Why Daoism over Buddhism

[Apech]

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... if you get my meaning.

[dust]

but the Wuxing/5E comes before the Taiji, believe it or not.

 

Depends who you ask the writers of the Taiyishengshui would disagree, I think

 

But I wasn't really referring to cosmology.. I set no store by any cosmology, Taoist or other... I'm fairly sure that "What came first?" is a meaningless question, and returns meaningless answers.

 

I was just talking about the taijitu as a good abstract representation of general Taoist thought.

 

There is no element that 'should' be venerated above any other as being 'more like Tao'. Chapter 8 of Laozi tells us that water is close to the Tao in certain aspects of its behaviour. It doesn't say "worship water".

 

To suggest that water 'wins' over all, or that the Sun 'wins' over all, is missing the point.

[Marblehead]

In Morse code that reads: ITITIT

[Marblehead]

Chapter 8 of Laozi tells us that water is close to the Tao in certain aspects of its behaviour. It doesn't say "worship water".

 

To suggest that water 'wins' over all, or that the Sun 'wins' over all, is missing the point.

It does, however say that water benefits all (except when there are great floods) and that we should try to be like water.

[dust]

It does, but

 

The highest good is like light
Light gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive
It shines in places men reject and so is like the Tao

 

Replacing 'water' with 'light' I see little to argue with..

 

In chapter 78, a couple more things would have to be changed, but the essence would be the same: all life depends on light, all life can be destroyed by light. Light is even less solid (to us) than water, but like water is soft and pervasive most of the time, and just as powerful.

 

 

 

Well, I won't labour the point further. You see what I'm trying to say, I assume, even if you don't agree..

[Marblehead]

It does, but

 

The highest good is like light

Light gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive

It shines in places men reject and so is like the Tao

 

Replacing 'water' with 'light' I see little to argue with..

 

In chapter 78, a couple more things would have to be changed, but the essence would be the same: all life depends on light, all life can be destroyed by light. Light is even less solid (to us) than water, but like water is soft and pervasive most of the time, and just as powerful.

 

 

 

Well, I won't labour the point further. You see what I'm trying to say, I assume, even if you don't agree..

Not fair changing the rules in the middle of the game. Hehehe.

 

Yes, I see what you are pointing at but most of my attention is directed at the finger.

 

Yes, light (energy) is One. (That is a departure in thought for me. I argue with Vmarco about his light with my energy.)

[thetaoiseasy]

A cultivator can work with the source, or continue to feed its conceptualization. All buddhas, immortals, deities, gods, spirits -- they are only literary and cultural descriptions of a simple, natural reality of energy.

 

Traditionally, this reality is grouped in terms of numbers:

 

0 - The Undefined Substance of Life, Hun Tun

1 - The True One, North Star

2 - The Duality of Yin and Yang, Sun and Moon

3 - The Three spheres of Heaven, Earth, and Man

4 - The Four groups of the Seven Stars in the 28 constellations

5- The Five Elements

 

Know that the level of One is not as responsive to form, and the level of Zero is completely deaf to form. So if a cultivator wants to go deeper, he has to go about things differently than a traditional Daoist or Buddhist.

 

As for light, Lu Dong Bin refers to internal light 內光, not external light 外光 -- he is referring to an awareness of energy. And so all things have light. There is the light of water. There is the light of mountains. There is the light of the sun. There is the light of trees. All of these sources of light converge as the One True Breath.

 

[Daeluin]

but the Wuxing/5E comes before the Taiji, believe it or not.

 

I can't read the taiji without seeing the wuxing inherent anymore.

 

As to what came first... the undivided and in-distinguished.

[Taomeow]

So here's another thing. The most electrically active organs (i.e. the most Fire) are the heart and the brain. The most Water organs are the womb and the Kidneys which include the reproductive system. The taoist cosmology correlates our physiology to the structure of reality -- heaven/light above, earth/water below, human sandwiched in the middle between them. (In terms of wuxing "human" is related to Wood, biological live entities, and between Fire and Water there's Metal. So "golden light" of taoism is not light -- except in buddhism-influenced renditions. It is gold, it's Metal in its fluid state that generates the phase that nourishes life -- Water. The role of Fire is to make it fluid (imbuing it with Water properties) in the Control cycle. Original taoism works with these energies of the world every which way based on their true universal dynamics.

