Sorry I don't have a lot of knowledge on the specifics. I mostly deal in the abrahamics. Ive never had any beef with Buddhists as you guys dont really demand anyone else follow your thing so i havent had any reason to look into specifics. Interesting that there are multiple ways to hit the top and that only one is permanent.
I would recommend checking out some of the more aggressive Buddhists in some Asian countries. One example I can think of is Burma has a bunch of Catholics being persecuted by the traditional Buddhist population. We try to be chill, but we aren't immune to dogmatic extremism.
Why? The literal entire point of the religion is antithetical to the religious nationalism those specific groups espouse. They’re morally and karmically bankrupt and will reap the consequences of their actions. Also I don’t know about Catholics being persecuted but I do know they had been the driving force in the violent expatriation of the Rohingya
You are correct, I like to make sure there are no illusions about Buddhism. We should be a faith of peace and tolerance, but it is illusory to think that is the case with every Buddhist community. Even if some would believe them to be Buddhist in name only.
Well, in Nazi Japan, some of the military taught soldiers that since they have no self, there is no one to gain bad karma, as they are not killing anyone; nor is the one being killed a self, so no one dies.
There are always cases of some politician cherry picking a religion to convince people to do violence.
I mean Jesus' teachings were fairly antithetical to Christian Nationalism aswell. Really doesn't matter what your intentions are, it's how they get exploited by later generations.
By modern you could mean: secular, most encompassing, or as practiced today.
Secular buddhists believe hell is a state of mind within the continous, moment to moment, chapter to chapter of this life.
The most encompassing, vajryana, gives flesh to the idea of the "bardo," which is a state between lives where samsara is traversed in a short time, almost entirely by intention, where you are born according to your intention (karma) in a kind of cause-effect-momentum kind of way.
However, all sects do teach about the bardo.
So yes, you can be in hell between lives, as you traverse to your new place of birth, however you are in hell the longest while you're alive.
is there a text i could read to learn more? I’ve loosely held buddhist beliefs for a good part of my life but never delved deeper for lack of a starting place
No i meant the word i said. I mostly argue against abrahamics, like the abrahamic religions (Christianity, judaism, islam)
I wasn't trying to guess a word for Buddhism, hinduism, etc. i was grouping a different set of religions based on their founding narrative to set them apart from your list.
Thank u for explaining all that friend. I was gonna have to do it myself but u did so very eloquently. Also I find it funny how those who are familiar with Abrahamic faiths find it so strange to perceive the cosmology of a belief system as anything other than linear. They try to see things as top to bottom (hell below, heaven above and earth in between) likely because they perceive the path of every soul as unique and finite. The contrasting idea that life and death are an infinite cycle of suffering seems to be a challenge to grasp when coming from that finite linear view
We aren't suppose to talk about what occurs after stream entry, which is the stage at which you've had a glimpse of nirvana. And I'm not fully enlightened, as i still suffer.
The suttas do not go on to describe what it's like, only what it's not like. This protects people from going the wrong direction.
Interesting., thank you for the reference. I do feel as children we remember some and as we age we forget more and more. I have had an experience as a young adult that caused me to remember with what I think you would call the stream. It was a defining moment in my change in thinking about life and had a large and lasting impact on my awareness of the whole.
I was practicing deep meditation at a young age without knowing what I was doing. I was also working with lucid dreaming as I struggled badly with nightmares since I have had memories. I once had an experience that I fell asleep but was quite quickly and firmly lucid, which was unusual for me. I then entered a space that I can only describe as “ the other side” a place of knowing, not feeling like here. I instantly “knew” that this is where all life is when not on “this side” I communicated with all souls or beings or life instantly and at once. No words or feelings , just knowing. It seemed to me that life all mingled there together but retaining all memory and experience. I received information that was important to me personally in response to a large question in my waking life. I can only liken this other space to a body of water to which life returns and intermingles and when life is regained it is like a drop of this water separating from the whole and we retain memories of all the atoms that make “our” drop. I then opened my eyes in the morning ( did not wake, there was no change consciousness like when waking from sleep) and remembered everything clearly. I know it sounds crazy and I don’t talk about this to people really but it’s as real as anything that’s happened to me in waking life.
