FOR SOME YEARS NOW I have been interested in the the question: what is it that arises in dependence on conditions? I treat the question as a kind of koan, digging deeper though textual scholarship, and using it as a focus for reflection on my own experience from moment to moment, hoping to see through it. My studies have led to the conclusion that the important thing is that experiences arise in dependence on conditions. This may not exhaust the possibilities, but it's the most useful thing to focus on.
Recently I came across a short text, the Selā Sutta (SN 5.9; S i.134), which gives an interesting answer to my koan. This analysis seems to anticipate later developments in Buddhist theory - particularly the elaborations of the Abhidhamma.
Recently I came across a short text, the Selā Sutta (SN 5.9; S i.134), which gives an interesting answer to my koan. This analysis seems to anticipate later developments in Buddhist theory - particularly the elaborations of the Abhidhamma.
Yathā aññataraṃ bījaṃ, khette vuttaṃ virūhati;So here the answer to my question is that what arises (sabhūtā) in dependence (paṭicca) on conditions (hetu) is threefold: the 'masses' (khandha), the elements (dhātu) and the sense spheres (āyatana). I will deal with them in the order: khandha, āyatana, dhātu for reasons which will become obvious.
Pathavīrasañ cāgamma, sinehañca tadūbhayaṃ.
Evaṃ khandhā ca dhātuyo, cha ca āyatanā ime;
Hetuṃ paṭicca sambhūtā, hetubhaṅgā nirujjhareti.
Just as a kind of seed, sown in the ground will sprout,
Resulting from both nutrients in the earth, and moisture
Thus the masses, elements and six sense spheres
Are produced from a condition, and cease when the condition disappears.
I have dealt with the khandhas before now (see: The Apparatus of Experience), so I'll be brief here. I follow Sue Hamilton in seeing the khandhas as analysing experience into the most important factors. The five khandhas are: 1. the living body (kāya) which is the locus of experience, sometimes more specifically referred to as 'body endowed with cognition' (saviññāṇa kāya e.g. M iii.18; S ii.252); 2. feelings (vedanā); 3. apperception (saññā); 4. volitions (saṅkhārā); and 5. consciousness (viññāṇa). Hamilton emphasises the collective nature of the khandhas - they do not represent a lasting self either singly or all together. As far as I am aware the khandhas always occur in this order, but are not treated a sequence in the Pāli texts.
The six āyatanas are the six sensory 'spheres' - āyatana is from ā√yam 'to reach out, to extend'. We often read about the 12 āyatanas which are the 6 internal (ajjhatika) and 6 external (bāhira) spheres. The internal āyatanas are the sense organs: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind; while the the external āyatanas are the respective objects: forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and mental activity (also confusingly called dhammas). It is this set of 12 that is referred to as "everything (sabbaṃ)" in the Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23 PTS: S iv 15). Here we have a resonance with Vedic texts which refer to the cosmos as idaṃ sarvaṃ 'all this' meaning all of the created world. The Buddhist Sabba Sutta seems to be explicitly contradicting the ontological and cosmological implications of the Vedic texts such as Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad (e.g. BU 1.4.1) or Ṛgveda (8.58.2):
éka evā́gnír bahudhā́ sámiddhaI read this aspect of Buddhist doctrine as saying something very important about epistemology. In saying that "everything" is the senses and their objects what the Buddha is doing is articulating limits on what we can know about. Although it feels real to us, our experience is a construction which relies equally on the thing being observed and the observer. And note carefully that this is a statement about the nature of experience, not a statement about the nature of reality. Reality remains at arms (or more accurately eye's) length from us, because our cognitions are constructed (saṅkhata) from sense impressions and mental activity.
ékaḥ sū́ryo víśvam ánu prábhūtaḥ
ékaivóṣā́ḥ sárvam idáṃ ví bhāti
ékaṃ vā́ idáṃ ví babhūva sárvam
Only one fire kindles many times
One sun penetrates everything
Dawns as one, shines on all this
From this one, unfolds the whole
The next set categories for analysing experience take the 12 āyatanas and add the 6 corresponding kinds of consciousness to make a set of 18. This brings together two basic ideas about the processes of consciousness. The first is that when cognition (viññāṇa) arises it is always associated with the sensory modality.
