Sunya

have you studied Bon and Tibetan Buddhism enough to discern a truly objective viewpoint? or are you simply arguing because your beliefs are being threatened? you came here first saying let's not talk, the answer is in the trees,,, or something like that. maybe stick to that? you had a lot more going then.

yes people think here that anti-intellectualism is a big part of Taoism but infact its not, Taoism was popular back n ancient China among the intellectuals, and when Buddhism flourished in China it was because of the intellectual discussions that were taken place about non-being and metaphysics which Buddhism fit very neatly into. truth is beyond words, but being so disparaged about using words as a tool for understanding I feel is very limiting. if there anything that Buddhism has contributed, besides dependent origination, it's that intellectual understanding is very important to bring realization into the proper context. the sole reason why Buddhists are able to have such deep realizations is because of the stress of conceptual understanding as a basis for allowing the deep realizations to come forth.

inside of what? consciousness is an object? a box?

there is a big difference in how the 2 truths are applied in Buddhism and Vedanta. the Buddha was the first to use this teaching, it was later elucidated by Nagarjuna with Madyamika; Sankara took the 2 truths model and applied it into a Vedic context, but it's interpretation is different. in Vedanta you have the relative truth as Maya, illusion, it doesn't really exist. the ultimate truth as Nirguna Brahman is absolute and self-existing. therefore Samsara is an illusion, and when the Absolute truth is realized, the relative disappears, all that is left is the Absolute Brahman. the Absolute truth is transcendent, this is not what the Absolute truth is as stated by Buddha and Nagarjuna. Samsara is not an illusion, it is like an illusion. if the Buddhists took the Hindu Absolute Truth to heart, then there would be no beings suffering because they do not exist since all Maya is illusion. Everything is Brahman, who is there to suffer? In Buddhism they do. Samsara arises due to causes and conditions, and though it is like an illusion there is still suffering; therefore in Buddhism truth has relative existence Nirvana is not absolute, Nirvana is Samsara. and even after your realization, other beings are still suffering. Why do you think the goal of Vajrayana is different than Theravada, which has the goal of Arhat? because the goal of Buddhahood is not just realizing emptiness, its also to develop powers (siddhis) to help all sentient beings. this is what a Buddha does. There is no superimposition in Buddhism because form is emptiness, there is nothing behind form, there is no screen.

Buddha meant to start a religion, he started a monastic movement and the first nunnery as well, and expected his disciples to keep the dharma alive and even predicted when the next Buddha will come, recognizing the impermanent nature of reality and that his teachings won't last forever. he also taught in a way that was meant to be remembered, methods such as using easy to remember teachings in sets of 4 and 8 that are psychologically easy to memorize. If your path is to find your own way, so be it. I just hope you don't start a religion; your followers might find your posts and end up calling other people idiots and their words garbage. hear hear! arrogance is the right way to salvation! we've been eating our own apples for countless lifetimes. where has it gotten us? these are not contradictions. he taught people according to their abilities and capacities. if you were to teach music to a young child with no interest, or a smart child with a big interest, or a very smart person with a capacity to understand music, or a very intellectual person who has no ability to understand music.. would your methods be the same? are these then contradictions or just different methods? of course, all of your teachings would have the same essence (music) and likewise all of the Buddhas teachings have the same essence as well (view) this is not a good analogy to describe one-taste. wetness is an aspect of water. along with other aspects such as form, shape, color, temperature, etc. but emptiness is not an aspect of mind and phenomena: rather it is the true nature of mind and phenomena. therefore emptiness is inseperable from phenomena and phenomena is inseparable from emptiness. Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness.

depends what you mean by consciousness, space in buddhism refers to emptiness, since mind and all phenomana are empty, its said that everything is of one taste, the taste of space-like emptiness. http://books.google.com/books?id=nNA4Iu35I...num=10#PPA61,M1

"In Buddhism , universal consciousness is completely refuted. There is no universal consciousness. Consciousness is always individual. Buddhism does not accept any concept of an all-encompassing consciousness of which our consciousness is a part. It is very important to understand that individuality is on every level, as I have explained. There is nothing cosmic or universal that goes beyond this individual consciousness. The state of omniscience is sometimes described as the mind pervading all phenomena. This does not mean that the fully developed individual mind now controls all phenomena. Nor does it mean that each individual consciousness comes from this mind. Rather it means that the mind of an individual is completely enlightened, and , therefore, omniscient. You know everything. There is nothing that your mind cannot know. Pervading all means knowing all in this context " HH Dalai Lama Does this sound like Advaita?