 

Fire, Light, etc. centered modalities don't. Which is why they fail to accurately reflect what's going on in the middle world, by offering either that it's not real (maya) or that it's all suffering, karma, punishment, something to escape... that birth is a "fall," that rebirth is a "sentence," that biological life is an aberration, that one must look forward to escaping it and joining some luminous eternal something or other. To me, all of it is a construct of Fire, of the Higher... er... upper, neocortical, electrochemically charged and continuously firing synapses in the brain. In any spiritual wrapper it is a head game, a mind trip. A betrayal one might say -- of the body, of the womb, of life on earth.

 

The goal of taoism is to master all of these energies -- as tao does. "Gathering the light" in quanzhen is legit -- but one would have to know why and what for before assessing the significance of the practice. In my school, we gather it back into the body because it has been scattered, in pursuits of the mind. We've squandered our light -- we just want it back, whatever is rightfully ours. No more. No less. If the goal of a taoist alchemical practice is an immortalist one (as it usually is in the original taoism), you go backward, from Fire to Water, from having used your head to get whatever you were after (e.g. more light, eternal light, unified light, whatever you call it) to having been nourished spontaneously in the waters of the womb of the Great Mother. But don't let me digress too far into alchemical paraphernalia. What I'm trying to say is, taoism does not deny, negate, belittle Fire/Light in any shape or form -- it just lets it know its true place in the grand scheme of things. A dynamic place, not some be-all end-all "goal."

[dawei]

Isn't life on Earth the result of the interaction between fire and water, animated by the pull of the moon? Remove any one of the three from the formula and the whole process would come to a halt. I think.

 

And as I understand it, first there was the sun, then came the moon, and then the water.

 

Would you be surprised that the oldest cosmology, Tai Yi Sheng Shui, relates it as:

 

Taiyi ShengShui:

 

Great One → Water → Heaven and Earth → Spirit and Light → Yin Yang → Four Seasons

 

The "initial conception" or what I prefer to call the "primordial illumination" (big bang) is extreme fire which 'hides' in a gas like water until space and matter form and align themselves. I don't think this is water we as physically known; it just as the first light is not as we physically know it. They are pre-celestial building blocks.

 

I guess to be on topic... this is Daoist

[Taomeow]

There was no big bang though. That's old physics of unresolved internal conflicts. I'm reading up on the new ideas -- the best ones propose cyclical universe(s) with no beginning, uncreated and indestructible. No expansion either except the kind followed by contraction followed by expansion, etc.. Very taoist.

[dawei]

There was no big bang though. That's old physics of unresolved internal conflicts. I'm reading up on the new ideas -- the best ones propose cyclical universe(s) with no beginning, uncreated and indestructible. No expansion either except the kind followed by contraction followed by expansion, etc.. Very taoist.

 

Sounds interesting... When you have time, can you post some links?

[dust]

There was no big bang though. That's old physics of unresolved internal conflicts. I'm reading up on the new ideas -- the best ones propose cyclical universe(s) with no beginning, uncreated and indestructible. No expansion either except the kind followed by contraction followed by expansion, etc.. Very taoist.

 

This seems so obvious, and yet at the same time it is kind of hard for a human being to comprehend; that something could have "no beginning". Saying "it has no beginning" is to say "it never began" which is to say "it doesn't exist" -- but this is our language tricking us. Nothing more.

 

This is why I suggest that the question "What came first?" is meaningless, and yields meaningless answers.

 

This doesn't necessarily mean that "the Big Bang" doesn't happen, though, at 'the beginning' of each cycle...right?

[dwai]

 

And this is a mirror image of what happened to me. Except "beliefs" didn't even play into that. I discovered energies of the world -- empirically, not theoretically -- and was struggling to explain and name them. I still have a notebook from those times with diagrams, attempts at formulas, brief descriptions (opening-closing, inward bound-outward bound, the curved Nothing (zero) flattens into the straight One and One splits in Two and Two curves into Three, etc. -- that last bit, without ever having read Laozi, mind you), so discovering taoism was like regaining memory after having suffered from some existential amnesia.