Yaññadeva, bhikkhave, paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ, tena teneva viññāṇaṃtveva saṅkhaṃ gacchati.With the eye (cakkhu) and form (rūpa) as condition, eye consciousness (cukkhuviññāṇa) arises, and so on so up to mind cognition (manoviññāṇa) which gives us six kinds of conscious. The second important idea is that the process of having an experience is always constructed from at least three elements:
Whatever kind of condition gives rise to cognition, it is known as that kind of cognition. (M i.259)
Cakkhuñca, paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati cakkhuviññāṇaṃ, tiṇṇaṃ saṅgati phasso, phassapaccayā vedanā, yaṃ vedeti taṃ sañjānāti, yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vitakketi, , yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti,... (M i.111)Each of these groups of factors (dhammas) - khandhas, āyatanas and dhātus - is a way of analysing experience. One of the key practices in relation to experience is examining it for any permanent, satisfying or substantial content of which one could truly say "this is mine" or "I am this", or "this is me" (etaṃ mama, eso'haṃasmi, eso me attā). Variations on this practice remain central to many forms of Buddhism from Theravāda to Madhyamaka.
With the eye and form as condition arises eye cognition, the three together constitute contact; with contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels one comes to know. What one knows one thinks about, and what one thinks about proliferates...
As I suggested above these categories were foundational for the Abhidhamma which endlessly analysed them and their relationships. I have complained that the Abhidharmikas lost sight of the experiential nature of all this and at least some of them started to speculate about the reality or otherwise of the dhammas. (The Post-Abhidharma Doctrine Disaster) Such speculation was a dead end. I also think Buddhists are wasting their time trying to apply this analysis outside the sphere of experience. The sphere of experience is "everything" in the sense both of what we have to work with, and what we can know about the world. These categories acknowledge the pragmatic and epistemological limitations on human experience, though liberation from dukkha is still an option from within this framework. It's not illogical to argue that this idea has broader implications. For instance the Buddha sometimes used examples from nature to illustrate the principle of dependent arising, which suggests that we see analogues of dependent arising in nature. However I believe the Buddha, especially in texts such as the Sabba Sutta, warned us to stay focussed on experience as the most fruitful course.
~~oOo~~
19 comments:
Very nice work indeed. Having thought about the separation of the world of experience from the objective world that science generally pursues, I wonder if more needs to be made of that distinction to help people not confuse the two.
In particular I'm thinking of being explicit about the domain of Buddhism and exploring the overlap - this being the area where naturally people become confused either imagining their experience has an effect (magical thinking) or explaining experience in terms of electro-chemical reactions.
Cheers Paul.
One observation that I did not make is that most of the people I talk to about this who have a great deal of experience of meditation - from long and/or frequent solitary retreats - think my emphasis on experience is a bit obvious. Whereas to me it was a revelation because of how I'd been taught Buddhism. (all within the same context mind you!)
WRT to your comment on explaining experience I think I'd refer back to the distinction between explanation and interpretation.
For instance it's quite clear that dream images are a result of random images drawn largely from the day you've just had, and seem to serve purposes related to consolidating memories and restoring baseline functioning (scan disk and defrag). But this does not mean that how we interpret dreams might not lead to profound insights into how our mind works - because the act of interpretation is what we get insights into (I think).
So we may find explanations for the mechanisms of experiences, and this seems to place limits on what is a sensible interpretation, but even so explanation does not exhaust the conversation. For instance a knowing a mechanism for consciousness does not explain why being conscious is such a mind blowing experience. Why should consciousness be awesome?
Also we have to keep at the forefront that scientific explanations are generally the most plausible way of connecting the available dots, and that when more dots or a better story comes along we'll change our explanation with only minimal resistance. Science is the polar opposite of religion in this way.
At present I think we can go as far as saying that all mental activity is accompanied by observable brain activity, but I'm not sure we can say it's causal with any certainty. I plan to say much more about this in two weeks.
But generally speaking, yes, I agree that clarity about domains allows for a happy co-existence. I think physics and the other sciences are how we should explain the world of objects; and even to some extent how we should understand our experience of the world. But Buddhism still provides us with a useful perspective on experience, and even more importantly gives us ways of working with experience in order to better understand it. If I want to send a rocket into space, then physics is what I would use, not paṭicca-samuppāda - it ain't rocket science. If I want to understand causation generally, then Newton and Hume are the places to start. But if I want to know why I think that sending a rocket into space will make me happy, and to deal with the dissonance when it doesn't (at least not in the long term) then Buddhism still offers the best insights into that process. For now.
