/lit/ - Literature

>>19630211
Don't tie yourself to anothers belief or you will aimless, follow your own sense of reality and never apologize

>>19630211
What’s this thing that looks forward. Show me it.

>>19630211
The release from suffering

>>19630211
>Can someone explain how Buddhism doesn't teach self-annihiliation?
Nobody knows how to explain this because there is no answer given in the Pali Canon and its left to Buddhists to just make up their own answer according to which type of Buddhism they subscribe to.

>>19630243
>What’s this thing that looks forward. Show me it.
The mind is what engages in anticipation, that you have a mind should be clear from the fact that you are reading this. Mind isn't the Atman though, the Atman is the presence that knows what the mind is doing.

>>19630211
>Can someone explain how Buddhism doesn't teach self-annihiliation?
There's no self, or a permanent ego-substance, to annihilate
>If there is no self and no rebirth then what do we have to look forward to?
The eternal return of nirvana in samsara. But more importantly, if you're concerned about living in the future as a projection of your present "self," a self that is going to experience changes and consequences of what you do or think now, this very belief of yours undermines the notion of a permanent unchanging self.
It's worth noting that the suttas are not really attempting to expound philosophy as much as they are outlining a method of religious experience. You will need to read commentaries or scholastic works to get a more in depth explanation of how it's all supposed to "work." The suttas generally don't care to delve into these questions.

>>19630282
>Atman is the presence that knows what the mind is doing.
Not in Buddhism

>>19630284
>There's no self, or a permanent ego-substance, to annihilate
But if what we have now in our experience is comprised of skhandas or aggregates, and if these come to an end and don't continue in Parinirvana as Buddhism posits, then it IS an annihilation or end of everything about ourselves/our experience, and Parnirvana is not distinguishable from nothingness in any meaningful way.

>The eternal return of nirvana in samsara.
Samsara isn't eternal though but even in Mahayana all the Bodhisattvas are supposed to attain final liberation without further rebirth when all beings have been enlightened, so saying "uhhh.. you are just reborn eternally without end" isn't actually solving the problem at hand, it's just attempting to hand-wave it away via obfuscation, since the problem of "how is Parinirvana not a total annihilation" is still present in Mahayana.

>But more importantly, if you're concerned about living in the future as a projection of your present "self," a self that is going to experience changes and consequences of what you do or think now, this very belief of yours undermines the notion of a permanent unchanging self.
Only if you don't understand the elementary truth that "what is experienced as an object" being subject to change =/= the self changing

>>19630291
>Not in Buddhism
I know, I think Buddhism is wrong and that Buddha wasn't enlightened, and that his religion being named after a word denoting enlightenment despite the founder being unenlightened is one of the great ironies of the world.

>>19630317
Oh it's you isn't it? Yeah, I guess if you believe it can't be shown that a permanent self exists (and doesn't need to be shown), but is merely "logical" that it could, that it is worth accepting. If you've already defined the self as an unchanging non-experience, it might as well not exist, being non-demonstrable, and so we have little to discuss further, because that is not even engagement the Buddhist understanding of atman but an entirely rivalrous definition professed as your own dogma.

>>19630336
"Enlightenment" is dumb westoid translation. More properly it is a matter of "awakening" but that sounds less sales-y

>>19630211
what gets annihilated?

>>19630211

>>19630282
I have a mind? Suddenly I exist. Wew lad. And I am the totality of my mind. Shit better fucking localize from delocized nondualism just to please the cunt who can’t just sit and can’t just walk.

>>19630364
>If you've already defined the self as an unchanging non-experience, it might as well not exist, being non-demonstrable,
The presence that is the experiencer of experience is not itself an experienced content but it is the basis of experience and what the taking place of experience presupposes. The experiencer demonstrates its own existence itself in every moment, although people who are very confused about the nature of their own self sometimes miss its presence even when its the most intimate thing to them that there is, even when its existence demonstrates itself to them, they remain ignorant and confused all the same.

>>19630418
>The presence that is the experiencer of experience
Then what experiences the presence of the experiencing of the experiencer's experience? As usual, you've crafted an infinite regress.

>>19630438
No, see, the experience doesn't exist, because experience is an illusion made out of nothing. The only thing that exists is Brahman, and the only thing that it does is be aware of itself, and it never stops doing that, nor does it ever start doing anything else.

>>19630418
Ok so you're just a dualist who draws a red line at a certain degree of causality and says we're done here. Except you aren't going to accept dualism because you are incoherently going to resolve experiencer and experience into >>19630445 which is just a kind of nihilism, that nothing we experience really exists anyway and all that is real is God

>>19630398
Can be disregarded along with Shankharafag here

>>19630438
>Then what experiences the presence of the experiencing of the experiencer's experience?
When that presence that is the experiencer of particular experiences itself is self-disclosing to itself qua presence, then there is no logical necessary that something else is required in order to experience the presence who experiences particular experiences, because when that presence is self-disclosing it has immediate access to and immediate knowledge of itself qua presence along with the particular experiences that it is witnessing.
>As usual, you've crafted an infinite regress.
The infinite regress you propose only arises if you foolishly assume a priori that the presence of awareness isn't self-disclosing to itself, to assume this a priori and then to cite the consequences of a non-self-disclosing awareness as proof that the witnessing experiencer itself doesn't exist is just a form of sophism, it's just arbitrarily rejecting the solution to the problem without refuting it.

>b-b-b-but Nagarjuna r-refuted that something can be self-disclosing!!!!
No, he just arbitrarily rejects it without refuting it, like like your sophistic "argument" did

Nagarjuna, incidentally, is guilty of a sheer quibble when he says that since the eye cannot see itself it cannot see another (MK 3.2). This is not seriously detrimental to his case, which can quite easily be restated without the quibble. But more serious is his failure either to accept or to disqualify the instances of genuine intransitive action that occur in commonsense experience plus the metaphysical ones that are affirmed by some of his opponents. When he denies that the lamp illuminates itself (MK 7.8), he is simply arbitrarily choosing to consider the reflexive object as if it were a nonreflexive object. He is refusing to allow, as ordinary language does, that reflexive statements are either pseudo-reflexive or pseudotransitive. "I saw myself in the mirror" and "I scratched myself" are pseudoreflexives. "Light illuminates itself" and "Water makes itself wet" are pseudo-transitives, better expressed by "Light is inherently bright" and "Water is inherently wet." ... An important example of an intransitive function is the svaprakasa (self-revealing) of Advaita Vedanta. This tenet has been skillfully and extensively defended against heterodox interpretations, and certainly suffices to show that Nagarjuna's critique does not damage the Advaita Vedantic position on this point. Thus it appears that the systems under attack commonly defended themselves by affirming a reflexive, nontransitive or reciprocal operation which obviated vicious infinite regression.

>>19630486
>which is just a kind of nihilism
Correct, that is the point of Advaita Vedanta. It's a trivial solution to the problems that dualism posits.

>>19630536
>"Water is inherently wet."
You haven't read Nagarjuna, so you're going to have to clarify your point here: Could you tell me when the wetness and the water come into contact?

>>19630211
The main focus of Buddhism is suffering; the self/no-self stuff is just a means to an end. Buddhism teaches the annihilation of suffering. If your self is suffering, it must be annihilated. If you can find something that isn't suffering, then you can make that your self and it'll be fine.
Also there is rebirth even if there is no self. But the thing which is reborn is just matter and consciousness, neither of which are self, because they are suffering.
You have to overcome the bias of seeing things in terms of self and not-self to really understand the big picture.

Buddhist shit posting threads are so much better than Christian shit posting threads because everyone reads and there’s an appeal to ontic inspection not just “Paul wrote this”

Also if you haven’t buried the baskets and started working a manual trade you are caught in an illusion of words.

>>19630548
>Could you tell me when the wetness and the water come into contact?
Wetness is not something separate from water that comes into contact with water, it's instead a property of water. In any case, I'm not talking about water and it's not relevant to my position to get hung up on a tangential example, I'm talking about the presence of awareness. The self-disclosing of awareness is not something separate that awareness comes into contact with, but it's the very nature of awareness, like how being luminous is the property or nature of light.

>>19630211
hey I have one of these sculptures

>>19630536
>presence that is the experiencer of particular experiences itself is self-disclosing to itself qua presence
Look at how much barf you have to come up with to even attempt to counter momentariness. And none of it demonstrates anything.
>>19630576
It is less a matter of pain and suffering and more that the elements (dharma) of experience as grasped are in a state of commotion or unrest... one suffers in the sense that this can be experienced as pain if his mind is weak or clouded and sees lasting substance in any of this momentariness to cling to. This momentariness applies to everything, to atman, skandhas, ayatanas, vijñanas, any dharmas whatsoever

>>19630611
>the nature of awareness is awareness
Very cool. Now why is that permanent?

>>19630611
>Wetness is not something separate from water
So, all things that contact water are wet? What about things like rocks? Are things that are put into liquids other than water wet?

>>19630693
>And none of it demonstrates anything.
Momentariness as an all-applicable rule is not demonstrable, since momentariness in awareness is impossible to demonstrate.

>>19630736
>momentariness in awareness is impossible to demonstrate.
If things were not momentary you'd experience a constant sensory overload of everything endlessly, no? You'd still be bumping around in your mother's womb as if it were happening right now.

