About the nature of non existence.

[JustARandomPanda]

Master Nan Huai-Chin is not my cup-of-tea,...could feel different if fluent in Chinese,...skeptical that the English translations are too Westernized, and thus distort the message. The deeper one enters inquiry into honesty and truth, the more specific the language becomes.

 

*scratches nose*

 

Hmm...yes I could see how that might be the case. I think there is renewed argument in Linguistics whether language has the power to shape our reality. It used to be discredited but new research suggests that at least sometimes which language one speaks shapes what one experiences.

 

I like Master Nan Huai-Chin but I certainly don't expect everyone else to. I mean...if I remember correctly, there were people who disliked the Buddha! If even He couldn't win universal liking by practically everybody I think it's unrealistic to think anyone else will either.

 

 

 

How many people do you know that understand a single truth? Keep in mind, a truth in this context implies something that never changes.

 

AH!!! Now you say something that I have pondered quite a bit (and then decided maybe I'd better stop the monkey-mind chatter since I wasn't getting any answers via that method). A truth is something that NEVER changes. Hmm...Funny...I know people (including myself once upon a time) who would argue there can be no such thing. That someone's truth is always and only going to be their Truth from their perspective since you can't divorce Truth from perspective. Or I think that's how the argument runs.

 

But...if let's say I take what you say as a Thought Experiment...I can not think of anything that I could say "this is True" *and* have it fit the above constraint (never changes for all eternity). At least not that I'm aware of at this time.

 

For example, I have often puzzled why so damn many spiritual traditions or religions (not always the same thing imo) argue with each other over Whose Truth is the Real Truth. Vajrahidaya used to piss off some of the Taoists on this board with his constantly maintaining the superiority of Buddhism to virtually any other spiritual tradition this planet has ever experienced.

 

 

What would be the vocabulary of someone who understood one thing? Most likely, everything they would say could be reduced back to the one thing they understood,...so that even if they didn't mention the one thing that they understood, it would nevertheless be quite visible, if you looked intently enough.

 

A great teacher is not necessarily a "less-than-kindly Sifu/Teacher sort" or its opposite,...but one who clearly mirrors back what the student gives off. Look at dynamic of Tilopa and Naropa. Many believe Naropa's 12 austerities were cruel,...but Tilopa was an enlightened, Heart Minded Mahasiddha,...how could he have been cruel?

 

Fascinating. In that case he would've probably mirrored back a huge, vainglorious ego that always defeated me in an intellectual debate. Ah...that was a bummer of a self-revelation. And one reason why I now try to not argue quite so much on Taobums anymore (not always successful at that unfortunately). It's definitely led to a reduction of my posting activity at TB. I had (and still do!) a bad habit of wanting to be "right" in any debate post I make. That's one reason why I got curious to see if I could go 3 months without ever forming an opinion or judgment about other people's posts. I didn't last 3 minutes.

 

As for the subject of illusion,...although "The general consensus I think was that it merely operates LIKE one, not actually IS one" does not make it so. The understanding of phenomena as actually being an illusory projection, like the image on a theater screen, is becoming more intellectually acceptable. The great Max Planck also stated, "As a man who has devoted his entire life to the most clear-headed science to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: there is no matter as such."

 

Not only is perceived life dreamlike, it is a dream, and has little connection with reality. Of course this is quite upsetting for the 6 Senses, whose imagined 6 consciousness' believes it is real. However, very few are ever convinced of that.

 

V

 

Well V I admit I have become more open to the above proposition and part of why I meditate and part of why I liked Buddhism was it's very science-like oriented nature. I liked how the Buddha himself said something to the effect of "if you do ABC you will get results XYZ. But don't just take my word for it. Do the work yourself and find out."

 

In other words..it's one of the few traditions I know of that advocates testing to see if what the Founder said is true. Very different from the Christianity that I grew up with were everything was handed to me on a platter and I was told if I didn't believe it I was going to burn in hell for all eternity. *shudder*

 

At least in Buddhism even beings stuck in hell eventually get another shot at doing better next time.

[Vmarco]

 

 

AH!!! Now you say something that I have pondered quite a bit (and then decided maybe I'd better stop the monkey-mind chatter since I wasn't getting any answers via that method). A truth is something that NEVER changes. Hmm...Funny...I know people (including myself once upon a time) who would argue there can be no such thing. That someone's truth is always and only going to be their Truth from their perspective since you can't divorce Truth from perspective. Or I think that's how the argument runs.