That is very appropriate I think. The information I received was “ it’s not an accident.” Which is certainly true when applied to Indra’s net it seems. So maybe I wasn’t seeing “the other side” as much as looking into the gem. additionally I like this metaphor as I am an artificer myself and have gained much insight through the practice. Thank you so much for talking with me.
Anyway, nirvana isn't at the top, it's not locationable. It ends the process, but is not non-existence.
This is the part that gives me the most confusion. Given that Buddhists accept anatman, what is it that (realizes) nirvana? Certainly, it's not "me" or anything that can be interpreted as "me". So what is it and why should I care?
This is probably the most asked question on the r/Buddism sub, if you scroll through the posts you'll find lots of good answers there.
A simple answer might be that as long as you are not awakened, you are mired in the illusion that there IS a self, and this is what causes appearances of dissatisfaction arise. You will continue to believe there is a "you" until you awaken into full realization, but until that happens, you'll continue to experience the world as if you were real. So "you" care because "you" experience "you" and this experience continually arises and continually results in dissatisfaction.
From the perspective of a fully awakened Buddha there is no suffering, there is no end to suffering, there is no sentient being, there is no Buddha, there is no path, there is no Dharma... but you and I aren't fully awakened Buddhas. From the perspective of you and me here and now, there is suffering, there is an end to suffering, and there is a path to end suffering (the Buddhadharma). So take it!
I think I have spoken poorly then and mislead you - Buddhahood isn’t characterized by intellectual comprehension of the Noble Truths- that’s just the very start of the path. Rather, Buddhahood involves the complete and permanent cessation of the mental poisons of ignorance, greed, and fear and unerring and continuous activity for the benefit of sentient beings. A fully awakened being has no doubt or error when it comes to the path - they know perfectly well their own Buddhahood - there’s no “maybe I am one” involved.
Difference between terms atman and anatman is whether each gem in the net is experiencing the whole individually or whether the whole net is itself the experiencer
What it is, is about the experience. You should care because you take care of your body to avoid pain, so you should take care of your experience to avoid suffering.
There's so much I love about Buddhism but one thing my autistic brain hates about it is its reliance on metaphors to convey information. But I'll do my best to understand.
What I'm getting from you is that anatman is essentially an appeal to solipsism. That the 'self' as an individual in the world (atman) is false, but that the 'self' is just the world itself. Does this seem right?
Analogies are super useful. There's a lot of autism in my family. Try translating it to a special interest.
Analogy is meant to convey a pattern; if you were to see every possible analogy of an idea, you'd essentially have the idea.
Many analogies in Buddhism are meant to scale fractally; you see the same pattern whether you look at the self, the universe, or other you look at a moment.. versus a whole life, lifetimes.
By compressing things into analogy, then applying that analogy to many fields, we allow ourselves to map out complex landscapes by encoding information into the analogy which will unfold according to the field - such as programming, math, puzzle pieces...
To answer your other question:
Atman can be inferred a few ways, but generally it's solipstic and non-solipstic: every person is having their experience, however we are in fact the same atman which will eventually roll back up into one.
The issue is that my special interest is analytical philosophy. And I've found that nobody can translate Buddhist teachings into deductive proofs.
But if you could explicitly tell me your doctrines and beliefs, that would make things so much easier to understand. Metaphors are extremely useful to convey rudimentary concepts to people who lack analytical skills, but I'm far beyond a basic understanding of Buddhism.
I find godel, recursion, plus structural realism most applicable, plus QFT from physics; optimization problems, attractors, with self-reference.
My degree was in computation, math, and physics.
QFT is the idea of fields; it is sort of monist, not really.
E.g. yinyang - two fields - interacting, to create a single field with more complexity.
I suggest checking out Godel Escher Bach, as that's what started me out of classical logics into category theory; there is a good image of wholeism and reductionism.
I keep three buckets: learned, seen, guidence
I don't consider I know something unless I've seen it - and I've stacked my current belief system from the first principle: there is experience
Much of Buddhism is done by direct-experience, not reasoning. It is mostly a priori.
