I don’t think he is the only Christian who feels like this in their hearts.

Maybe. Someone open minded like you might be able to see the connections across different religions - but that kind of puts you outside all of them doesn’t it? I tried quite hard to be a Christian but just found that I think like a Buddhist and while I admire a lot of Christians - there seems to be a very odd and dualist world view at the heart of it.

have you read the catholic catechism?

No ... goodness no! the chain is a metaphor not the non-duality. Deary me.

If you have followed my 'Unpopular Opiinions' thread you will see in my OP the idea that most western Buddhists are really Christian. There is an appeal to (especially Catholics) who have lapsed or lost their belief in God to move to Buddhist 'spirituality without God' - or at least that is what they think. Quite often you will hear this as the stated reason for their Buddhism - that it is atheist spirituality. This is of course nonsense. Buddha was not atheist in any way similar to Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens et al. In fact there are plenty of gods in Buddhas view. And you also have people who label themselves secular Buddhists - who have taken Buddhism and stripped it of all the difficult parts and made up their own system. This is even more of a laugh because the idea of religious versus secular is Christian. What is interesting about this though is the 'interference' that comes through from Judeo-Christian thought into those who profess Buddhism in the West. Culture as they say is incommunicable - in other words you can't quite say what it is even to yourself. And so a whole host of views and attitudes come across with the western Buddhist from their natural culture. I think this explains the big struggle with non-self, emptiness and non-duality which are not at all natural to a Christian mind which firmly embeds dualities such as good and evil. The other great poison is 'wokeness' but that's another story. Personally even though I was not brought up religious at all, my father was an atheism humanist and quite skeptical of anything vaguely mystical - I had to go through a long period of deconstrution and self examination to even decide if I was a Buddhist at all. There are times when I'm still not sure ... but with practice find the uncertainty helpful.

It's yogacara and therefore the union of one's mind with its original nature through meditative absorbtion reveals it's nature which is ineffable etc. I don't know anything about how your brain works. That as is said up to you. It is a metaphor only and shouldn't be stretched too far. It's not about erasing the distinction it is about resolving the 'ontological gap' which having two absolutes produces. This leads to ignorance and attachment and therefore more suffering. In the final result Buddhism is soteriological and not a philosophical system - the view is there to support one's conduct and practice that's all.

There's a Leonard Cohen song which refers to 'going clear' which is I suppose what this means. In Mahayana Buddhism there are two main streams of teaching which could probably call themselves non-dual. That is the Yogacara and the Madhyamika ... very broadly speaking the Yogacara spread into China and Japan as Ch'an and Zen, while the Madhyamika (of which there are two kinds!) held sway in Tibet. Yogacara which means literally something like 'yoga path' is sometimes also called citta-mattra, which means 'mind only' or 'mere mind'. In this school it would be fair to say that primacy is given to the realisations of practitioners that everything is mind. They use mostly the term citta for mind - which is an interesting reference back to Samkhya and the universal substance Prakriti. In Samkhya thought this universal substance applied not only to the material universe but also to what we would call mental phenomena such as thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. The form of Prakriti which was the subtle substance basis for thoughts and perceptions was called 'citta'. So mind was a kind of field of citta. Which is why Patanjali says yoga is 'citta vritti nirodha' - the exhaustion of disturbance in the mind (translations vary). When a Yogacara Buddhist says everything is citta they mean that what is experienced as subject and what is experienced as object is actually immediate events in citta. Which is why in Japanese art for instance it is all about the intensity of immediate experience (though technically the term experience does not apply) - the fall of blossom or leaves in autumn ... and so on. Zen stresses the ever present 'now' moment where the subject/object duality collapses into something that can never quite be expressed completely - natural, spontaneous, immediate - you get the idea. This really arises because of the stress on dhyana (jhana) - which is absorption in the now (samadhi or sartori)- Zen being the Japanese version of this word. The Madhyamika interpretation is slightly different. The term means 'middle way' but not the usual Buddhism way of the mean, but the middle way between nihilism and eternalism. It's analysis of all phenomena is that they are empty. Some care needs to be taken with the word empty which is the translation of shunya. One way of thinking about it is that in a world of plusses and negatives i.e. polarity and plurality there is also a zero. That despite the appearances of things as having this of that qualities, hardness, softness, heat and cold or whatever - truly their nature is zero - they are ephemeral and lack any enduring 'self' or existence in and of themselves but are just appearances in a chain of causal connection - like links in a chain which have no use on their own (if you try to extract them the whole chain falls apart). So a Madhyamika would say to a Yogacaran - your mind (citta) is empty also. Don't cling to even that! You can see the tremendous risk of nihilism in this path. But they would claim not to be nihilist but to be steering a course between nihilism and positing any eternally real cause of any kind as both are traps. Most Madhyamika practitioners are also tantrikas. In the tantras there is posited the reality of the mind of a Buddha (which might be used as a yidam or meditation object) and thought of as real. For most Madhyamika this contradiction is just parked, this is called Rangtong Madhyamika ... but there is another school of Madhyamika who reinterpret this to say that the Buddha-nature (which we all have) is empty but empty of other, that is empty of anything other than itself, this is called Zhentong Madhyamika or sometimes the Great Madhyamika. Some suggest that this school is really a kind of advanced Yogacara school where citta has been reinterpreted as the continuum of buddha-nature. This is a controversial view which was actually persecuted but has been preserved by the Kagyu sect. By the way I am just writing this off the top of my head - so feel free to correct any inevitable mistakes I may make.