>>19630211
Dharmadhatu (Buddha) is the ultimate (and only) reality, which is nothingness. So yes, there's no self, no rebirth and nothing to look forward to, dharma is accepting paramarthasatya (actual truth) and rejecting the false world of the senses and "common-sense" reasonings (I think therefore I am, for example), and attain death in life. I don't think Coomaraswamy is recommendable in any sense, a far better work, and by a Catholic too, is Paul J. Griffiths' On Being Buddha, which deals with most of what I have said, but grounding everything in a proper sourcing and elaborating further.

>>19630584
So you find "[x] wrote this" kind of arguments agreeable so long it isn't about Christianity? See just above your post. Nor I see much to admire in the ontological affirmation of nothingness, such formulation is self-contradictory, and when you simply reject every form of knowledge (as Buddhist do, if there's nothing there's nothing to know), there's no point in arguing.

Of course without sophistical arguments doubtfully could all these monks have deceived the peasants, nobles and kings by promising them all kinds of things for the donations they lived off.

>>19630766
>Dharmadhatu (Buddha) is the ultimate (and only) reality, which is nothingness.
Nothingness and emptiness are not the same thing. “Nothingness” really only makes sense in relation to “something,” but the Buddha went beyond all forms of mental grasping.

>>19630766
>So you find "[x] wrote this" kind of arguments agreeable so long
Ah so you fuck dogs!

>>19630722
>>Wetness is not something separate from water
>So, all things that contact water are wet?
Things that contact water are generally made temporarily wet by that contact if they have a physical surface which the water can penetrate into or rest on the surface of
>What about things like rocks?
Yes, rocks can become wet if you pour water on them
>Are things that are put into liquids other than water wet?
It depends, room-temperature mercury is what is called a "non-wetting liquid". Even if that mercury is not wetting the object it's resting on though, people can still figuratively refer to that object as wet with the mercury though, since "wet" is used in the dual sense of 1) the liquid saturating or penetrating the object and 2) resting on top of the objects surface without penetrating it
>>19630701
>Very cool. Now why is that permanent?
Because it never ceases to be what it is.

>>19630804
>it never ceases to be what it is
I agree, a tautological statement that never connects with reality never ceases to be false speech

>>19630747
Correct, which is why Shankara rejects the reality of experience. It doesn't exist, it's an illusion made out of nothing. The only thing that Atman, which is Brahman, ever does is be aware of itself.

>>19630766
>Dharmadhatu... is nothingness
No. Start with What the Buddha Taught, and then read the Heart Sutra. Feel free to skip garbage like anything by Paul J. Griffiths.

>>19630766
>Dharmadhatu (Buddha) is the ultimate (and only) reality, which is nothingness.
Nothingness doesn't have the capacity to appear as the world and living beings, or by definition it's not nothingness, but rather "nothingness with this special capacity I'm adding thereby making it not nothingness"

>>19630804
So then wetness and water are not intrinsically related as things can be wet in absence of water, and water can exist without wetness. So, let's loop back to the original question now that you've changed your mind:

When do the wetness and the water come into contact?

>>19630795
For a Western reader it's easier to understand "nothingness" than "emptiness", but yes, sunyata is what I'm getting to. And yes, it's beyond mental grasping, since there's nothing to grasp.

>>19630747
>If things were not momentary you'd experience a constant sensory overload of everything endlessly, no?
No, I don't know why you would ever assume something so outlandish like this, if awareness is permanent and unchanging (it is) while the unaware objects/experiences which are known by that awareness are changing then you can have an unchanging permanent Self of awareness which is knowing changing successive experiences in a neat orderly fashion without any contradiction or issue.

>>19630766
>>19630795
>>19630817
"Nothingness" should not be reified. That's a poor reading/translation.

>>19630833
But you aren't aware when you sleep.

>>19630812
Nothing in Buddhism is proven via empirical means, it all just distills down to tautologies and "because Buddha or muh apocryphal sutra said so"

>>19630833
>you can have an unchanging permanent Self of awareness which is knowing changing successive experiences
You "can," but please demonstrate that this self is permanent and observes everything without undergoing any change, experiencing consequences etc. It's ok if you can't—that just means it is mere speculation on your part, and therefore what we know from experience, that is to say arising and ceasing of phenomena, is far more admissible than raving that you are immortal.

>>19630847
See, this is why you need to actually look into topics before you have an opinion on them, otherwise you end up saying dumb shit like this.

And then, when someone points out that a huge portion of Buddhist epistemology is ultimately about reifying the validity of empiricism, you'll just turn around and say that empiricism is bad and and we can only trust the pronouncements of Rabbis claiming to have received visions.

>>19630814
Good Buddhist, no arguing, there's nothing to argument about! And no source can change that.

>>19630817
No, you are speaking about false phenomena, remember. Not even Buddha's nirmanakaya acts in any way, he's mere semblance.

>>19630847
You have "proof" that objects of experience are permanent and have eternal substance(s)? I'm not saying Buddhism is not a religion, or that Buddhism is literally science, or some other stupid modernist claim, but surely you can admit there is far more effort made by Buddhists to provide arguments from experience beyond "just say what scripture says," and there is a long philosophical tradition of thinking about how such experience actually is possible rather than the utterly groundless theological speculations other religions have made about god and his powers and the rewards he offers for obedience.

>>19630238
Fpbp Unironically Based.

>>19630211
what do Buddhists say about hoaxes like "germ theory of disease"?

>>19630830
Nothingness is a translation that readily lends itself to reading Buddhism as nihilism. If you're a nihilist yourself then this probably sounds fine to you, but no Buddhist sutra, shastra, or sangraha has ever affirmed a belief in nihilism.

>>19630284
>>19630284
>There's no self, or a permanent ego-substance, to annihilate
Then what does get reincarnated?

>>19630921
Precisely. Buddhists don't believe in reincarnation, they believe in rebirth. Rebirth is "Ship of Theseus", whereas reincarnation is "little man piloting the meat mecha gets put in a new meat mecha".

>>19630822
>So then wetness and water are not intrinsically related as things can be wet in absence of water
Affirming that water has wetness as its property is not making an exclusive statement that prevents other things from also having wetness as their property, e.g. pure ethanol without any water is still a wetting agent, unlike liquid mercury. There is no contradiction in saying that water has wetness as its property and is intrinsically related to wetness in that way, but without making all instances of wetness inseparable from water.
>and water can exist without wetness.
No, a body of water cannot exist without wetness as far as I'm aware, either in liquid or gas or as ice, in every case it wets objects that come into contact with it by leaving trace amounts of water on them. A single water molecule is not wet, but we don't ever encounter a single water molecule in experience, and in any case that a single water molecule isn't wet doesn't refute the original premise that awareness is intrinsically self-disclosing
>So, let's loop back to the original question now that you've changed your mind:
>When do the wetness and the water come into contact?
Wetness is a property of water and not a different object than the water, other things aside from water also can have the property of being a wetting agent. I didn't change my mind btw.

>>19630925
So then what is it fundamentally that is "reborn"? Buddha said he remembered his past lives. What was the essence of "Buddha" that was shared between those lives?

>>19630925
>"little man piloting the meat mecha gets put in a new meat mecha"

>>19630895
I'm not a nihilist myself, and it matters little what I could be or not, that's just edging the ad hominem fallacy. Yet it's even more fallacious to make an unsubstantiated generalized claim, like you just did:
>[N]o Buddhist sutra, shastra, or sangraha has ever affirmed a belief in nihilism.
Point of fact, once one deducts all the false phenomena and only one thing remains, Buddha, of which one can postulate nothing but nothingness, since he's sunyata, you can wiggle as much as you want with words and sophistries, but you can't evade yourself that there's nothing.

>>19630844
>But you aren't aware when you sleep.
I am

But in any case, that's impossible to prove that you are unaware when you sleep, because proving it would require that you experience and have confirmation of that absence, which would entail actually being aware. A lack of memory upon waking isn't the same thing as positive confirmation of the absence of awareness during sleep.

>>19630951
There’s a huge difference between nothing being able to be said about the Buddha and asserting nothingness as the ultimate reality.

>>19630942
>So then what is it fundamentally that is "reborn"?
Again, that's not what rebirth is. Reincarnation is literally "Re-"+"incarn"+"-ation"; "carn", from the Latin "body". "Incarn" means "to put something in a body", so reincarnation is "to put something in a body, again".

If we posit that all things are made out of parts, as Buddhists do, then we get a Ship of Theseus continuity. What then, continues between different lives? Shared parts. Maybe it's a memory, a karmic stream, whatever. If you wan to be a small brained materialist, we can do this with stuff like organ transplants. If you cut your heart out and put it in someone else, "you" are continuing. After all, "you" are a collection of parts. You have been reborn in that person. Now add on stuff like souls, subtle bodies, layers of existence, etc, and you get incredibly complicated stuff.

That's the entire point of Sunyata, Emptiness, etc: there IS no "essence of Siddhartha" ("Buddha" gets used a LOT in Buddhism to mean a lot of stuff, so let's just focus on Siddhartha). Rather, there's a specific arrangement of parts, moving through time, propelled by karmic forces.