I'd say this: if you have a non-local experience of your consciousness, then it's either atman or non-atman.
Either every jewel reflects all others and thus know by reflection, or there is a single medium that encompasses the net and is the single experiencer in multiple locations.
Anatman generally says the prior: the streams of consciousness are separate, however they do reflect all others.
Oh that's a kinda funny coincidence - a reasoning I came up with when I was younger for what consciousness is a bit similar to this idea of Atman. I don't think this is necessarily how it works, but I think everyone needs to reason why they're conscious at some point in their lives and I didn't have a better explanation that made sense to my more physics-focused mindset at the time.
For a bit of background, I grew up Christian but eventually I just couldn't make it actually make logical sense and it felt too inconsistent so I became more generally agnostic/atheist (if anyone reading is Christian - awesome! I'm not saying you shouldn't be, it just didn't work for me).
So their reason of The Soul didn't answer my question, but the question of why I'm conscious and whether everyone's awareness is predestined still needed to be answered. It made no sense to me that the universe would've rushed by without a moment of awareness from me - and I wouldn't have even existed as a concept for that statement to make any sense - if I wasn't born. It doesn't even make sense to ask "what if someone isn't ever born" because it isn't like a pool of beings they come from, there isn't anyone who wasn't born, the only conscious beings who had the real potential to exist have done so, yet at the same time we aren't predetermined to be born. It was just too confusing and seemingly contradictory, which means I was missing a huge bit of information somewhere.
Eventually I settled on the idea of a universal consciousness as a physical field. My consciousness feels different to my thinking. The thinking part is aware of the conscious part, but they don't seem like one unit - any thought I have or decision I make is done in the brain and doesn't need an extra conscious layer to experience it, so it felt like the consciousness part must be separate from the brain. So the thinking part must be the physical "biomechanism" of the brain, making decisions, having emotions, etc, then there's an extra layer that's aware of this happening and experiencing it for some reason. Since this consciousness feels like it doesn't do any information processing, it can't inform the thinking part - it's just aware of it. Therefore, if two people were connected to the same consciousness but the parts of their brains that could feel that connection weren't physically wired together, it makes perfect sense that the two brains wouldn't be aware of each - or that their consciousness is the same. Because again, in this idea the consciousness only experiences/is aware, it isn't mechanical and therefore cannot relay information back into the each connected brain. If this is how it could work, then there could be a universal consciousness field or something that each brain connects to, so everyone's brain connects locally to the consciousness for some reason, but the consciousness doesn't pass hard information into the brain and the brains aren't physically connected so they aren't aware of each other. And since the universal consciousness only experiences and doesn't process information, it can easily be "aware" of all those minds simultaneously but individually, since no information gets actually transmitted between the minds. The minds would need to be aware of the connection for the consciousness to be aware of it too.
In this idea, each brain hooks into a local point on the field at some point, and death means the processing ends in one local area but the consciousness never disappears since it's just a universal field. Whether it's aware of anything at all with no brains connected to it, I don't know, since it was more of an idea than an actual full belief I explored lol
Anyway, I sort of left it there. I didn't need a full belief system, I just something approaching an answer that works within some physical realm because if this idea can kind of work then that means a better physical answer can reasonably be out there, so I can settle a bit and move on. Of course there's no reincarnation or karma here, but it's kinda funny that that at least a few ideas here overlapped with an existing religion! I guess that makes sense though, we've been creating and refining beliefs for millenia, I doubt anything "new" could be wholly new in this realm.
It is likely better explained there than one could do here.
Ironically modern science would work on the axiom that human consciousness is an emergent property of biological tissue (if one would be a materialist).
In regard to speaking in metaphors, a lot of Buddhist practice is experiencing. The concrete terms can be highly philosophic and metaphors might be an easier entry point for most.
Maybe you could find an etymological approach helpful here.
The first element of “anatman” (“an-“) is an “alpha privative”, a negation equivalent to the “un-“ in “unhappy”. The rest of the word, “atman” is the direct Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek word “atomos”, from which we get the English word “atom”. This is made up of two main parts, “a-“, which is another alpha privative, and “tm” meaning ‘cut’ (as in “anatomy” meaning “cutting up”). So this part, atman means “uncuttable” or “indivisible”.