Probably too many Buddhists are unconcerned with understanding the nature of experience, and just like to be caught up in it. I think I see this in my context - there's certainly a resistance to the kind of deconstructions that I favour, though there is a lot of interest and enthusiasm as well I must say.
We can only plug away hoping that this kind of thing will catch the attention of the trend-mongers (few of who have any interest in science unfortunately).
Great article. I look forward to your thoughts on mental/brain activity, a topic which deserves much more discussion, especially in modern science. I've been very interested in this distinction. For example, simply because an EEG computer can determine the electrical activity in my brain when I think of say the Statue of Liberty, it can never determine if that thought, that image, is IN my brain, or my heart, or my toe, or in outerspace for that matter. The thought cannot be found. Of course this is central to Vipassana meditation practice, trying to "find the mind," but it is a distinction that never seems to get much attention elsewhere. That to me is mind blowing!
Thanks for your blog.
Excellent essay, and I heartily second Paul P's point about the necessity of clarifying for beginning practitioners the difference between the domain of science and the domain of spiritual practice. May we soon see the end of explanations of the objective world in terms of "karma" or dependent origination! I recall that there are suttas in which the Buddha advises the monks to "stay on their own turf", i.e. keep their attention on the aggregates and sense bases.
That being said, the fact that events in the objective world can be used as illustrations of "inner" events suggests, to me at least, that there might possibly be a deeper principle that does underly both - "as above, so below" - but of course it's best not to reach hasty conclusions about that.
Regarding the distinction between science and religion: In an important sense they are same: they both seek to construct explanations of the external world. Religion does a very poor job of this because the type of thought that explains the objective world in terms of dependent origination or creationism or the like is a degenerate and basically worthless mental habit that is only called "religion" because the real thing has almost completely vanished. It's like using a mushy banana to hammer a nail.
Real religion, which I'll call spiritual practice, concerns the world of experience and how to work with it. This is made plain in the suttas, which for the most part ignore the external world, and is not something peculiar to Buddhism - any genuine spiritual practice will be the same. A Buddhist practitioner can pick up a book such as The Cloud of Unknowing and understand its meaning because it deals with the very same world of experience.
To explain the objective world is to create saṅkhāras on the basis of other saṅkhāras: a process that, if done carefully, i.e. scientifically, can lead to an enormous degree of apparent control over that world. Spiritual practice turns away from that world, and that is the true difference between science and real religion.
Hi Christian
Thanks for commenting. However I think you are a little behind on brain science. The EEG was invented in the 1920s! An EEG machine (not computer) senses electrical potential on the surface of the head changes caused by millions of brain cells firing in concert, and plots it on a graph.
These days fMRI and PET scans are resolving volumes of about 1 cubic mm. This is far from distinguishing single cells, but it can resolve single cortical columns. You might want to take a look at the TED talk by Henry Markram which will give you an idea of what that is and does.
You might also want to read this story about how images we see are physically modelled in the brain. (Sorry I could only the version in the Mail). As you can see the image is very much "IN your brain". That much is certain. Or at least we can say that the image is tightly correlated with brain activity in specific identifiable areas of the brain the functions of which we know in general terms, and will know in increasingly specific terms as time goes on.
The thought is not only able to be found, it has been found.
But what you are trying to do in meditation is something quite different to finding the actual source of the thought, or the though itself. After all the Buddha specifies that nothing arises or ceases except dukkha (see my post on the Chariot Simile) - in his practice there is nothing to be found (and by this he meant nothing tangible).
What you are doing is examining the second order phenomenon of being aware that you are aware - standing back to experience yourself having an experience. This is not because it reveals the secrets of consciousness or the underlying mechanisms of thought - this is just the Buddhist conceit.
Turning one's attention to the experience of having experiences is just recursive awareness. My impression is that it allows us to be more free in how we respond to the push and pull of sensory stimuli: to stay calm and to experience more compassion. It's not much more than this, and the process seems to be open ended. Though of course one can get the mystical experiences these are often played down by serious practitioners. The one that everyone seems to like is "oceanic boundary loss" in which the sense of having a first person perspective is scrambled and one feels at one with everything. And this has been reproduced under laboratory conditioned by suppressing the activity of particular centres in the brain. A very good description of it can be found in Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk about her stroke. I blogged about this one in 2008 (An Experience of Awakening?).
