curious:
nintheye:
curious:
nintheye:
The spacious mind is not the end of the line for advaitins. That's a common misconception Buddhists have... The final end of the line is the permanent annihilation of all states and opposites and ideas, including the idea of going beyond them.
Interesting! I would like to learn more about this. Can you point in the direction of any resources on this point?
Hrm... what kinds of resources are you interested in exactly? I can answer any specific questions you have. This whole idea is deep in advaita -- it is the meaning, for example, of "mano nasa," destruction of mind. Mind is opposites/states/ideas. It is the meaning of Brahman, whose ultimate definition is "neti, neti" -- "not this, not that," -- the utterly unspecifiable beyond-concepts.
Ramana Maharshi says: "There is no becoming , and there is also no destruction, the opposite [of creation]; there are no people in bondage, and there are also no people at all doing sadhana; there are no people who seek the highest [i.e. liberation], and there are also no people who have attained liberation. Know that this alone is the supreme truth!"
Or I can give you little quotes, e.g. the Bhagavad Gita which says "What all beings consider as day is the night of ignorance for the wise, and what all creatures see as night is the day for the introspective sage." Meaning, again, that the sage is beyond the awareness of distinctions.
But the reality is that there's no
particular resource on this point except a complete understanding of advaita vedanta. Other than asking me, you can check out
my website and
reading list if you like for that.
Thank you Nintheye, I do think I see the point. This is tricky to discuss because of doctrinal differences, difficulties verbalising non-dual experiences, and the slight differences in experience that I suspect arise from the particular paths that people take.
So without wishing to promote divisive arguments, I would say that I understand this as a kind of dissolution or absoprtion in the non-dual state that then becomes the basis for all ongoing experience. I think some Buddhists would see this as their goal, and others would wish to go beyond this to take the fuel out of this experience as well, and then reassemble themselves liberated from this state as well as all others. So just my opinion, and I don't expect anybody else to agree, but I do enjoy talking about these things to help refine my understanding and find the boundaries of my experiences. Much appreciated.
aloha malcolm,
The heart of this is "the absorption in the nondual state that then becomes the basis for all ongoing experience." The buddha, while considering whether to try to enlighten people at all, said, "The truth is subtle and hard to know." "The nondual state" is not in any way something which "then becomes" anything at all. This "nondual state" underlies all "experience" or understanding or knowledge or existence.
You speak blithely of being liberated from liberation, and this is precisely the danger, that we may identify the Ultimate and then go on past it, as though it were one more experience in a succession of changing experiences. The word "god" obscures god. Naming god does not reveal her. The nondual state is always present, it is your essential nature, every child displays it, every eye sees and is seen with it
Your real insight here is "just my opinion." You "understand" what cannot be grasped. The tao te ching says, "I don't know its name; I call it 'the Way'." A subtle but essential distinction. The so-called Way does not exist in any experiential way.
This is out of respect for your understanding, hoping you will understand, not from any desire to criticize or establish some better opinion. You know, my friend.
terry
from masao abe, "God, Emptiness, and the True Self":
Throughout its long history, Mahayana Buddhism has emphasized: “Do not abide in samsara, nor abide in nirvana.” If one abides in so-called nirvana by transcending samsara, one is not yet free from attachment, namely, attachment to nirvana itself. Being confined by the discrimination between nirvana and samsara, one is still selfishly concerned with his own salvation, forgetting the suffering of others in samsara. In nirvana one may be liberated from the dualities of birth and death, right and wrong, good and evil, etc. But even then one is not liberated from a higher-level duality, i.e., the duality of samsara and nirvana, or the duality of the secular and the sacred. To attain thorough emancipation one must also be liberated from this higher-level duality. The Bodhisattva idea is essential to Mahayana Buddhism. Not clinging to his own salvation, the Bodhisattva is one who devotes himself to saving others who suffer from various attachments—attachments to nirvana as well as to samsara—by negating or transcending the so-called nirvana which is attained simply by transcending samsara.
Therefore, nirvana in the Mahayana sense, while transcending samsara, is simply the realization of samsara as really samsara, no more, no less, by a thoroughgoing return to samsara itself. This is why, in Mahayana Buddhism, it is often said of true nirvana that “samsara-as-it-is is nirvana.” This paradoxical statement is based on the dialectical character of the true nirvana, which is, logically speaking, the negation of negation; that is, absolute affirmation, or the transcendence of transcendence; that is, absolute immanence. This negation of negation is no less than the affirmation of affirmation. The transcendence of transcendence is nothing other than the immanence of immanence. These are verbal expressions of Ultimate Reality, because Ultimate Reality is neither negative nor affirmative, neither immanent nor transcendent in the relative sense of those terms. It is beyond these dualities. Nirvana in Mahayana Buddhism is expressed as “samsara-as-it-is is nirvana,” and “nirvana-as-it-is is samsara.” This is simply the Buddhist way of expressing Ultimate Reality. Since nirvana is nothing but Ultimate Reality, to attain nirvana in the above sense means to attain liberation from every sort of duality.
Zen takes this Mahayana position in its characteristically radical way. “Killing a Buddha” and “killing a Patriarch” are Zen expressions for “not abiding in nirvana.”
Now we can see what Lin-chi meant when he said, “Encountering a Buddha, killing the Buddha; encountering a Patriarch, killing the Patriarch. . . . Only thus does one attain liberation and disentanglement from all things.” In this way, Zen radically tries to transcend religious transcendence itself to attain thoroughgoing freedom. Therefore the words and acts of the Zen masters mentioned earlier, though they seem to be extremely antireligious and blasphemous, are rather to be regarded as paradoxical expressions of the ultimate truth of religion.
