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Denying the world?
betaboy
Veteran
This isn't a debate but a question out of curiosity. In Hinduism, there is a school of thought - advaita - which denies the world and explains everything in terms of appearances (rather than actual existence). Is there anything similar in Buddhism - is Nagarjuna's shunyata (emptiness) similar?
Again, this isn't a debate thread - we are not discussing whether this line of thought is valid but whether such thought even exists in Buddhism. So far, I know of dependent origination........
Again, this isn't a debate thread - we are not discussing whether this line of thought is valid but whether such thought even exists in Buddhism. So far, I know of dependent origination........
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Comments
This might be of interest: http://www.buddhismtoday.com/english/philosophy/maha/004-mind.htm
It is twilight. We see a length of rope and mistake it for a snake.
Advaita says that even the rope is an illusion.
Nagarjuna says that the rope exists as a rope, not a snake.
But that the rope is essentially empty of an unchanging , separate thingness.
That it arises, it is not an illusion, but it arises in emptiness and returns to emptiness, along with all conditioned states and beings.
Nagarjuna was well aware of the conclusions of the Advaitins and refuted them.
Mooji is an amazing Advaitist that I listen to from time to time. Gangaji is also pretty good, but my favorite is Mooji.
Do you object to the second post or the first?
The other day I discovered this text called Ashtavakra Gita which is an advaitin text. Reading some lines sounded some alarm bells for me. E.g.
Rare indeed, my son, is the lucky man whose observation of the world's behaviour has led to the extinction of his thirst for living, thirst for pleasure, and thirst for knowledge.
All this is transient and spoiled by the three sorts of pain. Knowing it to be insubstantial, ignoble, and fit only for rejection, one attains peace.
Most of it would be similar to Buddhism imo, but not sure about the rejection bit. In Dharma, I thought we aim for nonattachment, rather than detachment.
Nor are they otherwise
It's amazing to me that a whole can be divided infinitely.
The world is unreal in relationship to the realization of pure awareness. But pure awareness is the world and its the only real there is.
So what does this mean? Basically everything is coming and going but what remains is the witness or that which is aware of the arising and passing of experience. We are not our thoughts, feelings, smells, etc. But we are what remains, which is the IAM presence of awareness.
This at first is realized as the witness position then it evolves into a spacious container of all experience, a vast nothingness where things arises and fall into. Then this too dissolves into just pure experiencing as sounds/hearing, smells/smelling, sensations/feeling, etc. So no more background witness or container but only the foreground immediacy of the ever changing present moment free from conceptualization.
It is stillness and emptiness and at the same time completely dynamic. Oneness manifesting as twoness back into oneness.
And this is where hinduism is.
Buddhism on the other hand goes beyond this. And its subtle and its easy to assume they are speaking about the same thing because we're not just dealing with ideas but rather tested and tried mediative experience that by nature is non conceptual, hence its very common to assert the sameness of all religions.
Buddhism does not equate all things into a one essence as this is clearly the position of monism. Buddhism just sees through the whole dualistic/inherent posturing. Real or unreal. this or that. one or many. something or nothing. is or isn't.
All of it is invalid because there just isn't any referents that hold up when examined. even nothingness doesn't make much sense.
So in a way how can you deny something that isn't there to begin with?And how can you affirm something that isn't there to begin with? Its just the posturing of delusion that makes objects out of the confusion of self-awareness.
it can create puzzles that affirm, negate, both, or neither, or all of it at the same time while negating it while affirming it over and over again.
advaita means not-two in relationship to the duality of subject and object merging into oneness.
whats unreal is the thoughts and the illusion of separation.
whats real is pure consciousness/oneness.
its kind of a teaching method and a set up. you have to make something real to deny the false and vice versa.
truly a beautiful teaching.
My first encounters with Buddhism and nondual thought were absolute confusion. What do you mean, nothingness? emptiness? unreal, not really there, blah blah blah? What my mind came up with trying to grok these ideas was pure nonsense.
The first time sunyata EVER made sense was when I read a really dumbed down explanation of quantum physics and the observer effect. If I see a rope, what I am 'seeing' is a product of activity in the rear part of my brain. The visual object is happening in my occipital brain lobe, the usefulness, materiel, and things to do with rope are happening in my hippocampus and temporal and frontal brain lobes. The sensation of rope in my hands is happening in some sensory area in the middle portion of the brain, and my plans what to DO with the rope are also in the frontal cortex.
Perception is all happening in my brain, and still, the rope is hanging on a nail in the garage, whatever it really is
The sunyata or emptiness, in my understanding, is in the perception being NOT the actual rope, and the perceptions are a cascade of dependent arisings which dwindle away into . . . well, nothing.
I have no idea where "denying the world" comes into this anywhere, or that nondual thought denies anything. Perhaps it points out the error of mistaking our perceptions for reality itself.
Nagarjuna also refuted shentong by saying if you cannot establish any outer conditional objects then how can you establish an unconditional. I forget how rangtong explains how nirvana can exist at the same time as the statement that all dharmas are conditional. Then again in shentong all dharmas are still empty, but it means they are ungraspable. Rangtong works a lot with compassion to build yourself into enlightenment. Shentong does to a certain extent say with tonglen instructions. But Shentong in my experience uses meditation to see our false assumptions and drop them.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/vonglasenapp/wheel002.html
Doh!
Great thread by the way @betaboy with some truly interesting and insightful posts and comments. Thank you @Taiyaki for relating your insight - I have to say I sit very close to this view And that is where I think the term 'denying the world' comes into its own, particularly when you go on to say
Tarry a while, says Sow;
Put on the pan, says Greedy Nan,
Let's sup before we go.
night night - see you in the mourn!
In Hinduism, there is a school of thought - advaita - which
denies the world and explains everything in terms of appearances
(rather than actual existence). Is there anything similar in Buddhism?
Yes.
Both the Diamond Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra say,
more or less directly, that this world is a dream.
Where lies the problem?
Big S Self does not "control" the dream, but only provides the space in which the dream appears, and allows the dream to run.
To try to sum it up in a post or two really doesn't help for someone who hasn't read it themself.
To me it is better to say that reality is like a dream or dreamlike, in that it is entirely of the mind and while absorbed in it, seems like it is real from its own side.
When we are in it, it is easy to imagine that it will all run on without us, which is true in a way.
Hence we have estate planning and such, which is really just more adjustments to our own experience.
My world is entirely a personal display that no one else can experience. Like a dream.