 

But...if let's say I take what you say as a Thought Experiment...I can not think of anything that I could say "this is True" *and* have it fit the above constraint (never changes for all eternity). At least not that I'm aware of at this time.

 

For example, I have often puzzled why so damn many spiritual traditions or religions (not always the same thing imo) argue with each other over Whose Truth is the Real Truth. Vajrahidaya used to piss off some of the Taoists on this board with his constantly maintaining the superiority of Buddhism to virtually any other spiritual tradition this planet has ever experienced.

 

 

 

Yes, those who do not understand a single truth (truth being an unchanging, absolute truth) argue that there is no truth,...that it's all relative. Buddhists in particular, discuss the difference between the relative and absolute. For example, Shantideva said:

"Relative and absolute,

These the two truths are declared to be.

The absolute is not within the reach of intellect,

For the intellect is grounded in the relative."

 

That leads to this,...that the relative arises from the 6 senses, whereas the absolute is uncovered from beyond the 6 senses. Thus, the honest student inquires into the validity of experience beyond the 6 senses.

 

For those genuinely devoted to the inquiry, there is a natural resonance towards what is false, rather than what is true. A Sentient (6 sense dominant)Being believes themself to be encapsulated in a sensory, changing environment,...the 6 senses can only know motion. There is no absolute truth in motion.

 

To a Sentient Being, motion is life. To a Tathagata, the belief in motion is a barrier that Sentient Beings have built against experiencing truth,...thus Buddhism teaches meditation to help cultivate a better attitude about reality. But keep in mind,...Sakyamuni DID NOT uncover enlightenment through meditation,...his meditation was merely a preparation that enabled him to experience a truth,...after Sujata gave the almost dead ascetic some rice-milk.

 

The truth he realized was this,...that suffering is a consequence of the desire for things to be other than they are. From that absolute truth, the whole of Independant Origination was understood,...and the first Turning of the Wheel of Dharma occurred.

 

The 3rd and 4th Turnings embody the Vajrayana that "Vajrahidaya used to piss off some of the Taoists."

 

The bottom line,...absolute truth is only understood through the letting go of the notion that the 6 senses can access truth.

 

V

[JustARandomPanda]

I truly do not know what to think anymore. Did or did not the Buddha teach that Samsara IS an Illusion or merely LIKE an illusion?

 

Here's (an excerpt) what Thusness himself says on the subject (I presume Thusness has let go of all the senses?):

 

First of all, to the Buddha and Nagarjuna, Samsara is not an illusion but like an illusion.

 

There is a quantum leap in the meaning of these two statements. Secondly, because it is only 'like an illusion' i.e. interdependently arisen like all illusions, it does not and cannot vanish, so Nirvana is not when Samsara vanishes like mist and the Brahma arises like the sun out of the mist but rather when seeing that the true nature of Samsara is itself Nirvana. So whereas Brahma and Samsara are two different entities, one real and the other unreal, one existing and the other non-existing, Samsara and Nirvana in Buddhism are one and not two. Nirvana is the nature of Samsara or in Nagarjuna's words shunyata is the nature of Samsara. It is the realization of the nature of Samsara as empty which cuts at the very root of ignorance and results in knowledge not of another thing beyond Samsara but of the way Samsara itself actually exists (Skt. vastusthiti), knowledge of Tathata (as it-is-ness) the Yathabhuta (as it really is) of Samsara itself. It is this knowledge that liberates from wrong conceptual experience of Samsara to the unconditioned experience of Samsara itself. That is what is meant by the indivisibility of Samsara and Nirvana (Skt. Samsara nirvana abhinnata, Tib: Khor de yer me). The mind being Samsara in the context of DzogChen, Mahamudra and Anuttara Tantra. Samsara would be substituted by dualistic mind. The Hindu paradigm is world denying, affirming the Brahma. The Buddhist paradigm does not deny the world; it only rectifies our wrong vision (Skt. mithya drsti) of the world. It does not give a dream beyond or separate transcendence from Samsara. Because such a dream is part of the dynamics of ignorance, to present such a dream would be only to perpetuate ignorance.

