Simple_Jack

Vedanta, Mimamsa, Samkyha, etc., accepts 'testimony' (sabda) from authoritative sources (e.g. Upanishads) as valid perception (i.e. pramana) as well. By the way, I would garner that few "Direct-Path Advaita" teachers, especially Westerners, could match the sheer stability of Ramana's immersion in the Self.

If being a buddha was a prerequisite for anyone to teach other than Gautama Buddha, why are there many sutras, where his disciples assume a teaching role? They needn't be arahants as in some cases of devas.

Basically, when you're not subsuming buddhadharma under the authority of the Upanishads, the Upanishads are an authority over and above the buddhadharma. Why else would you have waged a smear campaign against its teachings? Do I need to link some of those posts in order to remind you?

Gatito, how many "Direct-Path Advaita" teachers influenced by Ramana Maharshi, from his contemporaries to current day teachers, were or are on his level of cultivation attainment? Likewise, it's not mandatory for someone to be a buddha in order to teach the buddhadharma, hell it's not even absolutely necessary for someone to be an arya, in order to assume a teaching position. As long as that individual is teaching according to the sutras, shastras, etc., that qualifies as relying on the testimony of the Buddha (and arya-sangha), as a form of valid perception (i.e. pramana). This need not concern you, since you do not consider the words of the Buddha as authoritative, ascribing instead to the views of Advaita and Trika.

The mental factors of jhanas, aren't the complete picture in the overall process of yoga, the body as well undergoes transformation which engenders states of bliss and so on. As for the issue of physicalism, that's fine and dandy, but outside of a secular ethics, as in the case of Marblehead, it renders the path of cultivation utterly irrelevant, which is why it perplexes me as to why people who adhere to this ideology bother with cultivation in the first place (other than as a mild form of stress relief?).

No, I'm not suggesting that, it just confuses me as to why you bother to comment on matters dealing with yogic experience from a purely physicalist standpoint.

Not really, you've pretty much stated that a bunch of times.

You're also a die-hard physicalist, with no incentive of accepting the psychological and physiological validity of extensive long term effects of meditation, since none of it matters for you in the end.

Yeah, I guess that would be experienced gradually and increasingly during the process of extensive mind-body transformation through yoga/meditation. The psychophysiological affects of meditative absorption, are outside the grasp, of the majority of humanities day-to-day experience.

Yet at the same time, reduction in the afflictions which sustains samsara, leads to feelings of ever increasing bliss and ecstasy beyond worldly comparison, as well as feelings of compassion and unconditional love; at least according to the accounts of religious scriptures and yogi's past and present.

Rajiv Malhotra on Dharma: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/dharma-religion_b_875314.html "...Dharma has the Sanskrit root dhri, which means "that which upholds" or "that without which nothing can stand" or "that which maintains the stability and harmony of the universe." Dharma encompasses the natural, innate behavior of things, duty, law, ethics, virtue, etc...But dharma is not limited to a particular creed or specific form of worship...Dharma is also often translated as "law," but to become a law, a set of rules has to be present which must: (i) be promulgated and decreed by an authority that enjoys political sovereignty over a given territory, (ii) be obligatory, (iii) be interpreted, adjudicated and enforced by courts, and (iv) carry penalties when it is breached. No such description of dharma is found within the traditions...The reduction of dharma to concepts such as religion and law has harmful consequences: it places the study of dharma in Western frameworks, moving it away from the authority of its own exemplars. Moreover, it creates the false impression that dharma is similar to Christian ecclesiastical law-making and the related struggles for state power."

According to Mahayana, everyone is subject to varying degrees of ignorance, as long as they have not achieved buddhahood; including bodhisattvas on the pure (8-10th) bhumi's.

Of course, the commonality shared between Dharmic religions, is in the reduction of the afflictions which sustains the cycle of reincarnation in samsara, which is achieved through (various types of) yoga/meditation.

They advocate suppression of the afflictions (kleśa) primarily through ethical discipline (śīla) and meditative absorption (samadhi/dhyana).

From "Master Yunmen: From the Record of the Chan Teacher "Gate of the Clouds" trans. by Urs App, pg. 133: Having entered the Dharma Hall for a formal instruction, Master Yunmen said: "Today I'm getting caught up in the words with you: Shit, ash, piss, fire! These dirty pigs and scabby dogs can't even distinguish good from bad and are making their living in a shit pit! Let me tell you: you must grasp the whole universe, the earth, the three vehicles', twelve divisions of teachings, and the verbal teachings of all buddhas of the three realms and all the masters in the whole empire at once right on your eyelashes! Even if you were able to understand this here and now, you'd still be a fellow out of luck who is jumping into a shit pit for no reason at all. If [anyone like that] should ever come by my assembly of patch-robed monks, I'd beat him up till his legs break!" Three monks then stepped forth simultaneously and bowed. The Master said: "A single indictment takes care [of all three of you]."