What then, is nirvana? Continuity unpropelled by karmic forces. A different kind of continuity, but continuity none the less.

>>19630941
>Affirming that water has wetness as its property
So wetness can precede water.

>No, a body of water cannot exist without wetness
So wetness cannot precede water.

So, which is it? Can water exist without wetness, or can it not? This is the fourth time that you've been tripped up by your own scholastic blabbermouthing, so why not just think about the question and answer it before typing up an essay and getting laughed at?

>>19630859
>You "can," but please demonstrate that this self is permanent and observes everything without undergoing any change, experiencing consequences etc.
We always have awareness in every moment and this awareness always remains what it is (simply aware) immutably regardless of what our mind is engaging in and regardless of whatever efficiency or lack thereof our mind has while doing so. This can be discerned in our own experience of being conscious but just like the proverb of how you can lead a horse to water but cannot make the horse drink, I cannot force you to overcome your own ignorance and clearly see what is already self-evident and demonstrable if you would just remove your blinkers and looked within.

>It's ok if you can't—that just means it is mere speculation on your part, and therefore what we know from experience, that is to say arising and ceasing of phenomena, is far more admissible than raving that you are immortal.
It's okay if you can't demonstrate that awareness is unchanging, that just means that everything being momentary is mere speculation on your part, and therefore what we know from experience, that is to say the perpetual continuance of awareness, is far more admissible than raving that everything is changing

>>19630981
*It's okay if you can't demonstrate that awareness is changing

>>19630862
>See, this is why you need to actually look into topics before you have an opinion on them
I have, I just hold that Buddhist sophist apologetics do not constitute valid epistemic or logical proof of Buddhism or its claims
>And then, when someone points out that a huge portion of Buddhist epistemology is ultimately about reifying the validity of empiricism, you'll just turn around and say that empiricism is bad and and we can only trust the pronouncements of Rabbis claiming to have received visions.
No, in that case I challenge the underlying arguments they use as being not actually airtight, as being quite sophistic, full of logical holes and absurd consequences, and as making claims which are contradicted by our experience

>>19630943
It’s not a meat robot it’s his dead mother.

Also Buddhist rebirth is moment to moment. Day to day. Life to life. Eternity to eternity. Face to face. Heart to heart. Cock to cock. With full fidelity.

>>19630942
Dogmatically speaking the Buddha the omniscient, so he "remembers past lives" in that sense, not only his but anyone else's, as stemming from the causal factors which are "karma," the volitional chain of causes and effects that goes from birth to death to birth to death (samsara). Rebirth is a pre-Buddhist belief that is being fit into this framework, as as consequence of action. A common metaphor is of a flame going from fuel source to fuel source—the flame is momentary and depends on the particular fuel to keep appearing, but there is no unfueled flame. In a way there is an 'essence' shared across lives because if you act to reify your desires you'll continue to transmigrate and keep dying and forgetting. Different schools of Buddhism will explain this differently so it's hard to give a more specific answer, and some can be rather divergent. But from a soteriological perspective, one has to abandon the petty self that keeps craving for more impermanence, and this is consistent for everything from Theravada to Shingon.

>>19630951
>you can wiggle as much as you want with words and sophistries, but you can't evade yourself that there's nothing.
"Nothing" is itself word-and-sophistry, and given its connotations leads to an obvious misinterpretation, and is thus a poor rendering. There is only nothing in the sense that discursive thought at best merely approximates ultimate reality, which is without speech, it is EMPTY of these imputations.

>>19630966
Nothing can be asserted about the Buddha, because there is nothing that can be asserted (or please point out what can you assert), and since the Buddha is the ultimate reality, then there's nothing.

>>19631021
It's not only empty of our mundane speech and rationalisations, the Buddha knows everything that ever was and is, and yet he's empty.

>>19630880
>You have "proof" that objects of experience are permanent and have eternal substance(s)?
Do Buddhists have proof that matter and energy do not last forever in time despite undergoing changes? No they don't, science tells us that the law of conservation of energy means that energy cannot be destroyed, do Buddhists refute this ever-lastingness of energy? No they don't even though it violates their maxim that everything has an end.

>>19630981
>We always have awareness in every moment
Suppose this were true to the extent you were aware for your entire life (you're not, but at least it could be argued), how is that permanent if lives are impermanent? Because the Vedas say you're just God with amnesia? Again please demonstrate permanence or go back to muttering atman brahman atman brahman

>>19631032
Emptiness has nothing to do with nothingness. The closest you can get is there being no essence to phenomena, but that just means that they are dependent and relative.

>>19630238
I’ve lost my own sense of reality, the only things I’m able to find are more ways to blackpill myself, and I only bring other people around me down. How do I find something inside of myself that’s my own that isn’t just soil that I’ve salted?

>>19631041
>energy and matter last forever, checkmate buddhists
And those are both primordially "empty" of any formal specificity yes? Otherwise we wouldn't have gone from suns to supernovas or dinosaurs to pigeons, we'd have the same expressions of matter or energy forever. It sounds like you ought to read more about what you're arguing against. Try the Heart Sutra

>>19630974
>So wetness can precede water.
Something and its very nature don't emerge into being at separate times; if something is intrinsically wet, then it was always wet.
>So wetness cannot precede water.
What is the relevance of asking? The wetness of ethanol and other wetting agents exists separately from the wetness of water.
>So, which is it? Can water exist without wetness, or can it not?
A single water molecule isn't wet, but a body of water (which is what the original quote that mentioned water was probably referring to) is intrinsically wet. You can slice up water to a single instance of a molecule where it is no longer wet anymore, but this doesn't work with other things, e.g. you can't slice up awareness to where it's no longer intrinsically aware, and there is no way to slice up space until it no longer provides extension.
>This is the fourth time that you've been tripped up by your own scholastic blabbermouthing
I have not been tripped up at all, you are the one who just got humiliated here >>19630536 when I exposed your argument as sophistry and to save face you tried to pick apart my words and to redirect attention onto a totally irrelevant question of how to define water, without being able to explain how that separate question of water hurts my position that I am arguing for in this thread viz. Awareness, Atman etc

>>19630211
There's nothing to look forward to not because the ego doesn't exist but because there is no future, only the never ending present moment.

>>19631000
>It’s not a meat robot it’s his dead mother
Get in the jiva, brahman.

>>19631050
>Suppose this were true to the extent you were aware for your entire life (you're not, but at least it could be argued), how is that permanent if lives are impermanent?
Because awareness =/= the physical body, even though the life of a physical body may be non-permanent, that awareness was continuing as permanent before that body and continues as permanent after that body dies.

Why would you assume that awareness is momentary when it's always indubitably present? Because your special woo-woo bald-headed guy says that your awareness undergoes absence despite this being unconfirmable? Again please demonstrate impermanence or go back to muttering void nothingness void nothingness.

>>19631066
Nibble on words as much as you want, if you prefer to render sunyata as "emptiness" rather than "nothingness" because it sounds less nihilistic to you, go ahead. And I am not speaking about pseudo-phenomena. But rather that you can't predicate anything about emptiness, which is the Buddha itself, and ultimate reality. What follows is what you are trying to deny through wording. I don't see any reason to continue this, since each has its preferences about how to understand what supposedly can't be understood. Have a good day.

>>19631072
>And those are both primordially "empty" of any formal specificity yes?
define "formal specificity"
>Otherwise we wouldn't have gone from suns to supernovas or dinosaurs to pigeons, we'd have the same expressions of matter or energy forever.
Regardless of what it's doing, it's still lasting forever in time *as* energy, in violation of the Buddhist maxim

>>19631113
>awareness was continuing as permanent before that body and continues as permanent after that body dies.
There is no reason to believe this based on our experience so as far as I am concerned, from having met babies and attended funerals, your claims are entirely without substance and can be rejected wholesale.

>>19631067
>How do I find something inside of myself that’s my own that isn’t just soil that I’ve salted?
read this

https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html

>>19631116
One who grasps the view that the Tathagata exists, Having seized the Buddha,
Constructs conceptual fabrications
About one who has achieved nirvana.

Since he is by nature empty, The thought that the Buddha Exists or does not exist
After nirvana is not appropriate.

Those who develop mental fabrications with regard to the Buddha, Who has gone beyond all fabrications,
As a consequence of those cognitive fabrications,
Fail to see the Tathagata.

Whatever is the essence of the Tathagata, That is the essence of the world.
The Tathagata has no essence.
The world is without essence.

I prostrate to Gautama
Who through compassion
Taught the true doctrine,
Which leads to the relinquishing of all views.

>>19631067
Synderesis is your way back from the corrupting influences of an immoral society.

>>19630211
>self-annihilation, nothingness, no-self
This is a common misconception that is amplified by what we call the current strain of "californian buddhism". Basically the only Buddhism you will get to know in the West. Don't mistake any conceptions you have of skillful means (upaya kausalya) for ultimate reality. You are missing the via positiva for a balanced view of reality that will allow you to make progress.