 

To Buddhism, any system or paradigm which propagates such an unproven and improvable dream as an eternal substance or ultimate reality, be it Hinduism or any other 'ism', is propagating spiritual materialism and not true spirituality. To Hinduism such a Brahma is the summum bonum of its search goal, the peak of the Hindu thesis. The Hindu paradigm would collapse without it. Since Buddhism denies thus, it cannot be said honestly that the Buddha merely meant to reform Hinduism. As I have said, it is a totally different paradigm. Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Jainism are all variations of the same paradigm. So truly speaking, you could speak of them as reformations of each other. But Buddhism has a totally different paradigm from any of these, not merely from Vedic- Hinduism.

 

This leads us naturally to the concept of the Two Truths (Skt. satyadvaya). Both Hindu Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhism (and for that matter all forms of Buddhism) use this concept to clarify its paradigm. But again the same words point at two different paradigms. First of all the concept of the Two Truths clearly stated as in Buddhism comes into Hinduism only after Sankaracharya (7th / 8th century) whereas the Buddha himself used these words. But even though Sankara copied the use of these words from Buddhism and also copied many other conceptual words from Nagarjuna to elucidate his Vedantic paradigm, the paradigm that he tries to clarify with these words is different. In many places these conceptual wordings and analogies are forced to produce the meaning that is required for the Veantic paradigm. In the Vedantic context, the Relative Truth (Skt. samvritti satya) is that this Samsara is an illusion and the Ultimate Truth (Skt. paramartha satya) is that there is an ultimately existing thing (Skt. paramartha satta) transcending / immanent in this world. The relative truth will vanish like a mist and the transcendent and immanent Brahma will appear as the only Truth, the world being false. To sum it up, the Vedantic Ultimate Truth is the existence of an ultimate existence or ultimate reality. Reality here is used as something which exists (Skt. satta).

 

However, the Buddhist Ultimate Truth is the absence of any such satta i.e. ultimately existing thing or ultimate reality. That is the significance of Shunyata - absence of any real, independent, unchanging existence (Skt. svabhava). And that fact is the Ultimate Truth of Buddhism, which is diametrically opposite to the Ultimate Truth of the Hindu Brahma. So Shunyata can never be a negative way of describing the Atman - Brahma of Hinduism as Vinoba Bhave and such scholars would have us believe. The meaning of Shunyata found in Sutra, Tantra, Dzogchen or Mahamudra is the same as the Prasangika emptiness of Chandrakirti i.e. unfindability of any true existence or simply unfindability. Some writers of DzogChen and Mahamudra or Tantra think that the emptiness of Nagarjuna is different from the emptiness found in these systems. But I would like to ask them whether their emptiness is findable or unfindable; whether or not the significance of emptiness in these systems is also not the fact of unfindability.

 

 

Sigh...

 

More and more I see it's necessary to keep diligently practicing. If I always rely on what I've already got I don't suppose I'll ever get any result different from what I already have.

[Jetsun]

I truly do not know what to think anymore. Did or did not the Buddha teach that Samsara IS an Illusion or merely LIKE an illusion?

 

That is what I always thought, people here always bang on about the world being an illusion but my understanding of it was it was like an illusion, like a dream, which can mean something fundamentally different. There are some Sutras which talk about the world being an illusion but you have to wonder what meaning may be lost in translation, especially if the translator isn't a particularly enlightened person.

[xabir2005]

I truly do not know what to think anymore. Did or did not the Buddha teach that Samsara IS an Illusion or merely LIKE an illusion?

 

Here's (an excerpt) what Thusness himself says on the subject (I presume Thusness has let go of all the senses?):

 

 

 

 

Sigh...

 

More and more I see it's necessary to keep diligently practicing. If I always rely on what I've already got I don't suppose I'll ever get any result different from what I already have.

 

what you quoted is from Archaya Mahayogi Shridhar Rinpoche. Thusnmess did not write the article, but did comment on it in the comments section.

 

The world is not illusory in the sense of being imagined, this is what he meant by "like an illusion but not an illusion".

 

However I put it this way: the world is illusory but not delusional. The world is not a fabrication of your imagination, yet it is empty and yet appearing, like a dream, a mirage, a magician's trick. Delusion is in taking self and the world to be real. If you realize no self no dharmas then the world apprehended correctly, is itself nirvana.

[Simple_Jack]

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Edited February 5, 2014 by Simple_Jack