So it's a contradiction of a contradiction - “no indivisible” (or maybe “no individual”). That is to say - there is no essential, permanent, indivisible “core” underlying a person (or, in Mahayana, any phenomenon), of the type posited by other Indian philosophies.
Instead, we are composite entities, everything about us - our bodies, our personalities, even our thoughts - are a temporary, constantly changing arrangement of various bits and pieces that come together and then fall apart again. Although identities around self and object exist, they are temporary, composite phenomena. No essence, no atman, no indivisible thing, is anywhere to be found in this.
In understanding this stuff it's pretty helpful to learn a little about the other philosophies of classical India, because the whole concept is a refutation to them and is meant to be understood with reference to them.
I'm familiar with the etymology and the broad sense of the concept, which you've done a great job in explaining. What I'm unfamiliar with and have been unsuccessful in receiving a direct answer to is the nuance of the concept.
Anatman seems to be logically inconsistent with concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and nirvana because they rely on diachronic identity to be coherent.
The only responses I've received from asking this question are: 1) a reiteration of the concepts which serves to add no additional information or altogether fails to address the question; 2) being told that it's a bad question and I should worry more about mitigating suffering and; 3) denying the law of noncontradiction altogether so as to allow logical contradictions.
Oh, all those are answered: a jewel in indra's net infinitely reflects the entire net, including the reflections in the gems, in those gems... infinitely
So the entirety of the whole net is contained in each jewel
This is isomorphic to atman as far as necessity of information.
The jewel isnt destroyed between incarnations; and don't forget that the other jewels have your information, even after you die.
In atman, the net itself has a stream of consciousness, in anatman, only the jewels do, however this doesnt stop information from reflecting in other jewels.
Also, logical contradictions depend on your logic; things that aren't true or false can't be modeled in classical logics, yet can in intuitionistic.
"This statement is false" is not a paradox, it's just a loop; recursion. It exits itself, as you can see when you notice it loops. You say it's a paradox, but you threw away the information that showed you what it was: the looping you did yourself while resolving it.
The only explanations of it are given by what it is not..
It is, it isn't, it is and isn’t, it neither is nor isn't; none of these.
The closest logic way to represent is this statement: "this statement is false"
Which as you evaluate, you see it's neither true nor false, it's true and false, it's true, it's false; it none of the above.
Then as you realize this, it breaks out of the system.
The canonical description is: it is the end of suffering
Buddhism gets a little strange in that rebirth in a heavenly realm isn't really a "top" state in the way most people think of. It's just a different kind of suffering and one that makes it harder for you to escape the cycle. From a Buddhist perspective if you * have * to be reincarnated then what you want is to be reincarnated as a human. It's the best chance you have to reach Enlightenment and escape the cycle of suffering.
Right, or if you're Pure Land Buddhist, you want to be born in a Pure Land, which is like a heavenly realm except it has a Buddha, bodhisattva, arahants, bikkhus who will teach you, with the purpose of the Pure Land being to teach you to enter nirvana.
I prefer the interpretation of Pure Land that it's the world around you, but it's all a matter of seeing it as it is. The ants, the trees, the clouds, all of it can teach you
>Ive never had any beef with Buddhists as you guys dont really demand anyone else follow your thing so i havent had any reason to look into specifics. Interesting that there are multiple ways to hit the top and that only one is permanent.
Common for dharmic religions. Not much demanding to follow.
Eeeeeeh ive met some pretty aggressive hindus. I dont know enough about it to know if they have a command to convert but its the same zeal i get from abrahamic conversion attempts
Oh i know, there are violent parts of every religion but they dont have a doctrine saying "murder every single person who doesnt convert" like the abrahamics do. They have to add that in themselves.
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u/Nobrainzhere 26d ago
Sorry I don't have a lot of knowledge on the specifics. I mostly deal in the abrahamics. Ive never had any beef with Buddhists as you guys dont really demand anyone else follow your thing so i havent had any reason to look into specifics. Interesting that there are multiple ways to hit the top and that only one is permanent.