 

To this day, I maintain it is the supreme ultimate science. Philosophy and religion of taoism are both Taoist Science 101 to me. Do I "believe?" Don't have to. No one has to believe that they are or aren't having a cup of coffee. I just happen to be so organized that I don't have to believe in yin-yang, qi, wuxing, bagua, ganying either. That sometimes they appear as philosophical ideas and sometimes as deities is a side effect. Taoism is the supreme ultimate science of the energies of the world. To be in this world and maintain ignorance of how it works is like having been imprisoned at an infinite library, with nothing whatsoever to do except read, and never having bothered to learn to read.

 

Most non-taoist modalities are this kind of illiteracy to me... their subscribers are in the same library, but they use books as bricks to build pyramids out of to entertain themselves somehow -- instead of learning to read them. Or they are busy discarding them, shredding them, throwing them in a furnace in search of the One True Book. Which they wouldn't know how to read even if it existed. Or they take a random book with a particularly fancy cover and designate it that. That is The. The is It. And then whack someone who has designated a different book on the head with This One, the The. And on and on...

 

Those who know any metaphysical position/framework is only relative truth, will realize that any system that says it is the "way" is only making a truth claim. There are flaws with your sun-based vs water-based theory but I found it very interesting nonetheless.

[dwai]

 

That's interesting ... and has already evoked some response.

 

Having just read a lot about this I would like to comment that the worship of light/sun/fire is actually Vedic. The primary rite of the Vedic religion was the Agni fire sacrifice where often many animals were offered up to the sacred pyre in the hope of eternal life with brahma. The Buddha actually was totally opposed to all this and subverted much of the vedic terms and imagery converting it into something quite other. He used Vedic terms like karma etc. because the people he was teaching people versed in that tradition. He never used the term enlightenment only awakening and didn't particularly use the image of light and only fire as a bad thing.

 

I accept there are now schools of Buddhism which like to present the Buddha as a light, shiny kind of thing (like Pure Land Buddhism for instance) but to characterise Buddha as part of the fire lineage is I think pushing it a little.

Vedic system is based on Brahman - the expanding one. The universe is called brahmanda or the expanding egg. It expands and collapses cyclically, thereby the material universe rising from and collapsing back into the Brahman. It is not based on fire or sun although both have places of significance in the Vedic perspective, as does water.

The Vedic creation hymn - the nasadiya Sukta essentially says that there was undifferentiated water essence (wuji) from where the substantial and insubstantial came forth and from the interaction of the two rose the material universe. A very clear correspondence with the daoist perspective.

[forestofclarity]

I have not come across any mind technologies in these religions that Buddhism has. For example, the development of concentration and mindfulness in an effort to understand direct experience. Christianity, especially, lacks any coherent technique.

 

The ultimate goal of Buddhism is the end of suffering, which comes from the cessation of clinging, which has nothing to do with the sun. The word nibbana meant to "cool", such as when you cooked something and you set it out to cool. So again, this analogy fails--- in fact, this is exactly the opposite of fire/sun. The term enlightenment is usually translated from "bodhi", which related to "buddhi" or the intellect -- the discriminating part of the mind. Again, nothing to do with the sun.

 

I would further argue that the light referred to by many of these traditions is not the light of the sun, but the light of awareness.

 

As for Taoism, it is as prone to persecution and religious fundamentalism as other religions (including Buddhism). How many Buddhist books and images were burned by Emperor Wuzong?

 

Unfold the wrapper and you won't be able to tell buddhism from christianity from Ra veneration from Mitra cult.

[snip]

Me no like. Me like what puts those fires out. Taoism does -- with water.

[Marblehead]

There was no big bang though. That's old physics of unresolved internal conflicts. I'm reading up on the new ideas -- the best ones propose cyclical universe(s) with no beginning, uncreated and indestructible. No expansion either except the kind followed by contraction followed by expansion, etc.. Very taoist.

Hehehe. May be very Taoist but very illogical. I have listened to those new-age theoretical physicists with all their smoke-laiden thoughts. They tend to go far, far away.

 

All observable evidence still supports the Big Bang Theory and an expanding universe.

[3bob]

Also Apech, Lord Brahma is not seen by all as eternal in the common use of the term, thus there is the "Day and Night" of Lord Brahma and the lifetime of Lord Brahma which is a very huge number as described in and as accepted in most forms of Hindu cosmology.

 

As I imagine you well know the terms Brahma, (or Lord Brahma) Brahmin, and Brahman do not point to the same meaning.