I think we need to start untangling Buddhist rhetoric from what is actually going on. Perhaps the mystical idealistic stuff got mixed in from the beginning, or perhaps it's more recent, but it's become a hindrance to acceptance and progress.
Hi Swanditch
Wow. I think that's the longest comment you've ever written! ;-) And on this occasion I find myself less in sympathy than usual.
I think there is a general principle of conditionality, but so what? At some point I have a blog coming up on why objective & subjective or inner & outer are deceptive terms.
I think it's a bit pointless to invent personal definitions of words and then argue about things on that basis, or more precisely it's often fruitless trying to argue with someone who does it. I use the regular dictionary definitions as often as I can and this forces me to think about what categories I am really using. Words are communal property.
What I take from your statement is that you personally don't like religion or the world, and want both to be something they aren't. I'm all for changing the world, but I don't think that disappearing into mysticism is helpful. Mystics don't help.
I don't think Buddhism teaches you to turn away from the world. It teaches you to pay attention to your experience, but it emphasises that your experience is experience of something, of the world. And in ethical terms our insights play out in interactions with the world. The world is very much a part of Buddhism. One ignores it at one's peril. The Buddha was not autistic!
So instead of an homunculus we have a 'mondunculus'! A 'world' inside our heads!
Argh Gambhiraḍāka...
Not so much a "world" as a virtual model of the world based on what we can see from here, and what we remember, and what we infer from previous knowledge. And within that a virtual model of our body and it's states, and part of that is the modelling of having access to the content of the model - self awareness. In other words we experience ourselves as inside the model, but we experience the model as real (partly because the model is in many ways very accurate - something Buddhists seem to hate to admit). However the model is optimised for a particular range of environments by evolution, and in the last 10,000 years we've gone off piste and invented new environments the model was never designed for... which is where Buddhism comes in: Buddhism is a bundle of apps for post-evolutionary living.
In your terms: virtualem tabulem de mundi , virtualem tabulem de ego, and virtualem tabulem de coporo. And Buddhism is vivens post-evolutionem.
[Enter Centurion... "What's this say?"...]
@jayarava, most of the people I talk to in the movement do look at things from the point of view of experience - but I often find that they are relatively unaware of the limits of that domain. I frequently hear relatively random events (finding £5 on the street for example) being assigned great significance or even as being caused by one's mental state.
That's not to say that one shouldn't consider such events on the level of meaning - merely that one could approach the personal significance as interesting without taking a literalistic approach and confusing the event and the experience it engendered.
Experience is amazing, and indeed once stripped out we are left with very very little. At the same time this austere medium called the objective world gives us the raw material for much (if not all) our experience including mediating between people (siddhis excepted).
Just a few thoughts from my ongoing stream...
Hi Paul
Yes in our circles we do often talk about experience, but note the tendency to slip into talking about "Reality", and our experience of "Reality". That's the give away! "Reality" is a meme so ingrained into our way of thinking that not thinking in terms of it is very difficult. I can only do it with enormous conscious effort and then only partially and on a good day. Most of the time I'm in default mode: naive realist.
And yes there is certainly magical thinking as well - viz my post beginning with talking about crop circles late last year. I came across this list of cognitive biases recently. I found it quite alarming how many and varied they were - and it gives some sense of the difficulty of trying to think clearly.
We do not know that the objective world is austere, we don't really know the objective world at all, except indirectly and as a function of our virtual world-model. Though I think that there is an objective world that corresponds quite closely to our virtual model of it in terms of physical properties (i.e. Intellectually I'm a Transcendental Realist). Else physics would not make sense, and patently physics does make sense.
I would go as far as saying that for all practical purposes we only have experience. I take this to be the message of the Sabba Sutta.
Good to hear from you. I'm enjoying your contributions.
Regards
Jayarava
Hi Again Paul
A case in point from Vishvapani's Thought for the Day today
"Buddhism starts with the fundamental character of human existence. Everything we experience, it says, is impermanent and constantly changing. That’s true of our possessions, our relationships and our bodies..."
Note the use of the word "experience", but the focus is outside of experience on the way *things* change, rather than on the way experience changes.
And at the end he mentions living "in accordance with reality". Whatever he means by this, and Vishvapani is usually a subtle and clear thinker, I don't think it's helpful to invoke "reality". Reality is part of a metaphysical belief structure for Westerners, which is then overlaid with Buddhist metaphysics resulting in, well, confusion at best.