Anatman in Buddhism = you are just a bundle of impermanent psycho-physical processes i.e 5 aggregates, 12 sense gates, 18 sense elements. If by "suppressing", you mean controlling the afflictions (kleshas) through sila and samadhi, then Eastern traditions (using this as an umbrella term) can be charged with this.

From Nan Huaijin's "To Realize Enlightenment" trans. by Thomas Cleary: (pg.116-117) People who study Zen are always talking about having no-mind, and working on no-mind at all times. Zen master T'ung-an Ch'a had a verse about this: Don't say that having no-mind is the Path Having no-mind is still separated from it by a barrier. Having no-mind is still far from the Path, but we cannot even accomplish having no-mind. But what is genuine "no-mind"? For example, when we are walking along and we happen to bump into someone else, we might say: "I'm sorry! I didn't mean it." This use of the same Chinese term wu-hsin, "having no mind," to mean an action was not intentional is obviously not the same as the having no-mind of the Buddhist Path; rather it means not keeping track of things or being absent-minded. Forgetful people also do not keep track of things.... ... (pg. 217) ....These realms of delusion are even simpler to understand if we express them in a saying of the Zen School: "Giving rise to mind and setting thoughts in motion is the deva delusive demon. Not giving rise to mind or setting thoughts in motion is the delusive demon of the skandhas. Giving rise [to mind] and yet not giving rise [to mind] is the delusive demon of affliction." If you cannot act the master, any thought whatsoever is a deva delusive demon. If your mind is sunk in oblivion all day long, this is the delusive demon of the skandhas.

From "The Original Face: An Anthology of Rinzai Zen" trans. by Thomas Cleary, pgs. 52-53: In the school of the ancestral teachers we point directly to the human mind; verbal explanations and illustrative devices actually miss the point. Not falling into seeing and hearing, not following sound and form, acting freely in the phenomenal world, sitting and lying in the heap of myriad forms, not involved with phenomena in breathing out, not bound to the clusters and elements of existence when breathing in, the whole world is the gate of liberation, all worlds are true reality. A universal master knows what it comes to the moment it is raised; how will beginners and latecomers come to grips with it? If you don't get it yet, for the time being we open up a pathway in the gateway of the secondary truth, speak out where there is nothing to say, manifest form in the midst of formlessness. How do we speak where there is nothing to say? "A mortar runs through the sky." How do we manifest form from formlessness? "The west river sports with a lion." During your daily activities responding to circumstances in the realm of distinctions, don't think of getting rid of anything, don't understand it as a hidden marvel -- with no road of reason, no flavor, day and night, forgetting sleep and food, keep those sayings in mind. If you still don't get it, we go on to speak of the tertiary, expounding mind and nature, speaking of mystery and marvel: one atom contains the cosmos, one thought pervades everywhere. Thus an ancient said: Infinite lands and worlds With no distinctions between self and others Ten ages past and present Are never apart from this moment of thought Chizen brought some paper seeking some words, so I dashed this off, senile and careless, after looking at it once, consign it to the fire. -- National Teacher Shoitsu

The Buddha Dharma is in the world Awakening is not apart from the world If you seek enlightenment apart from the world It is like seeking rabbit horns. -- Sixth Patriarch

From Nan Huaijin's "Working Toward Enlightenment" trans. by Thomas Cleary: (pg. 185) Later the Second Patriarch passed on the Dharma to the Third Patriarch Seng-ts'an [d. 606]. After he had given him the robe and bowl emblematic of the succession, the Second Patriarch went everywhere eating and drinking and acting wild. A great scholar like him, who had become a monk and then concentrated his mind on his religious efforts, who had been given the Dharma and the seal of approval by Bodhidharma -- but after he had passed on the robe and bowl, in his later years his life was completely different, he drank wine and ran around like crazy in the brothel districts. People would ask him, "You are a patriarch of the Zen school. How can you hang around in the wineshops?" The Second Patriarch would say, "I am taming my mind. What business is it of yours?"