(with Brahman being beyond any category yet the source of all categories)

[Marblehead]

 

This doesn't necessarily mean that "the Big Bang" doesn't happen, though, at 'the beginning' of each cycle...right?

That is a possibility I won't deny. But cycles are required for this to be so. For that to happen the universe must one day stop expanding and begin contracting.

 

Right now there are no indications that this is going to happen.

 

But then, it must have happened in the past if there was a Singularity that went "Bang".

[3bob]

to keep water based beer from going bang keep it in stillness before cyclically flowing it.

[Marblehead]

to keep water based beer from going bang keep it in stillness before cyclically flowing it.

Hehehe. Yeah, we have kinda' strayed off topic, haven't we?

[Kongming]

Christianity, especially, lacks any coherent technique.

 

One shouldn't underestimate Christianity entirely in this regard. The Orthodox practice of hesychasm, which is quite similar to japa or mantra practice, as well as the apophatic contemplation described by figures like Pseudo-Dionysius or in the medieval "Cloud of Unknowing", as well as the plethora of material within the Philokalia or in Scupoli's Spiritual Combat are all various techniques and methodologies for cooling the passions, clearing the mind, and entering higher states of contemplation.

[dust]

That is a possibility I won't deny. But cycles are required for this to be so. For that to happen the universe must one day stop expanding and begin contracting.

 

Right now there are no indications that this is going to happen.

 

But then, it must have happened in the past if there was a Singularity that went "Bang".

 

If it's true that there is no beginning, it's true that time as we perceive it is fairly meaningless in the Great Scheme -- but scientists can only look at what they can look at, which is a previously and presently expanding universe.

 

http://www.universetoday.com/11430/the-end-of-everything/

 

Not sure what to think about theories like this. In a nutshell, he suggests that eventually (10¹⁰⁰ years or more), stars and galaxies and everything will have collapsed in on themselves, and all the "dead" blocks of black stuff will either float away forever or come back together and start another Big Bang. That's it: 2 options. Nothing else is possible. Scientists know everything.

 

But, of course, all of this theorizing is based on our very very incredibly limited knowledge of the details of 'stuff'.

 

If the dead blocks continue floating away, forever...where are they going?

What about dark matter? (How do we know it won't change its mind?)

Other universes?

Behaviour that we can't predict because we have no evidence to base predictions on?

 

The current version of the universe is so young that a bunch of stuff that could happen hasn't even happened yet.

 

So, to get back on topic, this is why I like (my version of) Taoism. Very simple: Tao gave rise to all. This happens forever. Done. Now I can get back to singing songs and climbing trees

[forestofclarity]

It is not an underestimate, but an acknowledgement that the Christian relies heavily on faith and grace. Many schools of Buddhism rely on gaining knowledge, and this is based on specific practices.

 

 

Without doubt, a Christian needs certain periods of retreat into solitude to be recollected and, in God's presence, rediscover his path. Nevertheless, given his character as a creature, and as a creature who knows that only in grace is he secure, his method of getting closer to God is not based on any technique in the strict sense of the word. That would contradict the spirit of childhood called for by the Gospel. Genuine Christian mysticism has nothing to do with technique: it is always a gift of God, and the one who benefits from it knows himself to be unworthy.

-- Cardinal Ratzinger, referring to St. Theresa (Interior Castle)

 

 

The physical techniques are in any case no more than an accessory, an aid which has proved helpful to some but which is in no sense obligatory upon all. The Jesus Prayer can be practised in its fullness without any physical methods at all. St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), while regarding the use of physical techniques as theologically defensible, treated such methods as something secondary and suited mainly for beginners. For him, as for all the Hesychast masters, the essential thing is not the external control of the breathing but the inner and secret Invocation of the Lord Jesus.

--- Kallistos Ware, comparing The Jesus Prayer to Non-Christian Meditation

 

 

One shouldn't underestimate Christianity entirely in this regard. The Orthodox practice of hesychasm, which is quite similar to japa or mantra practice, as well as the apophatic contemplation described by figures like Pseudo-Dionysius or in the medieval "Cloud of Unknowing", as well as the plethora of material within the Philokalia or in Scupoli's Spiritual Combat are all various techniques and methodologies for cooling the passions, clearing the mind, and entering higher states of contemplation.