This is the crux of my argument against traditional presentations of paṭicca-samuppāda.
I did a very poor job of explaining myself in my earlier comment so I will drop the bulk of it. Two points though:
- Regarding turning away from the world: The suttas are full of instructions to abandon and cut off attachments to the world, as well as to temporarily abstract oneself from worldly concerns via jhāna. This is what I was getting at. Not running away from or ignoring the world, of course, but discarding it from the list of things expected to provide happiness. This seems to me an uncontroversial assertion.
- Regarding the word mysticism: This is a word about the meaning of which reasonable people can and do disagree. It's often got a pejorative tone. In my experience, mystics, that is to say very experienced meditators, are the real "realists" in that they are directly aware, more or less continuously and without having to think about it, of their sensory experience as sensory experience and do not construe it as "reality". That veteran meditators find your "experiences not things" thesis obvious supports my point.
I also think of Sāriputta and Moggallāna: the former took a whole week longer than the latter to achieve arahantship because he wanted to conceptually think through the Dhamma first.
Again, sorry about any confusion. The clarity of my prose is not of the first water.
Hi Swanditch
Yes, sorry I tend to pounce on certain types of unclarity, and I see to recall you and I have had this conversation before. I'm just seeing the words on the screen.
So yes. Turning away from the world. I have to agree that this is what the Buddha councils. Though I think is it pre-awakening advice. Yes? I also wonder whether this has been idealised. All of the experienced meditators I know spend time in the world (else I'd never see them!).
I do tend the use the word "mysticism" quite pejoratively and very loosely and it's something I need to give more thought to. Last night waiting for a bus I was reflecting that it's always going to be difficult to describe the experience of meditation. More so than sensory experiences. So metaphors, poetry, images, allusions, and even myth will be the order of the day. But I think some Buddhists take these metaphors far too literally. There seems to be a desire for the world to be magical. Whereas what the Buddha seemed to do was to disenchant the world, through these refined states.
This word "reality" is another one which is confusing. I personally try to avoid it now. But I can at least imagine that it is possible to see sense experience as it is.
One of the reasons I write and comment in terms of concepts is that I don't think one can do much else in the medium. Confusion is inevitable, and I appreciate your willingness to stay in the game when confusion ensues.
Sāriputta is one of my heros :-)
Best Wishes
Jayarava
@jayarava
I think "living in accordance with reality" could be applied to either domain. I guess it implies that one's view is contrary to the fact - that one has expectations that are not met - whether they be that heavier objects in a vacuum fall faster than lighter ones, or that unethical action will have a positive outcome.
Having said that, an understanding of gravitation will do little for the quest for enlightenment!
I guess talking about impermanence in the objective world triggers certain attachments which give rise to an experiential fantasy of threat to the continuation of experience, and indeed an actual loss provokes an experience of loss - but the thing that gets left out too often is the impermanent nature of the experience itself.
Hi Paul,
Judging by the testy reply I got on Vishavpani's blog he certainly considers himself to be talking about experience. Though I don't think that particular piece of prose shows a full commitment to the experiential paradigm and it's implications. He points out that it was for breakfast radio, but I'm not entirely convinced that we can't communicate more directly.
Reality as a term in Western discourse is burdened with meaning. It gives all the wrong messages. One of the corollaries of the early Buddhist approach is that "reality" is a meaningless term. Indeed there is no word which corresponds to "reality" in the Pāli texts in its philosophical sense. The nearest word etymologically is sacca (Skt. satya), which like colloquial English blends the senses of 'true' and 'real'.
The Buddha of the Pāli Canon does use examples and images drawn from the natural world to illustrate his ideas. Clearly he saw similarities. But he never applied paṭicca-samuppāda outside of the domain of experience.
The crucial observation is that we experience loss (of interest, fascination, satisfaction) even when the object does not change. This is what is different about Buddhism and say Heraclitus who apparently knew very well that everything changes and bequeathed this observation to the world. Everything changes, but as I asked a while ago: so what?
One problem that we face is that when we spout platitudes like "everything changes" (and I'm talking generally here, not about Vishvapani per se) is that Buddhism begins to fit into the monist paradigm that all religions teach the same thing. This reduces Buddhism to the level of banal folk wisdom. But our insights about experience are profound, and distinct. What sets us apart is this understanding and attempt to deal with the problem that experience is unsatisfactory. And it is not unsatisfactory because "everything changes", but because experience itself is contingent and impermanent even when the object of our desires is not perceptibly contingent and impermanent.
The high value items in our world are those that are impervious to change: gems, gold, other precious metals, land, etc. It's why we highlight institutions rather than individuals - institutions last, people don't. Respect the office, not the holder, because the office transcends mutability.
cont...
...cont
In order to cut through this we have to understand what we are offering. For sure science has undermined the notion of permanence - Einstein even destroyed the notion of universal time! Quantum mechanics have caused even objects to be doubtfully solid. But this is not our critique of the world! We have jumped on that band wagon, but we had a point in the Iron Age, that survives the intervening aeons and is still relevant in the Internet Age. And out point is that experience is not what we take it to be. It does not last, does not satisfy, and is insubstantial. The lakṣanas apply to experience. They can be applied outside the domain of experience, but we're back to "so what?"
If we fully commit to this point of view (and I must emphasise that it is the early Buddhist point of view, not my personal point of view) then we have to stop talking about objects and reality as salient to our project. We have to come to grips with our legacy terminology. My suggestion is that we start from scratch and produce a thoroughly modern architecture for running our apps. I think this is what is happening amongst Mindfulness Teachers (which does include Vishvapani). But the rest of us seem, desperately ironically, resistant to change!
Presently our worldview and associated terminology is Iron Age with some Medieval modifications. Buddhism is Windows NT running on a substrate of DOS. It's buggy and unstable, but popular because it ships with PCs out of the box. I've likened Buddhsm to Microsoft before. Mindfulness is OS X - somewhat elitist as it's university based, and leaning heavily on academic research. It works well for some apps, but is expensive to buy and support. Modern Mindfulness will no doubt set a design standard but it's not going to penetrate the market beyond Apple Mac users (and I mean this last literally). I'm wanting something much more open source and appealing to the rest of us - something essentially free at source, supported by a community of fellow users, rather than a professional elite. Wiki-Buddhism is not quite right, as I think it has to be more authoritative than that.
However I must temper this enthusiasm with the content of tomorrow's blog which highlights another problem that we face - that we have little or no influence and will never change the world until we get some, and in getting it we will most likely lose our idealism and want to settle for security and stability.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Pointless aside - NT is not based on MS-DOS - it had a MS-DOS Virtual Machine, but the kernel was a POSIX compliant development of OS/2. All Windows versions from 2000 onwards have not been based upon MS-DOS but retain the virtual machine for compatibility.
OS X is a friendly front end for what is essentially FreeBSD (a linux like descendent of BSD UNIX). UNIX like OS's are elitist, but OS X is generally sold on it's immediate usability based upon a sandbox environment. Oh, and marketing.
I think the "so what?" question can be answered like this - we live in a society highly permeated by scientific ideas - especially ideas about what is real and not real. Whilst the experiential point of view is as valid as it ever was, there is a new kid on the block offering detailed and precise prediction and understanding. My point is that the landscape has changed around Buddhism to form a definite understanding of portions of the objective world. If Buddhism carries on assuming that the experiential point of view is obvious then people will continue to conflate it with the objective point of view.
What I am saying in essence is that Buddhism needs to work out where it sits within a broader range of understanding - otherwise it will fail to communicate clearly with the outside world.
Hi Paul
Thanks for the corrections on OSs - obviously I was a bit outside my area of competence. ;-)
However we are in complete agreement on your final point. And this is exactly what I am interested in. I would very much like to explore it at greater length - i.e. book length. I even have a synopsis and some notes. I think you'll enjoy next week's blog which is now titled "Rebirth is Neither Plausible nor Salient".
Cheers
Jayarava
So yes. Turning away from the world. I have to agree that this is what the Buddha councils. Though I think is it pre-awakening advice. Yes? I also wonder whether this has been idealised. All of the experienced meditators I know spend time in the world (else I'd never see them!).
I fully agree.
But I think some Buddhists take these metaphors far too literally. There seems to be a desire for the world to be magical. Whereas what the Buddha seemed to do was to disenchant the world, through these refined states.
I agree, he says this pretty clearly, with frequent talk of "destruction of ignorance" and "abandonment of views and opinions" and so forth.
This word "reality" is another one which is confusing. I personally try to avoid it now.
Good idea.
It just occurred to me how funny it is that the word "reality" is confusing!
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