If you don't have a teacher I would recommend you read the Tathagata-garbha sutras to overcome this negative tendency:
- Tathagata-garbha Sutra
- Anunatva Apurnatva Nirdesa Sutra
- Angulimaliya Sutra (Taisho 120)
- Maha-Parinirvana Sutra (Nirvana Sutra)
- Srimaladevi Simhanada Sutra
- Ratnagotravibhaga

Ultimate reality including the true self is beyond description. Sometimes we use an upaya in the positive phase (true self) sometimes we use an upaya of the negative phase (false self) to point at the moon.

>>19631121
I don't see a particular violation here. Doesn't energy or matter basically underly everything, and we only know it through particular observations? So if energy "lasts forever" my body as a storehouse of energy, as a form given to it, does not last. Now personally I am not inclined to the "Buddhism is literally science" school of modernism, but there are concepts like Indra's Net or the Vairocana Buddha that bear unintentional similarity to a scientific view of the cosmos as being permanent even if what shows up in it is as bodies is governed by laws of combination and decomposition. To me that sounds a lot like "emptiness is form, form is emptiness."

>>19631041
>energy cannot be destroyed
"Energy" isn't a thing, it's a theoretical abstraction to quantify change. The First Law of Thermodynamics is delta_U=Q-W (change in internal energy equals heat minus work done BY the system on its surroundings). Energy, by which we mean the abstract quantification of change, thus cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change. Thus, change is.

This is LITERALLY the Buddha's entire bit about Nihilism and Eternalism both being Wrong Views.

>>19631130
>>awareness was continuing as permanent before that body and continues as permanent after that body dies.
>There is no reason to believe this based on our experience so as far as I am concerned
It's the only thing that's entirely in alignment with our experience of being conscious, since we never experience or confirm the absence of our own awareness but we instead invariably find it present and continuing. A beginning or end to the existence of awareness is not something we ever encounter in experience and so to assume one is a conclusion that one must reach from inference etc and not from experience
>from having met babies and attended funerals, your claims are entirely without substance and can be rejected wholesale.
You didn't experience the end of their awareness though anon, awareness is invisible and soundless, you only experienced their physical body not moving anymore, you had no experience that confirmed whether their awareness, ended, continued, or went somewhere else; the conclusion you are making about awareness from seeing a funeral or baby is actually one reached through inference. Experience supports only the continuity of awareness, and since you never experience other people's awareness you can only drawn conclusions about their awareness and its supposed beginning/end through inference etc but not experience.

>>19631159
So if awareness can't be
>interacted with
>change
>sensed in any way
then how can you even be sure it's there? By your own argument, it's not even necessary to do anything, as it does nothing, and can't start or stop doing anything other than be aware of itself.

>>19631153
>To me that sounds a lot like "emptiness is form, form is emptiness."
If only that could reconcile the contradiction of "everything is momentary, except the universe"

>>19631159
>i just don't know i'm eternal but i am
Ok whatever. It's obvious you're of a priestly, world-denying disposition and to continue further down the road of "you don't know that I'm not right, so I must be" is not an actual debate but a parody of philosophy

>>19631168
>the universe isn't momentary
I'm not sure what you mean. Scholastically, "momentariness" is not an orthodox Buddhist doctrine, and the schools that did hold to it held that the universe absolutely was momentary.

>>19631168
You only experience the universe as a moment anyway. Seriously. Go look up Indra's Net. It's kino

>>19631157
>thus cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change. Thus, change is.
And hence, it, as change, it lasts forever unchangingly, refuting momentariness, hence the whole thing refutes itself

>One can go even further and say that it amounts to the negation of all real knowledge whatsoever, even of a relative order, since, as we have shown above, the relative is unintelligible and impossible without the absolute, the contingent without the necessary, change without the unchanging, and multiplicity without unity; ‘relativism’ is self-contradictory, for, in seeking to reduce everything to change, one logically arrives at a denial of the very existence of change; this was fundamentally the meaning of the famous arguments of Zeno of Elea
>However, we have no wish to exaggerate and must add that theories such as these are not exclusively encountered in modern times; examples are to be found in Greek philosophy also, the ‘universal flux’ of Heraclitus being the best known; indeed, it was this that led the school of Elea to combat his conceptions, as well as those of the atomists, by a sort of reductio ad absurdum. Even in India, something comparable can be found, though, of course, considered from a different point of view from that of philosophy, for Buddhism also developed a similar character, one of its essential theses being the ‘dissolubility of all things ’. These theories, however, were then no more than exceptions, and such revolts against the traditional outlook, which may well have occurred from time to time throughout the whole of the Kali-Yuga, were, when all is said and done, without wider influence; what is new is the general acceptance of such conceptions that we see in the West today.

>>19631186
>And hence, it, as change, it lasts forever unchangingly
In the Heraclitean-Parmenidean sense, yes. That's the point. That's literally what the Buddha says. That's the entire point of Momentariness.

>>19631186
>blah blah blah people only reject priestly world denial for affirmation of flux because we live in the dark ages
Yes very good, go move to Afghanistan with your spiritual kin

>>19631167
Oh boy, I love these NPC questions! They are so amusing!

>So if awareness can't be
>>interacted with
>>change
>>sensed in any way
>then how can you even be sure it's there?
Because it reveals itself to me in every moment as the immediate fact of me being a self-aware presence
>By your own argument, it's not even necessary to do anything, as it does nothing, and can't start or stop doing anything other than be aware of itself.
Awareness *is* necessary to have knowledge of thoughts, sense-perceptions and to have conversations etc, because the mind and sense-perceptions are not self-aware and so without awareness there would be no knowledge of one's owns thoughts etc. "Knowledge of thoughts" or "knowledge of sound" etc only occurs when awareness is present alongside the mind that is thinking/hearing.

>>19631207
>it reveals itself to me
But you said that it can't do that.

>me being a self-aware
But you said that things can't be the object of experience, they can merely be aware of the experience that is held by the experiencer.

>>19631172
>>i just don't know i'm eternal but i am
Its what my experience shows to be true, unlike your inference of momentariness of awareness which is made on extremely shaky ground

>>19630830
> emptiness is beyond mental grasping, since there's nothing to grasp.
It's far beyond your understanding because you have not made much progress yet and ultimately its impossible to communicate it precisely anyways to someone who has not experienced it.

>>19631207
>you need to be permanent to experience impermanent things
Spoken like a true NPC, whose only experiences are pre-determined and scripted dialog with those free playersattvas passing through, who he must wait many levels for before being able execute his code.

>>19631176
>I'm not sure what you mean.
Scientists as far as I'm aware don't posit that the energy in the universe is destroyed completely when the big rip/big compression at the theoretical end of a universe happens.

Rephrased another way, "everything is momentary, but not the energy making up everything in the universe" is still a contradiction.

>>19630211
Does anybody know the name of the pose in OPs post?

>>19631217
Your experience does not show you are eternal, unless you have become severely disturbed by endlessly reciting scripture.

>>19631181
>You only experience the universe as a moment anyway.
"moments" are imagined to exist by the mind but cannot be shown to actually exist in themselves as discrete smallest-segments of time (time, like space and awareness, is partless in itself and only seems to have parts in relation to other things)
>Seriously. Go look up Indra's Net. It's kino
I'm already aware of what it is

>>19631226
>Scientists as far as I'm aware don't posit that the energy in the universe is destroyed completely when the big rip/big compression at the theoretical end of a universe happens.
So literally the Flower Garland Sutra.

As was already said, "energy" isn't a thing. It's an abstraction used to quantify change. I don't see what the point that you're trying to make is, because what you've said here is totally in line with standard Mahayana. To deal with your line
>everything is momentary, but not the energy making up everything in the universe
is only contradictory if you assume "energy" to be "a thing". It isn't.
>everything is momentary, and even the change as an abstraction that makes up the universe is changing and thus momentary
is not contradictory at all.

Yes, this means that there are no Forms or Hylomorphisms that you can point to and cling onto to save you from death, you either stay in samsara or you nirvana out. That's the point.

>>19631215
>But you said that it can't do that.
??? No I didn't, a fundamental tenet of Advaita Vedanta is that Awareness is svaprakasha, i.e. self-revealing, self-illuminating, self-disclosing, self-intuiting, self-knowing etc

>But you said that things can't be the object of experience, they can merely be aware of the experience that is held by the experiencer.
Awareness being self-disclosing isn't the same as awareness being an object of knowledge. In the former, self-awareness is it's very nature, i.e. awareness contains *by nature* its own disclosure to itself, in the latter, a subject-and-object relation persists between two things. The self-awareness or self-disclosure of awareness is not a subject-and-object relationship. I suggest reading Shankara, he clears up a lot of the confusions that Buddhism has regarding mind, awareness, etc and puts forward a much more viable position.

>>19631224
>>you need to be permanent to experience impermanent things
Note how I didn't say that, nice strawman though, once you get upset you tend to increasingly go for strawmen and non-sequiturs as your reply of choice.

>>19631242
So if there is no eternal me and whatever part of me is carried to the next rebirth is nebulous at best what is the reason to not just pursue sense objects to the fullest extent in this life and then just have my life end before the pendulum swings back? Have the next shrub take care of the karma.

>>19631276
>Knowledge of thoughts" or "knowledge of sound" etc only occurs when awareness is present alongside the mind that is thinking/hearing.
So the awareness is not permanent and the knowledges are not impermanent? Excuse me for hacking through the thicket of your scholastobabble, but it seems my strawman has a better memory of your views than you do.