Clarity is also one of those words which non-dualist Dzogchenis like to use - as if it means something in itself without reference to what is clear to what. Scientologists also like to say 'going clear' but I'm not sure what they mean - we shall have to wait until Tom Cruise joins the forum. I haven't got any dispute with what @Bindi said above - all the work in the subtle body involves dualities, also we see and experience the world in terms of dualities, hot, cold, positive negative and so on - so I think the first thing to say is that the philosophical position or 'view' of non-duality is not a denial of those dualities - although I admit it can sound like that on first hearing. The denial of dualities would actually be monism. The term 'non-dual' is chosen deliberately to show that it is not a monism. To start at the beginning of dharmic thought, you really have to start with the granddaddy of all Indian systems and that is Samkhya. This is very ancient and pre-dates all the various Indian traditions that we know of. The Buddha learned this before embarking on his own path. Samkhya is a dualist view. A kind of quick rough version of this way of thinking - going back to the cup - is to ask 'is the cup fundamentally real' and in deciding if it is real or not you ask does it's existence depend on anything else which might be said to be more fundamental - usually this is 'what is it made of' or what is its effective cause? In the case of the cup it might be made of clay. So if we smashed up the cup we would no longer have a cup but some pieces of clay (or china or whatever) and the clay then could be said to be more real than the cup because the existence of the cup depends on there being clay. Then you could look at the clay and say it is made of minerals - silicates for instance and in the same way the collection of minerals is more real than the clay. And then you could say the minerals are made of molecules and so on and so on. Then according to Samkhya thought if you followed this process of enquiry to the end you would be left with the finest of fine substances which is called Prakriti - which is the basis of everything that can be said to exist - like a universal subtle substance. But then when you are left with observing the Prakriti having deconstructed all other levels of being you have something else which is there - you the observer. The observing self is called Purusha and is not like everything else in that it is not made of Prakriti. So you end up with a duality of two fundamentally real absolutes - Purusha and Prakriti. This is a great analysis (or so most people think) but leaves a bog problem because if you have two absolutes how do they possibly interact since there is nothing of one in the other - they have no relation. So then begins the question - how do I resolve this? How can I get from a dual 'solution' to a non-dual one? Or can I subsume all Prakriti in Purusha or visa versa? Or to put it in more western terms how do I resolve the subject object duality? Because this kind of debate was happening in the west also - Descartes for instances singularly failed to solve it,

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs! Exiled for ever, let me mourn; Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn. Down vain lights, shine you no more! No nights are dark enough for those That in despair their lost fortunes deplore. Light doth but shame disclose. Never may my woes be relieved, Since pity is fled; And tears and sighs and groans my weary days Of all joys have deprived. From the highest spire of contentment My fortune is thrown; And fear and grief and pain for my deserts Are my hopes, since hope is gone. Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell, Learn to contemn light. Happy, happy they that in hell Feel not the world’s despite.

