Maddie

"Hatred is not ended by hatred. Hatred is ended by love" -Dhammapada Annihilation and elimination sound very aggressive and this does not seem to be the way of the Buddha.

Speaking of the stages of enlightenment how can one objectively gauge themself? Sometimes there's reasons that I think I may be at a certain place but then again I'm always wary of delusion.

A sage indeed lol

I think Ananda isn't not the only one that can't understand that LOL

Agreed 🙂

When asked if there is or is not a self the Buddha never answered either question.

That's still assuming that it is something. If I say my house is not a unicorn, and my car is not unicorn, and my wardrobe is not a unicorn, and my dinner is not a unicorn, that just states what is not a unicorn but says nothing about what a unicorn is or if a unicorn exists at all.

Who said its supposed to be anything? If it even exists.

If I was going to summarize what Buddhist morals are (more or less) in a sentence it would be, if it hurts someone its a problem, if it does not hurt anyone then it is not a problem.

Going back to the original topic. I think a common misconception in Buddhism is that the self is something that is meant to be ended. This is not the case. What the Buddha taught is that what is to be realized is that the five aggregates or what we think of as being the self is not the self. The idea is to realize what the self is not.

The goal of Buddhism is to end suffering.

That was the view that led to the rise of Pureland and Nichiren Buddhism. It was called the age of dharma decline, or the later day of the law.

There's still Thai Forest monks today that do that.

I'm sure he is humble but this has nothing to do with humility it has to do with the rules of being a monk. They're not allowed to tell lay people their attainments.

I think flexing credentials tends to distract from the actual analysis of the text and how it stands or falls on its own merits.

Oh I agree. I don't think it's a valid argument but I was trying to answer the question as to what the argument was. I also agree that the Pali Cannon can be confidently said to contain the words of the Buddha whereas Mahayana texts are later additions. Not to say that they're not useful but clearly not from the Buddha.

Here's an example of what I mean by side effects. I've noticed frequently that if I'm really mindful of something especially something that I hadn't been mindful of before that I will get super super sleepy and take like the deepest nap ever.

Granted I'm much more familiar with the Pali texts than the Mahayana texts, but that being the case I believe that the diamond sutra and the heart sutra are speaking about the teaching of non-self as opposed to non-duality. The difference being that non-self would teach that what you think of as yourself or your ego is not really yourself, and to my understanding non-duality teaches that there's no distinction between yourself and other things.

One of the primary examples of why this is seen as a worthless method is the telephone game. If you're not familiar with it, it's where one person whispers a phrase into one person's ear and then it goes around to several other people and then when it comes back to the original person it's usually very different.

I guess also to answer the big "so what" as to why this matters. It's because right view is the very first component of the eightfold Noble path, and the eightfold Noble path is how the Buddha said to become liberated. So it is quite important.

I can try lol. So basically after the Buddha died there was the first Buddhist council where 500 perfectly enlightened monks got together to recite all of the suttas. So they recited them and then agreed upon what was canon and what was not. They put it down into a rhythmic chanting format because back in a preliterate society that's how people memorized things. They have been doing the same thing with The Vedas and other things for centuries. Then the monks went their various ways but from time to time they would all get together to do Tripitika chanting (which is still done to this day to prove that it can be done), where they would recite the entire cannon to make sure everyone is still on the same page and hadn't forgotten any or hadn't strayed. Anyway eventually about 400 years after the Buddha there was a famine in Sri Lanka and so many people were dying they decided to put the cannon into written form so that it wouldn't become lost. Early fragments scattered around India and then eventually the Chinese translations all agree and are very close to each other in content. Anyway this is one way to know that what we have in the Pali Cannon today is most likely very close to what the Buddha actually said.

Good questions deserve good answers 😊 https://youtu.be/1h477l5gT2w

Hand full of leaves

Oh no argument there I just don't think the Buddha taught it.

Okay that's more or less what I thought was being mentioned in non-dualism although I can't think of a single Sutta where the Buddha stated this view.