>>19631284
It's true, someone else can be made to suffer and you can just eventually deal with the retribution in another life without even knowing where it's coming from. That's why the first stage of the mahayana path is considered cooompassion, not to increase the misery of transmigratory beings.

>>19631338
>So the awareness is not permanent and the knowledges are not impermanent?
No, awareness is constant, permanent, unshakable, unalterable. The particular knowledges like knowledge of sound, sight etc do change, but these are not awareness themselves but are only changing objects revealed to awareness, the awareness which knows them remains the same despite variations in those known objects.

>>19631351
>and you can just eventually deal with the retribution in another life without even knowing where it's coming from
But that would not be you dealing with that retribution but someone else entirely, remember! Buddhist "rebirth" is basically just materialism+ where another life arises somewhere when your body dies but you have no access to it or meaningful relation to it and the end result is your consciousness etc dying forever anyway, you don't experience the consequences of anything done in life after the body dies.

>>19630211
>how Buddhism doesn't teach self-annihiliation?
That's their end goal.

>>19631382
Siddhartha says over and over again that this this not the case.

>>19631394
Siddhartha =/= Buddhism

This thread reminds me of the three seekers and the river.

Three men meet on a road. All three declare that they intend to become monks. A river has changed its course after a storm and now cuts across the road to the monastary. The first man dips his small toe in the water and declares he will return the following spring when the water is warmer. The second man crosses halfway but the water is too fast and deep so he decides not to finish crossing but he does his best to hear and follow allong with the monks chanting in the distance just hardly audible and lives the rest if his life on a rock in the center of the river. The thrid man dives into the fast cold water and is carried away. As the third man was being dashed and bashed upon the rocks and pulled under the water to drown he thought to himself aboaut his good fortune to not be returning home or being stuck upon a rock in the middle of the river forever. The thord mans body washed up onto the shore of thenri sr in the town next tonthe temple and was thought to be dead. But upon preparing his body for funeral rights he awoke breifly and uttered a phrase of absolute truth and enlightenment. When hearing of the man who awoke from death to deliver a universal teaching the head abbot and all the monks came rushing down to discover what the thrird man had said. Unfortunately it was discovered that the only person who was in the room with him when he awoke was an old woman who was quite deaf and heard nothing but insisted that his mouth moved quite beautifully as he spoke and his eyes were lit up and his skin glowed a soft white light.

So theres that.

>>19631361
>the awareness which knows them remains the same despite variations in those known objects
therefore
>you need to be permanent to experience impermanent things
And you have no way of connecting these opposites other than "scripture says so" because it is not demonstrable that you are eternal yet we are still having experience. But if things are indeed impermanent as we observe them and we ourselves are also impermanent there is no issue with experience, common sense, logic, etc., unless you have a specific need to demonstrate a permanent self which is atman which is brahman is actually piloting a meat robot and what is experienced by that meat robot has nothing to do with the pilot because all experience is maya and not brahman. I am following you,yes? Experience is fake and has nothing to do with brahman which is real? With that attitude how can one even converse with you about awareness, if the only things we are aware of are fake? Behold the critique of momentariness

>>19631135
Any specific section in particular?

>>19630251
is this a common view? do you have any recommendations for reading on this topic?

why do buddhists get called nihilists so often then? this is much more interesting

>>19630243
>tacitly admitting OP's argument

>>19631394
>Siddhartha says over and over again that this this not the case.
True, but no one here cares. They are all busy with their intellectualism. Might as well go to /r/zen.

>>19631437
>Siddhartha =/= Buddhism
Correct observation. Buddhist organizations today are all corrupt. Lots of jews. Tibetan Buddhism is a joke now with the sex cult and the money grubbling.

posting some merit ITT

>>19631494
>why do buddhists get called nihilists so often then? this is much more interesting
Because the surviving Buddhist scriptures and lineages mostly focus on describing nirvana by explaining what nirvana is not - in a deductive fashion - instead of describing what nirvana is - and plebs are stupid.

may this chart bring merit ITT desu

>>19631376
>But that would not be you dealing with that retribution but someone else entirely, remember!
But it's also not "you" now either. You as a personality or individual are just another thing caused by other things from the Buddhist pov. What is in your power at this moment is to decide which phenomena you are going to be a causal factor in and that includes future arisings or lives or births. In pan-Indian cosmologies it is accepted there are before-lives and after-lives and Buddhism relates to this in arguing the only reason these changing states and appearances are possible is because of anatman, the momentariness that is a consequence of the lack of any permanent own-nature, ego-substance etc. There will be a ripening of effect for every action, but you will be gone in the sense of the you who is here now.
>Buddhist "rebirth" is basically just materialism+
Most extant buddhist schools are idealistic but yes some of the earliest took a more material or atomistic approach (for which later schools used them as butt monkeys in all their shastras), however there were materialists and atomists in India who are argued against, by the historical Buddha no less, in the Pali nikayas, and some of these passages are actually the primary historical evidence in indology for some of these schools. There has long been a difficulty of interpretation, but that the Buddha argued against the Ajivikas for instance shows his doctrine was not meant to be taken to mean that 'our actions are meaningless because the world is material and all that is is the material'

>>19631621
Mahasanghika-pilled

>Buddha can really see the tathagatagarbhas of sentient beings. And because he wants to disclose the tathagatagarbha to them, he expounds the sutras and the Dharma, in order to destroy klesas and reveal the buddha nature. Good sons, such is the Dharma of all the buddhas. Whether or not buddhas appear in the world, the tathagatagarbhas of all beings are eternal and unchanging. It is just that they are covered by sentient beings’ klesas.

>At that point, the World-honored One expressed himself in verses, saying:

> “It is just like the pit of a mango fruit
> Which does not decay.
> Plant it in the earth
> And inevitably a great tree grows.
> The Tathagata’s faultless vision
> Sees that the tathagatagarbha
> Within the bodies of sentient beings
> Is just like the seed within a flower or fruit.
> Though ignorance covers the buddhagarbha,
> You ought to have faith and realize
> That you are possessed of samadhi wisdom,
> None of which can be destroyed.
> For this reason I expound the Dharma
> And reveal the tathagatagarbha,
> That you may quickly attain the highest path,
> Just as a fruit grows into the most regal of trees.

>>19631494
Not him but "nihilism" comes from a few different readings. One is the Nietzschean, which interprets a general notion of Buddhism in alignment with Schopenhauer as a pessimistic doctrine of rejecting the world and thus considers it nihilism. But Nietzsche doesn't really care what Buddhism is per se and is using it as an example of world denial without ressentiment, to be contrasted with the Christian world denial, which is based on ressentiment. Nietzsche doesn't have access to substantial Mahayana literature that would expound on the non-duality of samsara and nirvana either, since this is decades away from getting translated and disseminated by indologists studying the prajnaparamita literature or by Japanese advocates of Zen. Understanding this, one would see it is not world denial, and there goes one form of nihilism.
Another nihilism charge is that of the theist opponent of the Buddhist. This should be extremely familiar, as in the West, extant Christians assume atheists are nihilists because they deny the ultimate reality of god. In Indian discourse this is Brahma(n) or Ishvara. The specifics don't matter much, it's enough that Buddhists deny a creator of the universe to be labeled as nihilists. This is a very foul smelling argument because it would suggest the theist only believes in god to avoid being called a nihilist. So if you want, you can pick up Nietzsche here even though he doesn't agree with Buddhism and use him as cudgel, since they were both arguing with some of the same priestly people who had ceded their power to evaluate to "God."
Finally there are negating or apophatic doctrines like anatman or sunyata. Anatman is in every form of Buddhism and denies a permanent ego-substance or own self-nature. As you may recognize if you are familiar with Platonism, immortal souls and immortal God go hand in hand, so Buddhists are totally consistent here in saying no to both rather than picking and choosing. Madhyamaka is the school that makes sunyata its core and influences the rest of Mahayana Buddhism. This "emptiness" doctrine is really just an elaboration on anatman in its most basic sense, nothing has a self in the sense of that permanent enduring substratum. Nagarjuna is taken to be the founding thinker here, and for him and his tetralemma methodology, we cannot say of anything that it is x, not x, both x and not x, or neither x nor not-x, and this has been a nightmare of doxography ever since, with a long list of Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and also Korean Buddhists attempting to say "yes, but how do I explain non-dualism using language?" The consistent denial of any objects of discourse to be ultimately real is what gets this Buddhism called nihilism. But all Buddhists disagree that this is nihilism and provide many arguments to the contrary, generally to the effect that appearances are affirmed as appearances and that any theory beyond that is unsatisfactory, leading to error.

>>19630211
Buddhism doesn't teach self-annihilation because it doesn't teach self to begin with.

>>19630211
They say enlightenment is the end of suffering, but that’s what it’s not, not what it is, I believe they say when the Buddha was asked about it he just smiled. The answer is to annihilate the sense of self and find out for yourself.

>>19631725
>Modern philosophical schools of Buddhism are all more or less influenced by a spirit of sophistic nihilism. They deal with Nirvāṇa as they deal with every other dogma, with heaven and hell: they deny its objective reality, placing it altogether in the abstract. They dissolve every proposition into a thesis and its anti-thesis and deny both. Thus they say Nirvāṇa is no annihilation, but they also deny its positive objective reality.

