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If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him ???
nottwo
Explorer
"Those who do not live in the single way fail in both activity and passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality, to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth only ease to cherish opinions." • Sosan
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cherish opinions and that'll kill the buddha right there! I like the quotation. but what does it mean when it says that changes we see are not real?
the apple "is" red,,,red does not exist in nature,,and an apple is a mass of particles,,nothing we see is "real" perhaps, just abstractions
what do you mean by 'red does not exist in nature'?
http://epluribusunum56.com/light_colors.html
ha I am a chemist I know all that. but I would say that all of that scientific phenomena described is none other than 'nature'. which is what you said. so a sugar cube is made of molecules and more and more reductions to quarks etc.. but sugar is still sweet.. experience is evident regardless of whether we can reduce the nature of sugar into dynamic pieces of structure and reactivity.
what are you calling "nature" what is your concept of nature?
the scientific phenomena of light and physiology etc.. as one example. but 'nature' could also refer to non-synthetic and found outside of man-made. That is how nature is often used.
But in this discussion here I was referring to the interaction of light with physiology as a description of what redness 'was' in nature.
then i hope that link helped
yes it did
now I know what you mean by redness is not in nature. but I would say that nature IS inclusive of chemistry, physics, and physiology whereas you are saying that redness is not nature and is rather reducible to science. So I am saying science is nature whereas you are saying that our experience can be reduced to science...
I can't explain this ^^ but just trying to say that for me science IS nature...
Whereas I think you are saying that our experience which we think of as 'nature' is reducible to rupa (form) such as light and receptors and so forth.
i understand your generalization about sugar,,and interestingly not every body tastes "sweet" http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/smelltaste/pages/taste.aspx,,, its not "evident" to them,is it their "nature"?
I got a computer error on your link.
if they do not taste sweet that is evident. there many be a rupa reason too. they may have different physiology and ultimately different genes.
but the actual experience is what would be called 'sweet'. when I talk about 'sweet' I am talking about a mental experience. at the same time I don't doubt that there is a body and molecules and genes and so forth.
one is not saying"redness is not nature" but perhaps red is an illusion or an abstraction,as an example of perceived reality
perhaps the map is not the territory ?
redness is redness. call it an illusion. sounds odd to me that a normal appearance of an apple might be called a hallucination. I am schizoaffective and I see (edit: hear) real hallucinations.
for me red is an experience. but there is also rupa going on such as molecules and physiology and so forth. for me to call it a hallucination is odd particularly as I have actual hallucinations.
I would say that 'illusion' is a word used to point to a meaning. Like a rainbow can be an anology of something that is not really there but that is apparent. But it is an analogy. A pile of rocks is not a rainbow but it is like a rainbow as words used to point out a meaning.
yes I like the map is not the territory. I would say words are used as pointers.
yes what is truth prior to language
I don't know! that's an interesting question.
True story. I have a severe red-green color blindness. Objects people point out as red or green are the same exact color to me and you cannot convince me that those circles with colored dots show any numbers in them at all. Color is subjective reality.
But I can play around in the college physics lab and split white light into various wavelengths and see there are shorter and longer wavelengths and map the visible spectrum. The light labeled "red" can be shown to be a different wavelength of the light labeled "green" even if my eyes can't see the difference. If we define different wavelengths as color, then red and green have objective reality and exist no matter what I see.
So "apple is red" is both true and false. Apple is apple, take a bite.
“When we recognize that the seemingly object nature of reality is nothing different than the subject nature of mind, which is rigpa, it is called enlightenment.”–Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche,
"If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him ???"
As soon as "I" think "I" know, then "I" have killed the Buddha...
Human eyes evolved physiologically to detect light in a particular part of the EM spectrum, a set of wavelengths we call "visible light". We label the perception of a particular wavelength "red", and this perception is pretty consistent. I'm not sure how this relates to the OP though.
^^^ Please don't break the moon. I likes it!
Or where it went for that matter.
Ah! Someone went off on a tangerine again.
~the Tao Te Ching
Kill the Buddha? I though Buddhists were a non violent folk?
@shep83, I would point you towards the second pinned thread in the discussions column....
Thanks.