OK Daniel - if anyone called you ignorant and down below I am shocked. To the core. Oh so a kind of montage of convos. No. That's not it. (normally I would explain but a quantity of red wine has been drunk - sorry ). You have realised that denial is an anagram of daniel haven't you? It's sat-chit-ananda not sit-chat-ananda. The first is the being/consciousness/bliss of the self (atman) and the spirit (brahman) being not different to each other ... i.e. non-dual, while the second is the bliss of sitting and having a conversation (and probably a cup of tea and a biscuit).

I don't know if it is a misnomer or not. Actually I'm not quite sure what the 'it' is you are referring to. There was a very long thread on here started by @Bindi which dissed the whole 'non-dual' idea or practice - but I think this was mostly because of the current trend to misuse the term as it sounds kind of cool to say you are non-dualist (mostly because almost no-one understands what that means anyway). I am not wedded to the term myself, although I do think it has meaning in both Buddhism and Advaita (slightly different but similar). What differences in the stated and practiced dharma are you referring to here? No, sorry, perhaps I am being particularly thick here but I don't understand what you mean. I think what you have said here is quite confused actually and you are imputing motive and action onto persons (I don't know who) which don't make sense to me. I don't know if it is helpful to say but emptiness is not absence. Emptiness is arrived at through clearly seeing the nature of phenomena. There is no need to deny anything. Also you have introduce 'sat-chit-ananda' which is either vedanta or yoga and not Buddhist - did you mean to suggest they are the same? I'm not sure.

Firstly @Taoist Texts is right (not something I admit without some pain) that there are no Two Truths in the original recorded saying of the Buddha. And for @Daniel who sees contradictions in Buddhism - some arise because in terms of the philosophy (or as they would call it 'the view') there are many in different schools of Buddhism which actually don't agree. Some are later developments or refinements of others and others are simply differing statements about what is true. All Buddhists may agree about say the truth of suffering and wotnot - but when it comes to developing philosophical models about what is real and what is not we have 2,500 years of dispute. In Tibet monasteries were sacked or forcibly converted for following different interpretations. All is not sweetness and light in the Buddhist world and neither is it a bland mediocrity that everyone signs up to without thought. The weighing of the feather in Khonsu-mes pre-dates Buddha by about 1000 years (give or take) and comes (obviously) from a different cultural base. Having said that - in Egyptian mythology there is a 'Hall of Two Truths' which is kind of interesting. The feather - in this case the feather of Ma'at is the order which the sun creates every day. The world created by the sun is like a bubble in an infinite watery chaotic vastness. So the tendency (as with the scientific concept of entropy) is that if left alone the chaotic energies of this vastness will penetrate the bubble and distort the world in bad ways. That is why you get droughts and floods and so on - because Ma'at has been lost. It was the role of the Sun to continually fight this tendency and re-establish right order. So too the King or pharaoh was charged to maintain Ma'at in the land. On a personal level therefore there is a way of living in accordance with ma'at and there are things that might be done which disturb ma'at. So not doing wrong things is the key (I gave a handy list in the Khonsu-mes thread). This could easily be compared to 'right living' in Buddhism. And the list of the negative confession is quite obviously an ancestor of the Ten Commandments in the Bible. I'm not sure if this answers anything you asked or not.

I'm not sure how serious you are being - but if you want to understand the non-dual Buddhist view I can recommend: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Center-Sunlit-Sky-Madhyamaka-Tradition-ebook/dp/B002IT4X72/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1PE0PI9UUF5MQ&keywords=the+center+of+a+sun+lit+sky&qid=1699460951&sprefix=the+center+of+a+sun+lit+sky%2Caps%2C149&sr=8-1