From Nan Huaijin's "Working Toward Enlightenment" trans. by Thomas Cleary: (pg.201) ....The truth in this is summarized in the following phrase: "You must activate your mind without dwelling anywhere." The Sixth Patriarch awakened to the Path by hearing this line from The Diamond Sutra. For example, when we hear someone else talking, aren't our minds born? After we have finished listening to them talking, our minds drop it, and we are fundamentally "activating mind without dwelling anywhere," aren't we? So why do we need to preserve mind?...In The Record of Pointing at the Moon, Volume 7, it records this story: One day a certain Master Lou-tzu was passing by a house of song, and he heard the sound of someone inside singing the words: "Since you have no-mind, I'll quit too." At the time he was tying his shoe, and when he heard this line of the song, he was enlightened. What did he awaken to? Fundamentally we have no-mind: after every sentence we say, it does not remain anywhere. Since you have no-mind, I will quit, that's it! This is also the truth of emptiness. Even though emptying out past, present, and future still does not reach the final destination, almost no one can cut off past, present, and future and consistently maintain this. The basic reason is that people have no clear recognition of "subject" and "object"... ... (pgs.212-213) ....The Record of Pointing at the Moon, Volume 2, contains this passage: "Manjushri asked the maiden Anditya, 'What is the meaning of birth?'...The maiden said, 'If you can know clearly that the four causal elements of earth, water, fire, and wind have never been mixed together, and yet they are able to follow what is appropriate to them, this is the meaning of birth.'....Our bodies are made up of the four elements gathering together and building a house. Though these four kinds of things have joined together and turned into a body, earth is still earth, water is still water, fire is still fire, and air is still air. None of them infringes on the other, each rests in its own place. "Yet they are able to follow what is appropriate to them": they still match up and join together, and give form to this phenomenon of life. The link between the mental and the material is all right here. We see these four elements as joined together, but in reality they have not been joined together at all. To say they have not joined, but they are still able to follow what is appropriate, is the same as the statement in The Surangama Sutra: "The pure fundamental state pervades the universe. It follows the minds of sentient beings, and responds to their contents, and becomes manifest according to their karma." You should not just study Buddhism -- you should take its principles and apply them to your own body, to seek realization. If ordinarily you only know to sit in meditation and hold to an experiential realm, this is like a blind cat guarding a dead rat, and you will be a blind cat forever. You should study this: "They have never been mixed together, and yet they are able to follow what is appropriate to them." This is the truth of where birth and death comes from. ... (pg.264-265) ....Tung-shan said: "In the age of the End of the Dharma, many people have dry [sterile] wisdom." In this present age of ours, the Correct Dharma is not there anymore. People do not have real meditative accomplishments. They can expound theoretical principles so that it all seems like the Path, but they themselves have not experienced it. This is dry [sterile] wisdom, and it is useless. Tung-shan said: "If you want to distinguish the real from the false, there are three kinds of leakages." Do you want to tell if someone is enlightened or not? There are three kinds of problems: once you see them, you will know. Tung-shan said: "The first is called leakage of views. Your mental workings do not leave the station you have attained, and you fall into a sea of poison." People who do not have a thorough, penetrating view of truth cannot jump out of the limits of what they have attained. They just stay within those limits, and are poisoned -- poisoned with that little bit of seeing truth. Tung-shan said: "The second is called the leakage of sentiments. You are stuck in going toward and turning away, and your perception is one-sided and withered." In other words, these are subjective sentiments and feelings. You attain a little bit of an experiential realm, and you have feelings toward that realm. You think: "Ah! How comfortable it is when I begin sitting. Hey! This is it." Some people think: "Our old teacher has probably never gotten to this: he knows nothing about this experience of mine." In fact, you have already fallen into the leakage of sentiments. The "sentiments" referred to here are not what is commonly called emotions. It means getting bogged down in the level that you have attained...Tung-shan said: "The third is leakage of words. You delve into the subtleties but lose the guiding principle, the source. Your potential is benighted from beginning to end, and defiled knowledge flows on and on." Here "words" includes all Buddhist studies and learning. If you rely on texts to interpret meanings, if you roll around in learned thinking, and fail to understand the true seeds of the Buddha Dharma, how can this create a basis for the functioning of your potential, for the adaptive use of methods of cultivating practice? How can you realize the fruit of enlightenment? If you fall to the leakage of words, you will never understand the key to success at all. In the age of the End of the Dharma, in this evil world of the five corruptions, people who cultivate practice are revolving in these three kinds of patterns. Tung-shan told his disciples that they must know about these three kinds of leakage.

Bump.

http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=14040&p=186276&hilit=+epistemic#p186276 It depends on what you mean by nondual. There are three kinds of non dualism. One is cognitive non dualism, i.e., everything is consciousness, for, like example Yogacara. The second is ontological nondualism, i.e. everything is brahman, god, etc. The third is epistemic nondualism, i.e., being, non-being and so on cannot be found on analysis and therefore do not ultimately exist. The indivisibility of the conditioned and the unconditioned is based on the third. We have only experience of conditioned phenomena. Unconditioned phenomena like space are known purely through inference since they have no characteristics of their own to speak of. When we analyze phenomena, what do we discover? We discover suchness, an unconditioned state, the state free from extremes. That unconditioned state cannot be discovered apart from conditioned phenomena, therefore, we can say with confidence that the conditioned and the unconditioned are nondual. The trick is which version of nonduality you are invoking. This nonduality of the conditioned and unconditioned cannot apply to the first two nondualities for various reasons. http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=3193&start=60 "Non-duality" is trivial in general because it is just an intellectual trip. The nature of things is "non-dual", simply meaning free from existence and non-existence. Great, now one knows this. Then what? How are you going to use this fact? How do you integrate this into your practice? Better not do so conceptually, since that will just result in taking rebirth as a formless realm god. The purpose of emptiness is to cure views. Emptiness is not a view. "Non-duality" is a view. That is why Vimalakirti kept his trap shut.

