anatta vs atman in buddhism?

absolute

i heard from a man who said some mahayana buddhist sutras accept atman such as tathgatagarbha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ātman_(Buddhism) and he said dalai lama accepted atman and pure buddhism or buddhism in first time buddha accepted atman and atman is base of buddhism it is true some buddhist sutra accepted it ?

taiyaki

Not sure if you're into reading.

http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/02/madhyamika-buddhism-vis-vis-hindu.html?m=1

Atman is essentially a Hindu proposal. I'll give you the short answer. No it is not buddha nature. Atman is a permanent entity that is everything. A kind of uber soul!

Buddha nature is the potentiality for Buddhahood.

The confusion occurs because people have a habit of connecting dots and screaming its all the same!!!!lol

Dakini

absolute said:

i heard from a man who said some mahayana buddhist sutras accept atman such as tathgatagarbha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ātman_(Buddhism) and he said dalai lama accepted atman and pure buddhism or buddhism in first time buddha accepted atman and atman is base of buddhism it is true some buddhist sutra accepted it ?

IMO, you've hit the nail on the head. Some scholars of Buddhism say that the tathagatagarbha and the doctrine of True Self were not the Buddha's teachings, but are a later part of the canon that resulted from Hindu influence. The Dalai Lama would never say he accepts atman, but if you study his beliefs and teachings on the subject of "consciousness", they rather point in that direction. Battles have raged on this forum and elsewhere as to whether substituting "consciousness" for "soul" is mainly a semantic issue. I would say that in view of the ambiguity as to the origin of the tathagatagarbha/True Self teachings, interpret as best works for you.

The soul played a central role in pre-Buddhist Tibetan belief systems, and some of the soul purification rituals are still practiced, under a Buddhist guise. Buddhism in Tibet has incorporated many of the pre-Buddhist beliefs, in fact. So we shouldn't be surprised that teachings closely resembling belief in a soul are present. But this isn't only in TB. Ch'an Buddhism talks about different types of consciousness as it relates to rebirth, and so do some Zen sects, so it's clearly a Mahayana thing. But no one calls it "atman", that's clearly a Hindu term. If you were to raise this question with scholars, though, I think you'd have some pretty interesting discussions, depending on which scholars you chose.

Jeffrey

Read the nirvana sutra, or the ratnagotravhibaga.

The mahayana regards these as definitive whereas some of the pali canon as provisional. This may seem odd but keep in mind the Theravada considers some of their own sutras as 'mundane' and some as supra-mundane.

Basically the mahayana teaches dependent origination and shunyata. Bodhicitta is the fact that we are completely free. But that freedom is not a void. There are qualities such as love. If there was no Buddhanature there would be no love.

In the Pali Canon in the dhammapada it is said that the Self may be liberated by the self alone.

Buddha negated the self as skhandas but he didn't say that there was no self. There must be something left over when you deconstruct all of the poisons and release them. There must start out a Buddhanature because otherwise Buddhahood would be prapancha, a fabrication of cleverness. But the Buddhahood is completely free and not bound by fabrication (sankhara).

Dakini

Here's an intro to the tathagatagarbha teachings with references to sutras to read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tathagatagarbha_Sutras
You can probably find the Tibetan teachings on "very subtle mind" by or consciousness by doing a search on the Berzin Archives: http://www.berzinarchives.com

http://www.sofiatopia.org/bodhi/rebirth.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaya-vijnana

Jeffrey

You also might want to read a book establishing the viewS of emptiness within the mahayana. Emptiness is a lot like non-self. I really got a foggy idea years ago about emptiness from reading the book: Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, by Khenpo Gyamptso Tsultrim Rinpoche. It is about various views of emptiness. For example the Prasangika views all views as provisional nothing to grasp. The cittamatra views everything as Mind which is similar but as you read the descriptions of the two there are clear differences. The five views are: shravaka, cittamatra, sautantrika, prasangika, and shentong.

taiyaki

For those who care. This is a topic I enjoy discussing a lot! =]

Rob Burbea in Realizing the Nature of Mind:

"One time the Buddha went to a group of monks and he basically told them not to see Awareness as The Source of all things. So this sense of there being a vast awareness and everything just appears out of that and disappears back into it, beautiful as that is, he told them that’s actually not a skillful way of viewing reality. And that is a very interesting sutta, because it’s one of the only suttas where at the end it doesn’t say the monks rejoiced in his words.

This group of monks didn’t want to hear that. They were quite happy with that level of insight, lovely as it was, and it said the monks did not rejoice in the Buddha’s words. (laughter) And similarly, one runs into this as a teacher, I have to say. This level is so attractive, it has so much of the flavor of something ultimate, that often times people are unbudgeable there."

http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/09/two-sutras-teachings-of-buddha-on.html

pegembara

The Suttanta sets out in sixty-two divisions [2] various speculations or theories in which the theorisers, going out always from various forms of the ancient view of a 'soul'—-a sort of subtle manikin inside the body but separate from it, and continuing, after it leaves the body, as a separate entity—-attempt to reconstruct the past, or to arrange the future. All such speculation is condemned. And necessarily so, since the Buddhist philosophy is put together without this ancient idea of `soul.'
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta