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Everything posted by Apech
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Oops sorry - this has never happened to me before.
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Congratulations you have won 'Best Click-Bait Thread Title' 2020.
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I bow to your greater knowledge of Jung. But I still have problems with that link on Buddhist psychology. But maybe that's just me.
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I guess you are right - I shouldn't have picked Jung as an example as he is more sympatico. But I'll give an example of what I meant. In the Buddhist ngondro you are supposed to do 100,000 prostrations. One explanation for this is that it helps remove pride. i.e. a psychological explanation. Whereas my experience is that the purpose of the prostrations is not really this - if you lose pride then that's more of a spin off. And it is certainly possible to have great pride in having completed them. To place the psychological reason as central is really to suggest that dharma or the spiritual path is about becoming better adjusted to the world. But of course part of one's path might be periods of isolation - in retreats - far from the world or society. Or again if you want to meditate you need to learn to relax - but if you meditate to relax you are missing the whole point. In fact it is possible to say periods of stress are part of the path and if you avoid them you will get no where.
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Yes, unless you hold to the Out of India hypotheses.
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In my simplistic way of expressing things I would say that the Buddha became awakened after he had rejected all the available practices - sat down under a tree and said 'right I've got to sort this out for myself'. I have found, and obviously you take this or leave it, that all meditative techniques are just like useful toys which you can use or not use depending on if they work or not. Obviously there might be things which you think are not working but actually they are - which is where a teacher or guide comes in. Another way of putting it is that all the practices have a 'key' which is often not given. Not because its some kind of guarded secret but because it relies on you realising what it is you are trying to do in meditation. If you don't realise then you are practicing in an outer way - but not in the real way - and you may get some results but not the full ones. So you have to see for yourself what is going on in the mind when you are doing .. mantras or whatever. In Buddha-tantra mantras are said to be 'protection for the mind' - this is mentioned by Guenther in Ch. 10 'The Dawn of Tantra' https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dawn-Tantra-Herbert-V-Guenther/dp/1570628963/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+dawn+of+tantra&qid=1587693279&sr=8-1 but this is probably still obscure. Going back to the history thing - in the first John Peacock lecture posted above he says words to the effect that there was nothing like Hinduism at the time of the Buddha but there was Vedic Brahmanism. And actually there were two adjacent cultural areas - one is called Kuru-Pancala and the other the Eastern Ganetic area. In Kuru-Pancala a very ritualistic and conservative vedic tradition was being practiced by the Brahmin priests who were a specific 'varna' or caste group - you had to be born into this. While in the other region a different style was practiced based around wandering sages or sramanas. Buddha and Mahavira came from this later area. Buddha was critical of the brahmins but mostly because they were not being very good brahmins. He was not a reform figure from within the strict vedic tradition - he was commenting from his own tradition alongside it. But he did take and use many terms (like karma) but subtly changed their meaning, for instance saying karma is intent and not a ritual act. In addition to these two traditions there was a religion involving yakshas, nagas and other deities/entities which probably stretched back to the Indus Valley culture. In fact Vajrapani was a yaksha - a protective deity of the capital of the Buddhas home state. I would suggest that this underlying religious 'strata' was some from of shamanism which predated the vedic pantheon but became mixed with it on the journey towards what we now call Hinduism. Hinduism doesn't really mean that much anyway - and probably comes from Alexander the Great describing anything beyond the Indus River - and then was used by the British Raj as a general term for incredibly diverse religious culture in India. The Brits in trying to understand how the Buddha fitted in to the rest of Indian religious life reinvented him as a Hindu reformer - which he never was.
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There was no such thing as Hindu then. Wiki is wrong.
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Not Hindu - Samkhya .
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https://www.audiodharma.org/series/207/talk/2602/ - for John Peacock. I think the use of mantras emerged with vajrayana (which is also called mantrayana) - why? is a big subject in itself.
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Sorry old bean that is completely wrong. There was no Hindu front runner. There were two cultural areas in India in 500 BC - one in the East of Northern India and the other in the West. The one in the west had the Sramana tradition which gave rise to Buddhism as well as Jainism and others. The one in the East had traditional Vedic Brahmanism - which was not the same as Hinduism as we know it now. The narrative you are using is exactly the same as Western academics of the 19th and 20th century used and is wrong.
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To say its 'through the back door' is just part of the projection of western thinking - as if it's some kind of cheat or add-on.
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All the Bronze Age/Early Iron Age cultures had cosmological models which are quite similar. The sky is a vault supported by a mountain or mountains, the earth a disk surrounded by water, on top of something like a huge pillar, there are various continents/elemental structures or zones mapped in the four directions and so on. They are not really geographical in the way we would understand more like a catalogue of all that exists with each element in relation to the other. But they came to be thought of as geographical and literal - but became to be used in this way out of deference. So the mandala is really saying - this is the universe as I understand it - and all that is in it.
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Ah but we live in Jambudvipa where the sky is blue .... and the side of Mt. Meru pointing towards us (South) is exactly the same colour - so cannot be seen. There's cunningness in the ancient mind
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Some people argue that science is a Judeo-Christian project - or a legacy perhaps. For me the key problem with Christianity is the emphasis on blind faith - or perhaps the superiority of faith over reason. Mind you, these days I happily make mandala offerings knowing full well there's no Mount Meru - so maybe I've just gone ga ga
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I read some Batchelor and John Peacock (?) - also a few books by Richard Gombridge - and I like what they say about the etymology of words like dukkha and so on - so there's a lot to be learned from them - and in a way being skeptical about a subject is quite healthy - but they let themselves down when they get selective in this way.
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There's one sutra (I think its called The Arrogant Brahmin (?) ) where Vajrapani appears out of the top of Buddhas head. I suppose they can still discount this as being symbolic or whatever. The other thing I find slightly weird is the clinging to atheism - as if the Buddha was Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris - when the Buddha didn't say there were no gods - just don't rely on them.
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A few years ago I hit a similar or related problem. I was practicing Tibetan Buddhism because of my feeling of connection to it – particularly the historical figures like Marpa, Milarepa and Gampopa. But I realised after a while that I knew practically nothing about the Buddha himself or early Buddhism or the history of Buddhism. In fact I found some of the ways in which Buddha is presented a real turn off. So I spent quite a while reading a number of academic books on the subject and researching through what's available on the internet in terms of serious academic study. It's a huge subject and has layers of what I came to understand as misunderstandings built over it. What is not always immediately apparent is that contemporary Buddhism and popular western Buddhism has been majorly influenced by Western rationality. It has been as if (or it may actually be the case) that various schools of Buddhism responded to Western influence by saying 'we can be as rational as you' – and they did this by being selective about what the sutras say and portraying the Buddha as a kind of Eastern Socrates. To do this they have to eliminate all accounts of spirits, deities, Vajrapani and so on – clean it up and repackage. Western academics climbed on the back of this repackaging, the height of this approach is in Oxford, England with Richard Gombridge, Stephen Batchelor and so on. Everything that does not quite fit like rebirth, karma and the six realms are rejected as 'cultural'. Personally I reject this as much as I reject the 'psychological' treatment of dharma e.g. Jungian and so on. Its quite surprising how little is known about early Buddhism from archeology and historical research – and it has to be bourne in mind that the Pali Canon was not written down for several centuries – and while I have no problem with the oral tradition as being accurate – Buddhism had by the 1st Century BC become quite institutionalised – was scholastic and monastic (in the sense of fixed institutions rather than wandering forest dwellers). So you have to be very careful about assuming that the Theravada is the same as early Buddhism (even though the Theravada scholars would say it is). The Buddha taught in 84,000 ways – and said that his teachings were like a handful of leaves compared to a whole forest. The earliest Mahayana sutras were only slightly later than the Pali Canon – and the Mahayana did not arise as part of a schism (that is a Western projection ) - actually Mahayana was always a minority practice style which existed alongside Hinayana in some sanghas. It grew in influence over centuries until the Hinayana died out. Please note Theravada does not equal Hinayana (some similarities maybe). The difference in Mahayana sutras was the way they were taught and practiced. They departed from the Sravaka (listen, reflect, meditate) system – to become more participatory and image based . The Mahayana sutras were chanted by the teacher to a group which would be expected to memorise, repeat, visualise and then practice the sutra – so it was more of a practice based teaching transmission than an analytical/reflective one. This became even more true when the Vajrayana came along (!). All this has to be seen in the context of a view of history which includes increasing degradation over time (Kali Yuga) – and the idea that it is actually getting harder to achieve enlightenment over time compared for instance with when the Buddha was alive. I came to see that the Buddha used reason – but was not a rationalist – that early Buddhism was probably not scholastic and remote from ordinary people's lives but very much part of the community. That the world view they held (still hold) encompasses gods, demons, ghosts and so on – even where these are seen as aspects of Mind this is still not in the sense we would mean it today. As Buddha himself said of his awakening that it was deep, profound, ineffable, unborn etc. - so any tight definition of what mind is or is not is impossible conceptually. I have found in my own practice for instance that making offerings to negative ghost-like beings is effective, that prayer and devotion is key to pure perception, that we interact with all kinds of 'beings' in dream-like perception – and yet I remain rational (just about ).
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those wishy washy liberals and their mutilating ways!
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Thus demonstrating their own limited view of what mind is.
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I think there is a tendency to try to make the dharma something acceptable to us. For instance, making it rationalist by emphasising how the Buddha used reason to teach or making it a form of psychotherapy by stressing that it's all about mind - without clearly saying what 'mind' is in these terms. Both of these a big mistakes. Also much of western scholarship does use paradigms from the history of Christianity to try to understand how Buddhism developed - which are equally in error.
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I forwarded that to the Ayatollah and he's fairly pissed off now! You could have started something.