This is all well and good, but we're stuck in samsara and words are very important.

are you bored? you know that there is a difference in connotation between arguing and debating since the former insinuates negative emotions while the latter is more for clearing up a conceptual understanding. nice quote.

you can use the program TOR to get past blocked sites, it's what i've been doing since i've been living in Nanjing for the last 4 months. going back to the states this weekend though. visited Beijing, found it too populous for my tastes.

yes and furthermore there is this idea in most mystical traditions that you're on the path, evolution will take you to the goal, the purpose of life is to attain this goal of oneness or unity or whatever, so you'll get there eventually. this implies that the correct view inherently exists, that all you have to do is "let go and with the flow" or just build up a lot of chi and circulate it through the chakras, that this will bring one to ultimate realization. this implies that view is not important but looking at dependent origination, we see that from cause comes effect, so fruit depends on the seed. simply letting go will not bring you to the ultimate fruit of liberation because no seed was planted, which only comes from having right view, Tibetan Tantra that works with the subtle body is pretty similiar to Hindu Kundalini Yoga and Taoist alchemy of jing-chi-shen, but there is a reason why Tibetan masters don't give out these techniques to just anyone, right view has to be there. right view does not come from watching your breath, or circulating energy, because it isn't inherent. it takes work to change from wrong view to right view, so doing these techniques without wrong view is dangerous, many here prefer the open source techniques and think that Lamas have big egos for not teaching everyone the secret stuff, I think that this is because they believe view isn't important, and dependent origination is not understood. Due to many lifetimes of wrong view we have many many many mental afflictions, these can be very subtle and very gross. to get rid of only the gross afflictions leaves many subtle ones as well. simply letting go and doing alchemical work does not take care of subtle afflictions that bring one into wrong view.

Bravo!

Vajra would know better than I since I am just a beginner in Tibetan Budds in Vajrayana you commune with Diety in a personal form, but its a form of your enlightened nature of mind. Wisdom exists as a quality of the true nature of mind and sometimes, the karmic obscurations like dirty clouds clear away and the sun shines forth and clear light and visionary dreams are experienced, or even waking life encounters. but due to your karma you still perceive this wisdom as coming from a separate source when in fact it is a quality of your true nature. mindstreams are infinite, beginningless, and separate. and yet the qualities are the same: wisdom, emptiness, compassion. so a thought experiment, you have 2 Buddhas in the same room. they are separate mind stream, not the same, but they both have the same qualities of infinite wisdom. this does not mean that they are both connected to some source of wisdom, or God, but rather wisdom is a quality of the true nature of mind.

and yet you have not done so, since every argument that has been made against your pronouncements has been ignored,

for me, the hardest part is giving up the notion that a reality exists, i think out of all religions besides Buddhism, Advaita has the subtlest form of God, it's like.. you're almost there on giving it up but still holding on incase things go wrong.

well I did have many arguments with you months ago that left me quite annoyed, so I had to figure things out for myself! annoyances can become great blessings.

is there actual proof that Dzogchen existed before the 8th century AD ?

Dwai, I posted this earlier in this thread, but I guess you never read it. http://www.advaita-vedanta.org/avhp/gaudapada.html very good objective look at Nagarjuna's Middle way in comparison to Vedanta Sunyata is not Brahman because Sunyata is not Absolute, the whole point of Nagarjuna's middle way (which only elucidates what Buddha taught) is to avoid the extreme of an Absolute, so how can you even compare them? and Emptiness does not mean non-phenomenal. you are positing that phenomena does not exist simply because its empty. empty does not mean non existant. this is another extreme. phenomena neither exists nor non-exists. all you're doing is taking Nagarjuna's philosophy and putting it into a Vedantic context, which is what Gaudapada did, but that won't work because Buddhism will never say that something exists behind phenomena, like a background screen which is the source of everything. Buddhism stops where Hinduism keeps going, positing a position that Buddhists deny. it's as simple as that. Hindus are idealistic in assuming that something exists while Buddhists just look at reality more honestly, in my opinion. "For Nāgārjuna, who provided the most important philosophical formulation of śūnyatā, emptiness as the mark of all phenomena is a natural consequence of dependent origination; indeed, he identifies the two. In his analysis, any enduring essential nature (i.e., fullness) would prevent the process of dependent origination, would prevent any kind of origination at all, for things would simply always have been and always continue to be. This enables Nāgārjuna to put forth a bold argument regarding the relation of nirvāna and samsāra. If all phenomenal events (i.e., the events that constitute samsāra) are empty, then they are empty of any compelling ability to cause suffering. For Nāgārjuna, nirvāna is neither something added to samsāra nor any process of taking away from it (i.e., removing the enlightened being from it). In other words, nirvāna is simply samsāra rightly experienced in light of a proper understanding of the emptiness of all things."

this ? http://macdonaldbayne.homestead.com/Beyondindex_1.html

thanks for joining the discussion Vajrahridaya, it's always best to get the perspective of one who has experiential understanding of both traditions which tradition of Advaita did you practice under and what sort of insights/realizations did you gain from that path? could you talk more about the moment when things changed and you realized that Buddhism had a different understanding? was this experiential or intellectual?