>According to them the soul enjoys in Nirvāṇa neither existence nor non-existence, it is neither eternal nor non-eternal, neither annihilated nor non-annihilated. Nirvāṇa is to them a state of which nothing can be said, to which no attributes can be given; it is altogether an abstract, devoid alike of all positive and negative qualities.

>What shall we say of such empty useless speculations, such sickly, dead words, whose fruitless sophistry offers to that natural yearning of the human heart after an eternal rest nothing better than a philosophical myth? It is but natural that a religion which started with moral and intellectual bankruptcy should end in moral and intellectual suicide.

- Ernst Johann Eitel

>>19631752
Your right, its teaches skhanda-annihilation instead

>hey, you shoudl obliderate your cocniousness, awareness, sensations etc etc… forever without any further rebirth or continuance… but’s that’s not an annihilation of you… because those aren’t you ‘self’ even though we say you are comprised by these things in the same breathe, lol

>>19630967
This didn't answer the question. You just invented a concept of multitude and didn't explain rebirth. What is rebirth?
>Rather, there's a specific arrangement of parts, moving through time, propelled by karmic forces.
So a tree?

>>19631002
So the goal is to stop karma? Karma is the life force of cause and nirvana is outside of cause?

>>19631137
If you view Hell as oblivion I honestly think buddhism might be a study in finding Hell.

>>19631794
>Ernst Johann Eitel or alternatively Ernest John Eitel was a German-born Protestant who became a notable missionary in China and civil servant in British Hong Kong
He does sound extremely butthurt in those quotes you provided. I had a feeling he had some bullshit metaphysical priors

>>19631810
It doesn't teach about skandha annihilation. Skandhas are already temporary.

>>19631821
>So the goal is to stop karma?
Yes, if you no longer generate karma you will experience no further maturation of effects, i.e. no more rebirth, transmigration, etc., as per the soteriology of Buddhism.
>Karma is the life force of cause
And effect. As long as you have those you experience a whole chain of arisings and cessations.
>and nirvana is outside of cause?
Nirvana is described variously depending on the school but what is pretty consistent is that cause and effect cease.

>>19631857
>Yes, if you no longer generate karma you will experience no further maturation of effects, i.e. no more rebirth, transmigration, etc., as per the soteriology of Buddhism.
How is that not satanic and literally just genociding the Holy Ghost.

>>19631794
This. So much.

I am so tired of the whole binary truth bullshit; "It both is suffering, but isn't. I am the virgin, but also the harlot, I am... " and all that uselessness.

Reminds me of Thunder Perfect Mind, which says nothing profound.

The truth is we have a valence scale. At one end is what we like, at the other, what we hate. Something that feels as though its the ultimate good will never personally feel the ultimate bad.

Does anyone have that copypasta of some anon btfoing his Buddhist university professor?

>>19631865
Please demonstrate satan and the third person of a triune god have any ontological reality.

>>19631875
>Something that feels as though its the ultimate good will never personally feel the ultimate bad.
So you agree that affirmation of personhood obstructs reality and leads to relativism?

>>19631908
Satan is merely nonbeing as it pertains to the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost can be found as follows
>We are animals so we are determined by power
>We marry for power
>Elon Musk could marry anyone he wants even if that person doesn't like him and her family doesn't too
Wait. This breaks down. Maybe Elon could do it for a little, but it'd fail - he could probably have her for a night, as an animal, but not symbollically. What is this difference? It is the logos. If you believe power has ontological reality then love does too. Logos +Love = Holy Spirit. Also, the symbolic is how we attain Truth and our mind matches realoty, whereas via the bodily we merely sustain Truth or die.

>>19631794
Based Buddhists destroying any false pretenses to knowledge

>>19631928
>Satan is merely nonbeing
So Satan doesn't exist. Good to know.

>>19630844
yes you are
>hear sound
>wake up

>>19631914
>you agree that affirmation of personhood obstructs reality
I could never say. I could say its highly unlikely the truth is within a monkey's spehere of perception. My point is the language games are useless. We know why bad is bad, good is good, and we know that we are all not one.

Its dogma just slightly more appealing than christcuckery.

>>19630211

Buddhism is about self-cultivation, not self-annihilation. You try to be better and it doesn't matter if you fail or succeed - it's about the elevation from suffering through self improvement as it is the path to nirvana.

You can get philosophical if you want, but that's not the day to day interpretation of Buddhism.

>>19631966
Hmmm you could say he's a blackhole of the Holy Ghost (I'm vague on this myself)

>>19631928
you've introduced a bunch of technical terms and assumptions which can be categorically rejected unless you are willing to demonstrate them, maybe you are mixing up Jung and gnosticism and Christianity and whatever else is popular here of late but none of it amounts to answer to my question. If we know 'truth' through symbols then there is a serious problem of how to arrange the symbols such that we produce truth, which I am asking you do to!
>>19631987
>its highly unlikely the truth is within a monkey's spehere of perception.
I disagree. Monke's got his own umwelt. See Uexkull for an interesting take on this.
>My point is the language games are useless.
This is a highly emphasized point in Mahayana texts; the Yogacara school will beat you over the head with this, as do Chan, Zen, Shingon
>We know why bad is bad, good is good
Do we? Please don't bring up violent crimes as an example or some other juvenile observation. As you know, for some weird reason we give license to absolute unrestricted violence as a species in certain situation, whereby what was bad at one time becomes good for some reason. But even without going there, read some Spinoza and Nietzsche to at least understand the position of those who deny the ontological reality of good and evil from a Western pov before trying to make sense of the Buddhist one
>we know that we are all not one.
Maybe. Shantaraksita, who introduced Buddhism into Tibet from India and was considered a master of the philosophy , held that there was neither one nor many

>>19632061
The Holy Ghost is that truth as parrallelled in the symbolic landscape is made from pure Being and Goodness which is identified by us as Truth. The explaination is above and the terms are not technical. I find it ironic too that you are asking me what is truth. Pilate and Buddha might have a lot in common.

>>19632107
>I find it ironic too that you are asking me what is truth.
I am aware many Christians hate philosophy, yes

>>19632126
What does philosophy not answer?

>>19632130
Is this a trick question? It doesn't answer you apparently.

I've read scripture from all main religions and tried to form my own understanding and I came to the conclusion that the hard dualist gnostics came closest to the truth.

>>19631893
>Does anyone have that copypasta of some anon btfoing his Buddhist university professor?

An American Vegan druggie low-test 'kinda-bi' crypto-materialist Buddhist professor was teaching a class on Gautama Buddha, known subverter of the Tradition. "Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Buddha and accept that he was the most brilliant individual the world has ever known and that he proved that there is no such thing as self!" At this moment, a brave, wise and virtuous autodidact former-NEET who had read all of Śaṅkarācārya and achieved atma-jñāna and who understood the necessity of combining positive descriptions of the Absolute with apophatism stood up and asked the professor "If the Self is just an illusion, then who or what is directing my body to ask this question?". The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied "a fleeting and changing bundle of mental aggregates which have no inherent existence, you stupid eternalist". "Wrong", the absolute madman replied, "the subject precedes its own negation, if Atma is an illusion with no reality sustaining and underlying it, then it wouldn't be consciously experienced as awareness, there are no examples of illusions such as mirages being self-aware like we are, you cannot have a dream without a dreamer, a illusory snake is never mistakenly seen in an empty room, but only where there is an existing real such as the rope upon which the idea of the snake can be superimposed. The Buddhist model contradicts empiricism, logic and common sense and as such must be rejected".

"T-t-this is all wrong, you just haven't meditated enough, if only you had you would understand that I'm right!" the professor screeched in a state of panic. "Meditation is a fool's errand my friend" the student wisely replied, "only knowledge leads to liberation as it's only knowledge which is mutually incompatible with ignorance just as light is to darkness, whereas meditation belongs to the sphere of action which can exist without opposition alongside ignorance". The professor was visibly shaken and dropped his copy of Mulamadhyamakakarika. He stormed out of the room crying those Buddhist crocodile tears. The students all applauded and began to recite Vedic verses. A eagle named 'Dharma' flew into the room and perched atop the shoulder of the brave student and shed a tear of joy. The works of René Guénon were read aloud from several times, and Kalki himself showed up and ended the Kali Yuga. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day, he eventually committed suicide out of anguish and shame.

ॐ

>>19631865
>the holy ghost is cause and effect
I'm pretty sure that this is some kind of heresy. In fact, I know for a fact that it is, because this act of syncretic criticism requires you to accept that karma (and thus the Holy Ghost) is created by things other than Yahweh, and is separate from Yahweh, and that right there is a rejection of the Trinity. It's also probably literally polytheism as you get into the question of "one karma vs many" (depending on whether you mean by "karma" "an individual karmic stream" or "the principle of causality itself"). This would also mean that you'd postulate that, before Yahweh created the universe, that there was no karma and thus Holy Ghost.

>>19631818
The question you asked was nonsensical. "Rebirth" is not "little man piloting the meat mecha gets put in a new meat mecha". You might as well ask who the unelected dictator chosen by birthright is in a democracy. It's a fundamentally different system.
>but that would require there to not be a little man piloting the meat mecha, or that he would at the very least have to be made out of parts and not be eternal!
Precisely. That's the point.
>but then you'd have to come up with a theory of the mind that holds that the mind is composite and made up of parts!
Precisely. Buddhists have done that. In fact, they've come up with several ways that this could work.
>but that would require an infinite historical past!
Precisely. There is zero reason to reject an infinite historical past unless you're trying to justify the validity of some Rabbi's pronouncement from on high, and Buddhism completely rejects Judaism as being nonsense.

I have never felt a stronger spiritual "pull" than towards Buddhism but I still feel there was something special about Christ worth investigating. Are there (unironically) any books that can help me with this?

>>19633647
Start with Dhammapada

>>19633365
The brahmins can't meme. This version is absurdly wordy and just seems more angry than anything else. It's like twice as long as the liberal vs conservative version

>>19633594
Oh touché re-HG outside of time and space

>>19633920
I did

>>19634253
Start harder because its all you need.

>>19634438
Apparently not

>>19633647
Yes. The Anti-Christ

>>19633365
lol

>>19634458
The Christ-like figure in Buddhism is Amitayus. You have likely heard of the Pure Land. There is an entire autist youtube channel dedicated to him. What you are looking for is the Tannisho and Shinran's letters commentary to the Larger Sutra on Amitayus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaUvxJsx0w

Amida Butsu Amida Butsu Amida Butsu Butsu Butsu Butsu

>>19630238
Hermann…is that you?

>>19635721
Why are christers such retarded proselytes while buddhists are generally pretty chill?

>>19637978
Book I recommend explains. Christians strive for escapism through ecstatic rituals and strong self-inflicted emotional states. They also find stimulus in infecting others with the same phrenzy. It's heroine in religious form.

>>19637978
Buddhism was historically a proselytizing religion and has a presence in all of what you could call "non-Islamic Asia." Incidentally, Islam has a similar attitude as Christianity regarding the need to destroy other religions, so it shouldn't suprise us there are no more Buddhists in Afghanistan for instance. According to the Assmann, egyptologist Jan Assmann, this is a feature of monotheism going back to Akenahten, which he calls the "mosaic distinction," that is to say, between true and false gods. Buddhism, though it competes with other religions, somewhat bypasses this insofar as it does not involve gods in its soteriology anyway. In Buddhism, gods and mortals are both in samsara, i.e. gods are not immortal and cannot make you immortal.

>>19639325
In Greek and Shinto mythology gods are also not immortal, and in Hinduism gods are also just atmans in samsara except for the purna avatars. The reason Buddhism can compete or coexist with other non-abrahamic religions is that it does not concern itself directly with upholding some natural order the order of society but rather focuses on the salvation of individual souls bringing them to the experience of nirvana.

>>19630211
>Can someone explain how Buddhism doesn't teach self-annihiliation?
It does. There are Buddhist monks who bury themselves alive and starve themselves until they die, just to prove that they don't care about anything, as well as a Japanese cult (don't remember the name but it's mentioned in my books) where the monks paint themselves to look like skeletons in some Dias De Los Muertos fashion. I don't know how everyone accuses Christianity of being a death cult when Buddhism is the one and true instance of it. Yes, the final aim of Buddhism is nothing. It poses that every single thing in this life, not just the material life but the afterlife too, is Hell. Nothing but suffering and pain for you and everyone around you. Therefore, nothing is ideal. Technically the Bodhisattvas only stay around so they can help you take a few steps further. The idea is that the Buddha and Bodhisattvas care so little about achieving nothingness that they stick around for the sake of compassion. This enables the whole monastic thing to exist in service of the lay, so that the layman can spin a wheel and get a +10 karma bonus instead of doing the hardcore shit, which is very convenient. This also allows the monks to exist since without lay offerings they would have to work. Everything in institutionalized Buddhism stands on this Karmic pyramid scheme; without this structure you'd ideally sit under a tree and let yourself die.

>>19639403
If not "nothing," what? How do you describe an absolute empty of description? Are you going to worship it as God instead and hope it gives you superpowers? Or will you be an actual nihilist and hold no values? No Buddhist considers himself a nihilist simply because he disbelieves in other philosopher's speculations. There is a middle way...

>>19639403
It teaches the "self-annihilation" of illusory mental conceptions that you - your true self - are using to keep yourself from God, Reality, The Highest Bliss and Seeing Things as they really are. No doubt there are some weirdos on here and /r/zen but you're a particularely dense person.

>>19639403
>>19639533
The truth is that Buddhists are right about a few things: world rejection, disregard for metaphysical speculation (well, depends on the sect) and salvation being a personal matter. The Gnostics were right about this too.
The rest is sectarian, ritualistic fluff. Read the Book of the Dead, read the suttas and texts relevant to praxis, and disregard the rest.

>>19630211
>the mistranslation of anatta and its consequences has been a disaster for the Buddhist race
The receiver is not the signal. The radio is not the signal.

>>19630284
>There's no self
This is where the troubles begin. Soul as such isn't ever denied in the Pali Canon.

>or a permanent ego-substance
This is more proper.

>>19630398
>Giga Chad

>>19630766
>Dharmadhatu (Buddha) is the ultimate (and only) reality, which is [incomemesurable]
>I don't think Coomaraswamy is recommendable in any sense
There's your issue.

>>19631494
>is this a common view?
Common misunderstanding, Yes.

>>19631494
>why do buddhists get called nihilists so often then?
Bad translation, willful misunderstanding.

>>19631794
>Giga Chad

>>19631908
There are counterspace entities.

>>19639494
>There is a middle way...
No, there is no middle way.
>>19639533
I have literally given college exams on the stuff. I'm sorry but Buddhism taken seriously is just suicide. The thing with, say, Christianity, is that you can be a very, very pious and holy Christian by actually living your life. If you are a very, very holy and pious Buddhist, you should by all means starve yourself to death.
An example is "compassion". There's a story where a monk rescues a boar from a trap, and the Buddha says to him "why did you do that?", and the monk explains, "I am sorry, I was moved by compassion". Moral of the story, "bhikku, one who is moved by compassion can do no wrong" but this is wrong! Horrible things have been done with the motive of compassion. I'll make a very obvious example: a doctor and scientist, who felt compassion for a child with leukemia, decides to find a cure. He experiments on mice. Perhaps he's even feeling guilt about the tortures he's inflicting to the mice, but he's nonetheless choosing to inflict harm because he's motivated by compassion for the people whom he's seen suffer. Freeing that boar has starved a hunter somewhere. How is compassion not just another form of attachment? It's just hypocritical. The truth is that only the suicides are right in Buddhism. Everything else is in contradiction with the very basics of its teaching. I have realized this when it came to putting a mortally wounded animal out of its misery: the Buddhist idea is that you should leave it alone to die, because the suffering is for the animal to bear, it's its Karma to suffer and die as it's dying, perhaps with its entrails spread out of its belly, unfathomable suffering. Although I'm moved by compassion, I cannot kill it to ease its pain, because I would be committing himsā. It makes no sense! What is compassion? Compassion literally means "to suffer with", if I see something that is mortally wounded why cannot I kill it to put an end to its pain? It will die anyway. If I see someone else's pain and I wish to remove it, I am inevitably inflicting pain on something else. Buddhism condemns even the smallest "passions" as inciting a domino-effect of dukkha across the world. Why should I free a boar but not kill it? It makes NO sense. Absolutely no sense. I should instead watch the boar die to the trap and feel nothing, watch the child die and feel nothing, do nothing at all times, and feel the bite of starvation and do nothing until I die. And this is what very very dedicated Buddhists have ended up doing, and I see no inconsistency with it except that, obviously, a religion whose adherents kill themselves is going to die out very soon and spread very little.

>>19639566
>salvation being a personal matter.
Does that mean that salvation is something that every individual can do for himself as he wishes? Because that's not true. The various Buddha's have developed innumeral different skillful methods (upayas) that have led people to their Awakening but the upayas can not be developed or correctly grasped by unawakened individuals. Emptiness is just a concept used in many upayas because it approximates reality if correctly understood. It also does a lot of harm to the modern materialist normie psyche.

>The rest is sectarian, ritualistic fluff. Read the texts relevant to praxis
You also can't have practice without sectarian differences. As much as people try there is no universal set of (scientific) instructions for practice. All you do is work against tradition and the essentiality of things or the essential nature of the dharma.

>>19639659
The whole cope that Buddha/Bodhisattvas stick around to save YOUR ass is retarded. Why would they? Technically this allows people to spin a wheel at the temple, then go to work at the Gucci factory and skin crocodiles alive. Why would they do this retarded shit? Wouldn't it be better if people were just, you know, on their own. You want to stop reincarnating into a cockroach? Then you become a monk. Why not? Why did the Bodhisattvas decide that spinning wheel was beneficial to everyone?
The whole compassion meme in Buddhism is so stupid given its emphasis on renouncing attachment it makes absolutely no sense. The only reason why you shouldn't jump off a cliff is literally "b-because you can to that! you're going to have a bad reincarnation if you do that!" although jumping off a cliff achieves 100% of what the religion states, provided of course that you kill yourself with the intention of renouncing life in the most absolute terms, like the suicide-monks do, and not because of unfulfilled desires like that you can't get a girlfriend. It makes no sense precisely because Buddhism is otherwise so mathematically consistent in its teachings.

