The Importance of View
It is one of postmodern indisputable discoveries that „context is everything“ or, well, almost everything. The crucial importance of right view has been recognized by every generation of Buddhist masters. From Gautama the Buddha to Nagarjuna the "second Buddha“ to mahasiddhas of the tantric revolution to Ch'an/Zen masters...
Though formulations of the View have been shifting significantly, they retained the distinct central Buddhist purpose, namely to point out the Middle beyond extremes. Four truths and the eightfold path, dependent co-arising, emptiness, the Middle, Suchness, buddha-nature, relative and ultimate bodhicitta, no-thing-ness, one taste etc. etc. every school has brought a fresh unfolding to the lotus of clarity and a new spin to the dharma-wheel. And then the whole unfolding took a break until..... the 20th/21st century meeting of all schools and formulations.
The purpose of the View is to establish a general map-like orientation in practitioners' minds and to safeguard one's spiritual progress through the stages of the path, thus the View is one's pocket-guru (think an enlightened pokemon). Another purpose of the View is to serve as ground for culture and policy. There are what we may consider a variety of Buddhist views on as a wide range of subjects as you may think of. But then there's the View not as the totality of these particular views, but more fundamentally as the way we approach, understand, consider, and conceptualize the essential triune issue of Ground, Path and Fruition. In addition to that, at various stages of the path we are required to hold certain views that have to do with specifics of the challenge faced in our practice. Thus, the View will inform and guide one's practice as well as enable one to situate the resulting experiences in a meaningful context, thus allowing for a no-nonsense interpretation of both generalities and relevant details.
In short, cultivating the View means cultivating right understanding, by learning, examining, pondering, questioning, and experiencing for ourselves. Right understanding, in the Buddhist context, means understanding the Buddhist view, which is the middle view beyond eternalism and nihilism.
In traditional terms, prior to awakening, the View is those tenets of Dharma that guide and direct one's practice, i.e. the right view(s), accepted not as mere beliefs, but after reflecting on their meaning and checking with one's present experience. After awakening, it's those modalities and interpretations that safeguard the integration of realization into every lived experience, AND that maximize an effective sharing of realization in culture and society. As such the View has a relative and an ultimate aspect, i.e. two truths. Plus, the formulation of such View will shift with the level of structural development (see addendum). So I would say the View has three important dimensions that need to be meaningfully integrated at every step.
Every great tradition and lineage has it's own preferred formulation of the View (including the ultimate component, even if only to say they refrain from over-formulating it). In Theravada/vipassana it could be summed-up perhaps as "Four truths, dependent co-arising, and three characteristics". The second turning will emphasize emptiness, while the third turning will reveal buddha-nature. Most of these orthodoxies (lit. right views) have been codified in a premodern structural context, so that now we're struggling with a massive overhaul in which neither doing away with everything traditional nor preserving the tradition intact is an option. This website is a symptom of such an overhaul, with an emphasis on practical application and pragmatism. Enter the fourth revolution of the dharmacakra.
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The Four Seals of the Buddhist View
- All compounded things are impermanent.
- All phenomena are empty, without inherent existence.
- All dualistic experience is intrinsically painful.
- Nirvana alone is peace, and is beyond concept.
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Addendum
What we have become aware of more recently is that views and their expressions go through shifts of a deep, structural nature, sometimes called paradigm shifts. We have become aware of worldviews, contexts, and perspectives. We have awoken to evolution and deep development in all domains. Thus, as humanity we have so far gone through at least half a dozen structural and cultural emergencies. The ones we encounter alive and kicking today are traditional, modern, and postmodern, and what is common to them is that each sees the other two as being mostly if not completely wrong through and through, the product of which are the many culture wars on every possible front. Thus we have a traditional Buddhism, a modern Buddhism, and a postmodern Buddhism, not just as phases in historical emergence but also styles of upholding the teaching here and now. At Dharma Overground we tend to intuitively embrace what's best from each of these three paradigms, thus aiming for a meaningful integration of their partial truths in a truly post-sectarian context, without diluting the important differences of schools and vehicles, while endorsing a post-postmodern emergent Dharma.
Links:
Early teaching: "Discourse on right view": Translation 1, translation 2.
Plus: "Buddhism in a Nutshell", Dzongsar Khyentse on four seals