"In Buddhism , universal consciousness is completely refuted. There is no universal consciousness. Consciousness is always individual. Buddhism does not accept any concept of an all-encompassing consciousness of which our consciousness is a part. It is very important to understand that individuality is on every level, as I have explained. There is nothing cosmic or universal that goes beyond this individual consciousness. The state of omniscience is sometimes described as the mind pervading all phenomena. This does not mean that the fully developed individual mind now controls all phenomena. Nor does it mean that each individual consciousness comes from this mind. Rather it means that the mind of an individual is completely enlightened, and , therefore, omniscient. You know everything. There is nothing that your mind cannot know. Pervading all means knowing all in this context " HH Dalai Lama

I don't think there is any misunderstanding of Brahman. I think the point is pretty clear, you say that Brahman is void of any description or properties; you point to a formless constant which is reality. Since phenomena is all unreal, due to our ignorance perception, all that truly exists is One. Multiplicy is illusion. All that exists is Brahman. As I keep saying, there is no "One" in Buddhist thought, multiplicity still exists. there is just no source, phenomena are empty and arise becauses of causes and conditions. Phenomena are not unreal, whereas in Advaita phenomena are unreal. Phenomena are not real, nor unreal, There are appearances, they are vivid, and 'like an illusion', but, like a mirage, nothing is there. there is nothing behind the appearance, which is not what Advaita says, so this is a main difference. You can't attach a permeating essence (eternalism) and you also can't say nothing exists either [nihilism]. both are the extremes that Buddhism tries to forego you're right, we are going in circles. I don't think you're interested in understanding the difference because you still are holding on to the assumption that Brahman and Shunyata are teh same, when I am trying to convey to you that this isn't so. The difference between Monistic thought and Buddhist thought is clearly evident in this quote by Shabkar Tsokdrug Rangdrol on reality: "it is not eternal, for nothing whatsoever about it has been proved to exist. it is not a void, for there is brilliance and awakefulness. it is not unity, for multiplicity is self-evident in perception. it is not multiplicity, for we know the one taste of unity. it is not an external function, for presence is intrinsic to immediate reality" a discussion of Gaudapada's view VS Madyamika Buddhism http://www.advaita-vedanta.org/avhp/gaudapada.html The contention of some modern scholars that gauDapAda's philosophy is nothing more than buddhism clothed in vedAntic colors is based on two errors, that do not do justice to either mahAyAna buddhism or to advaita vedAnta. The first and the more serious error lies in interpreting the madhyamaka concept of SUnyatA as an Absolute, equivalent to the Atman or brahman of vedAnta. A careful reading of nAgArjuna's mUlamadhyamaka-kArikAs and other works shows what pains the madhyamaka school takes to avoid the extreme of absolutism (SAsvata-vAda). While the buddhist ajAtivAda maintains, "There is no birth," gauDapAda's argument about ajAtivAda says, "There is an Unborn." Thus, gauDapAda clearly upholds the Atman as the absolute. For nAgArjuna, no view is correct, because every view ultimately entails some absolutist positon, an extreme that is avoided by the buddhist middle path. gauDapAda, on the other hand, is inclusivistic in his scope. He argues that every view entails an absolutist position, and precisely for this reason, all views are said to be non-conflicting (avirodha) with the absolutism of advaita. There are other points of contrast. For nAgArjuna, there is no need to affirm a substratum (adhishThAna) of phenomena, whereas for gauDapAda, the Atman is the substratum of all experience. The madhyamaka non-duality is in terms of the emptiness (SUnyatA) of all phenomena, while in the vedAnta view of non-duality, phenomena are possible only due to the essential reality of the Atman, which is pure consciousness. The madhyamaka school does not describe SUnyatA as an independent absolute entity, whereas the advaita vedAnta emphasizes brahman/Atman as an Absolute. In the light of these significant differences, seeing nothing but mahAyAna buddhism in gauDapAda's advaita vedAnta is impossible without seeing madhyamaka buddhism itself through vedAnta-tinted glasses. As for the other schools of buddhism such as vijnAnavAda, the madhyamaka school itself criticizes them for holding views that entail consciousness as an Absolute. gauDapAda possibly agrees with this evaluation of the vijnAnavAda school.

if you want to become a doctor, which is a better solution.. going to medical school, studying with the best in the field, having a mentor to guide you and learn as much as you can? or figure it all out yourself by practicing on cadavers through trial and error?