>>19639659
Salvation is a purely individual matter and forcing yourself into one set of sectarian practices is useless. Pick what's useful and apply it, they're just means. And yes materialist bugmen will suffer.

>>19639610
"Compassion" is just an English translation and you shouldn't get hung up on the etymology of the English word. I don't remember the Sanskrit as it has been a while. There is copious scholastic literature—.e.g. Asanga's Mahayanasangraha and Vasubandhu's commentary—on the bodhisattva qualities which indicates that "compassion" does not mean giving everyone what they want or claim they need, it does not mean to make the poor rich or put those in pain out of their misery, it means to take actions which are suited to the karmic factors of that person such that they are led to the dharma. It is related to the idea of "skillful means" or upaya. A greedy person will not be made better, for instance, through giving them things.

>>19639693
>although jumping off a cliff achieves 100% of what the religion states
This is just a hostile reading that you could apply to nearly any religion. If Buddhism were really about suicide it would not have spread.

>>19639610
Sounds like western new age hippi buddhism to me, i.e. you're a dense person. The Mahakaruna (highest compassion) is to act in accordance with the dharma (the natural law) of the formless Buddha (God). It's to do the will of the dharmakaya. This is not ambiguous or inconsistent. It is mathematically precise as you say. No room for speculation.

You should also realize that Buddhism is taught differently to different castes of society. The Buddha addresses pratyekas, or monks most of the time. He spoke entirely different to kings, and then again a very big lot different to normal working people. You are confused.

>>19630211
thai monks dont have a monopoly on the interpretation of buddhist truth. on the flipside of self-annhilation is marvellous emptiness; the possibility of everything and anything

>>19639773

Kind of a tenuous claim given that the only perennial idea is antinatalism.

>>19639763
>"Compassion" is just an English translation
it's the officially chosen translated word though
>>19639773
>This is just a hostile reading that you could apply to nearly any religion.
I could never apply this to, say, Christianity. Christianity says the opposite, that you should love another as you love yourself. Although much of Christianity says the very same things as Buddhism, the Christian reading of renouncing passions is much more in line with actual life than Buddhism's. In a very similar way, the idea that the Bodhisattvas can intercede (this time I borrow a term) for you becomes nonsensical.
>If Buddhism were really about suicide it would not have spread.
Ideally, Buddhism's aim is to get everyone out of Samsara: the spiritual analogue of the Big Crunch. Sorry anon.
>>19639774
>The Buddha addresses pratyekas, or monks most of the time.
Yes, and this was another thing that I found irksome. As you probably know, it was already established by the time Buddha started preaching, that giving alms to holy men granted one good Karma. Without this semi-institutional backdrop borrowed from Hinduism, Buddhism would have had to specify exactly why you'd need to differentiate between monks and laymen. Without the laymen taking the bad Karma for killing animals and raising crops and doing everything they need to do in order to have food to offer the monks, the whole religion wouldn't exist. Basically the whole shebang exists on top of someone else's Karmic "sin". Taking Christianity again, there is no such thing in Jesus' teachings. He spoke to whores as he spoke to nobles, saying exactly the same things. And yet Christianity is very much unlike Buddhism, specifying what many people claim to be arbitrary rules, while Buddhism is clean and coherent because its message is so basic. It's so basic precisely because it's life-denying.

>>19639793
"Why don't you just kill yourself" always says more about the person criticizing than the person criticized. Now you're bring up "anti-natalism" which I have only ever seen discussed on /lit/ anyway as if that were equivalent with suicide. Is your point that monks don't reproduce and therefore they should just kill themselves? Apparently the overwhelming majority of them have not seen things that way and neither do the laity

>>19639851
>I could never apply this to, say, Christianity.
The earliest Christians begged Roman magistrates to kill them so they could be with Christ lol. The earliest Buddhists went around debating other philosophers

>>19639862
But that was for martyrdom in the name of Christ. Dying wasn't the end goal.

>>19639851
>Without the laymen taking the bad Karma for killing animals and raising crops and doing everything they need to do in order to have food to offer the monks, the whole religion wouldn't exist. Basically the whole shebang exists on top of someone else's Karmic "sin". Taking Christianity again, there is no such thing in Jesus' teachings
Jesus kills himself to get rid of "sin" and not one Christian has understood this since, and Christianity maintains long lists of what is and is not sinful and who is in charge of deciding and punishing that.

>>19639865
>uhhh it's not actually suicide since I agree with the theological speculation behind it

>>19630211
Read this.

>>19639851
>Jesus made no distinction and taught all members of every caste the same.
Yes, the jews made him into a proto-marxist after they killed him and used his legacy to enslave Europe.

>Buddhism is clean and coherent because its message is so basic. It's so basic precisely because it's life-denying.
If a clean and coherent philosophical system is life-denying then I don't want to know what you think about existence or God if I ask you to give me a clean and coherent answer.

>>19639851
I wish you people would stop confusing world rejecting with life denying

>>19639881
There's a massive difference between sacrificing your own life in the name of belief in the person of Jesus, who died for your sake, and dying for the very sake of renouncing life. As I said, Christianity says many things that are similar to Buddhism, but there are substantial differences based on WHY you are supposed to renounce life and the world, and on top of that there's the entire layer of God's person which is absent in Buddhism. There is nothing you are sacrificing in Buddhism. The point of Christianity is sacrificing things you hold dear, such as your life. The point of Buddhism is making so that your life is not something you hold dear. This makes every teaching about preserving your own life hypocritical.
>>19639912
>clean and coherent philosophical system is life-denying
life itself is not clean and coherent
>>19639920
"rejecting the world" in Buddhist terms is self-annihilation.

>>19639930
>>clean and coherent philosophical system is life-denying
>life itself is not clean and coherent
Existence and God are clean and coherent. There is no room for ignorance, illusion, confusion, evil or arbitrariness. Only in the mind of an ignorant person.

>>19639920

Why one or the other?

>>19639954
Gnostics hate neither life nor God nor themselves
Read Lacarriere and Jonas

>>19639954
>gnostics watch capeshit movies
is this a lesson in how to put people off something?

>>19630844
If you aren't aware in deep sleep, you haven't meditated properly yet.

>>19639930
>The point of Christianity is sacrificing things you hold dear, such as your life
Ok so it is a death cult, thanks for clarifying. As always the anti-Buddhist "just kill yourself" posters are full of nonsense and can't handle emptiness or even critique it without substituting weird priestly escape narratives by which their lack of power or knowledge is something that gets overcome when they die, because they died for the right reason. The Buddhist is correct, you get no magic powers or paradise from dying, and your actions in this life matter for now and the eternity of cause and effect. They are not something you are rid except through the cessation of that cause and effect. Birth and death are of the same genus. And this is why Jesus let himself be killed! Not that you should die to be with him but that you should live such that death is not something to be fought.

>>19640062
I am not anti-Buddhist, I have been intensely suicidal for a long time.

>>19639964

Sounds like a half measure. I mean, Baptists really believe that God hates fags, Catholics that he writes messages in the blood of livestock, Orthodox that the Father's sword will devour flesh. etc. Gnosticism being outradicalized is downright embarrassing.

>>19640077
God is angry when you sin, anon

>>19640073
Ok, well I do recommend reading texts mentioned in this thread more closely because most Buddhists have not killed themselves over Buddhism and much of your misery is due to misinterpretation of conditioned existence

>>19640108
Why? Where do christers come from with all this a priori knowledge of something they cannot even begin to demonstrate? Why can't you be responsible for your own actions without needing someone to spank you?

>>19640200
>Why can't you be responsible for your own actions without needing someone to spank you?
Have you seen those protty TikTok videos?

>>19640108
Spoken like a true abrahamic. God is never angry at you. You must be thinking about yehova. The correct view is you turn your back towards God if you decide to sin while God is waiting for you to turn back to him.

>>19640216
Doesn't even work as a behavior regulator anymore. It's like having a fleet of sailboats for a shipping company instead of panamax container ships

>>19630211
I-Is he sucking his own cock? Is that what reaching nirvana means?

>>19639693
>why would a being that explicitly swears to stick around to save all sentient beings stick around to save all sentient beings
Because they said that they would. What part of "the Bodhisattva Vow is an intentional declaration to delay nirvana to help all sentient beings" did you miss?
>b-b-but how can you trust them?! you don't have a book written by a rabbi saying that you should!
You can not. The Buddha gave us plenty of stuff on this. You can do this on your own, it's just harder.
>b-b-b-but if you aren't given a bazillion goy-slaves by Yahweh for not touching your peepee how can you be good?!
Compassion is what's left when wickedness is blown away.

Yes, that means that if you actually went through with nofap instead of repeatedly failing on day 1, you'd be a more compassionate person.

>>19639851
>Buddhism would have had to specify exactly why you'd need to differentiate between monks and laymen
It does so. The Buddha outlines this in excruciating detail.

You're new at this, so you should start with What the Buddha Taught, and then check out the Heart Sutra.