http://thetaobums.com/topic/33010-nondual-in-buddhadharma/ Dvayaṃnissito kho'yaṃ kaccaana loko yebhuyyena atthita–ceva natthita–ca Kaaccana, this world abides in duality, normally abiding in ‘is’ and ‘is not’. ~ Buddha Emptiness is the abandoning of wrong views itself. But there are only two wrong views i.e. "is" and "is not".... "Is" leads to the view of eternalism. "Is not" leads to the view of annihilation. Nāgārjuna states: ‘Is’ is holding to permanence, ‘Is not’ is an annihilationist view. Because of that, is and is not are not made into a basis by the wise. There is no actual state or condition that is free from duality. If one should think that there is, one will have not understood one single thing about Buddha Dharma. Because people think there is a real state free from dualistic extremes, they fall into the pit of eternalism and grasping, never even recognizing emptiness correctly, let alone realizing it, and hampering their understanding of dependent origination. Thinking there is such a thing as a real state of non-duality is precisely the Advaita Vedanta, Trika and so on. The term non-dual (gnyis med, or advaya) is used frequently in Buddhist texts. The term non-duality (gnyis med nyid, advaita) is virtually never used, showing up only one time in the entire Kengyur, in a single passage in the Kalacakra tantra (hooray for a text searchable Tibetan canon!); and nineteen times in the Tengyur, the translations of Indian commentaries. There is no philosophy of non-dualism in Buddhism. This is wholly the invention of western scholars. For example, Madhyamaka rarely uses the term "non-dual". It does not get used at all in the Nikaya schools. I think westerners are over-invested in this word. But a word that is frequently brought up, over and over again, is anutpāda, non-origination, non-arising. This word is much more important for we Buddhists. "Non-dual" in Dzogchen is no different than non-dual in Madhyamaka - it means that the categories of being and non-being are cognitive errors. "Non-dual" i.e. gnyis med/advaya means the absence of the duality of being and non-being. In Yogacara, it can mean absence of subject and object, but the reason for this is that ultimately there is an absence of being and non-being. It depends on what you mean by nondual. There are three kinds of non dualism. One is cognitive non dualism, i.e., everything is consciousness, for, like example Yogacara. The second is ontological nondualism, i.e. everything is brahman, god, etc. The third is epistemic nondualism, i.e., being, non-being and so on cannot be found on analysis and therefore do not ultimately exist. The indivisibility of the conditioned and the unconditioned is based on the third. We have only experience of conditioned phenomena. Unconditioned phenomena like space are known purely through inference since they have no characteristics of their own to speak of. When we analyze phenomena, what do we discover? We discover suchness, an unconditioned state, the state free from extremes. That unconditioned state cannot be discovered apart from conditioned phenomena, therefore, we can say with confidence that the conditioned and the unconditioned are nondual. The trick is which version of nonduality you are invoking. This nonduality of the conditioned and unconditioned cannot apply to the first two nondualities for various reasons. "Non-duality" is trivial in general because is just an intellectual trip. The nature of things is "non-dual", simply meaning free from existence and non-existence. Great, now one knows this. Then what? How are you going to use this fact? How do you integrate this into your practice? Better not do so conceptually, since that will just result in taking rebirth as a formless realm god. The purpose of emptiness is to cure views. Emptiness is not a view. "Non-duality" is a view. That is why Vimalakirti kept his trap shut. Here, when we say non-conceptual, we do not mean a mind in which there is an absence of thought. When consciousness is freed from signs and characteristics, this is called the realization of emptiness. An non-conceptual mind may still indeed be trapped by signs and characteristics... Phenomena are free of duality, since they originate in dependence. That absence of duality also has a correlate in direct experience -- see Kaccaayanagotto Sutta i.e. "Everything exists,' this is one extreme [view]; 'nothing exists,' this is the other extreme. Avoiding both extremes the Tathaagata teaches a doctrine of the middle". The middle way view is by necessity a non-dual view, avoiding these extremes of dualism. That is also emptiness; emptiness cures the views of existence and non-existence -- that can be correlated in one's personal experience.... ~ Loppon Namdrol

.