Edited January 24, 2015 by forestofemptiness

[C T]

This insertion, with apologies, is entirely off-topic, but presents one (possible) theory in relation to a view of endless regression, subscribed by certain Buddhist schools, vs. a causeless, spontaneously arisen big bang. Its from a blog called The Endless Further.

 

 

 

 

INFLATION OF THE COSMIC KIND (Nov 2014)

Nov302014

Last March, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made a finding that supports Einstein’s last untested prediction about the Theory of General Relativity. According to Einstein, even in the void of space-time, empty of stars and galaxies, ripples known as gravitational waves can move across space in much the same way that ripples spread across the surface of a pond. Until recently, there was only indirect evidence that gravitational waves existed. In their press release JPL stated that they

"Have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

The findings were made with the help of NASA-developed detector technology on the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation.”

 

 

The Dark Sector Lab at the South Pole that houses the BICEP2 telescope, which measured the polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. (Harvard)

 

This supports the Inflationary Universe theory, hypothesized in the 1980s by Alan Gult, who held that the initial expansion of the universe was caused by a repulsive form of gravity. “Cosmic inflation” suggests that after The Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light (at .0000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, to be precise).

It’s a pretty big deal. According to Time, it means that gravity should no longer be seen as a force, “but rather as the warping of ‘spacetime,’ an amalgam of those two formerly independent concepts,” This aspect of Einstein’s theory “also predicted that violent events should trigger gravitational waves, which would set spacetime rippling, like a vat of cosmic jello.”

 

Actually, Einstein was skeptical of the idea of a Big Bang. He favored the concept of a static universe as opposed to an expanding one. But when American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed how galaxies recede from the Milky Way, and that distant galaxies recede faster than those nearby, Einstein changed his mind.

 

Now, I don’t think it’s necessary for modern science and Buddhism to agree, or that science should prove Buddhism, but intersections between the two are always interesting. Here, we have a case where Buddhism and science both agree in some respects and disagree in others.

 

In The Big Bang theory, the entirety of space was contained in a single point of space and this was the beginning of the universe. Buddhism, however, says that there is no beginning (and therefore definitely no creation) because causes have no beginning.

 

The first line of Chapter One in Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way reads, “Nothing exists that has arisen from itself, from another, from both, or from a non-cause.” This does not negate the idea of a Big Bang, only qualifies it somewhat. The Big Bang could not have caused itself, nor could some being have caused it, or is it possible that a Big Bang was a combination of the two – there had to have been some prior cause, and as I understand it, this means The Big Bang must have been an effect. Still, Buddhism discusses the beginning of things in terms of consciousness, which is the real “creator” of all things, and consciousness has no beginning. So, in pondering all this, we should keep in mind the distinction between the ultimate and relative truth.

 

The other key notion in the Big Bang theory is that of an expanding universe. Here dharma and science seem to agree. In his teachings on Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland at UCLA in 1997, the Dalai Lama stated:

"So through this analysis of the causal origin of mental phenomena, then the question arises if there is a beginning point of whether the chain of causation goes on infinitely. If we were to choose the first option, which is to say that there must be a beginning at some point, then this immediately throws up conceptual problems about the status of the first cause – whether that first cause comes into being relatively or if it comes into being through self-causation. So, it throws up all sorts of conceptual problems.

 

The Buddhist option is to choose the second option of accepting the infinity of the causation. Although one could, in a conventional sense, accept or talk about origin or a beginning point of some particular object, like the objects of everyday life, but in a deeper sense, consciousness or mental phenomena are beginningless in terms of their continuum. And since this is the case, according to Buddhism, the continuum of the individual or person can be said to be beginningless, because being or person is designated upon the continuum of consciousness or designated upon the phenomena that makes that person a knower or experiencer or agent. Since the basis, which is the continuum of consciousness is beginningless, therefore the continuum of the individual being is also said to be beginningless. However, when we conceptualize it in individual situations, we can say that, in a conventional sense, there is a beginning and there is an end."

 

Obviously, there are differences between individual beings and universes, but I think the infinity of the continuum would be the same. And again, from the Buddhist perspective, there must have been something prior, a previous cause existing before all of space was condensed into a single point that apparently exploded into our ever-expanding universe.

 

Likewise, there were prior points posted on this blog before I posted the single point that began this post, and therefor, today’s offering reflects the infinity of the continuum and therefore cannot be contained in a single end point . . .