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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
The Buddha did not teach in a vacuum. His teachings were directed to those who shared the social world in which he lived.
John Peacock, a British scholar who studies and translates in more than a dozen languages and is familiar with the philosophical environment of the Buddha’s day, maintains that by framing the Buddha’s teachings in their original context, it is possible to RECOVER the original meaning of teachings that have been ignored and lost by later Buddhist schools -- including the Theravada.
Thera + vada = "Elders' Teaching" or "The Teaching of the Elders." Who are these "elders"? They are the immediate enlightened monastic disciples of the Buddha, the monks (theras) and nuns (theris) of ancient India.
These talks examine many of the ways in which Buddhist practice was radically different from the Brahminical and Upanishadic thinking of the time and, indeed, how it differs in substantive ways from much present-day understanding of the Dharma.
This exploration details the Buddha’s shift away from metaphysical thinking to a focus on internal experience and ethical activity. In the process there will be consideration of how the Buddha’s earliest teachings diverge from much of the Western philosophical tradition and often from what has become the traditional view of the Dharma today as well.
Nitin Kumar, ExoticIndiaArt.com; edited and expanded by Wisdom Quarterly
Amitabha (Tibetan, Opame), the gentle, lovable "Buddha"
AMITABHA is undoubtedly the most well known and popular of the Five Meditating "Buddhas." He is red in color, which in Tibetan Buddhism is the color of love, compassion, and emotional energy.
His direction is the west, where the sun sets. Indeed, he is envisioned as the red setting sun. Sunset is when the sun is gentle; we can look directly into its awesome power without being harmed. As it disappears into the west, the sun is like a proud and fierce king, who at the end of a hard day of rigid protocol turns gentle and jovial and allows anyone to approach him.
Amitabha is thus the supreme power and energy of nature on this earthly plain, accessible to all. It is no wonder this aspect of the Buddha is the most popular of the Five Meditating Buddhas.
His unique emblem is the lotus, the attributes of which he is associated: gentleness, openness, and purity.
Amitabha’s mount (vimana, platform, spaceship) is the peacock, which is capable of swallowing poisonous snakes (nagas) without coming to any harm.
[This ability is reminiscent of a shaman healing technique practiced by the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon, as mentioned by The Sound of Rushing Water.]
In fact, the peacock is believed to derive its rich plumage from the poison of the serpents on which it feeds. The symbolism of being open even to poison -- transmuting it into beauty -- gives a sense of the purifying and transforming power of Amitabha. For ordinary uninstructed worldlings, it signifies that even our darkest and most venomous aspects can be transformed by meditating on his image
Amitabha’s image has both a simplicity and archetypal quality to it. His demeanor is totally relaxed and his hands are in the dhyana mudra, the gesture of absorption (jhana, dhyana, zen) meditation.
According to tradition, this mudra derives from the one assumed by the historical Buddha Shakyamuni when he was meditating under the Bodhi tree in pursuit of enlightenment.
In conformity with his hand pose, the essential message of Amitabha is that of meditation. His association with the setting sun suggests withdrawal of external sense perceptions inwards, into higher states of meditative absorption. Elevating ourselves to such a spiritual level has the ultimate objective of uniting us with that ineffable transcendental universal consciousness, which although intangible pervades all tangible reality.
Amitabha provides the archetype of infinite wisdom that helps us transmute the negative trait of obsessive attachment into a discerning awareness that we are all made up of the same primitive substratum.
By contemplating in this way, one is able to realize that the objective we crave is not separate from us but already as much a part of "self" as one is of it.
Many of these ideas display very Hindu ideas about reality -- mounts, mudras, meditations, devotion (bhakti), transcendental consciousness, and so on. They reveal the inordinate influence Brahmin priests and Brahmanism had on the development of the later Mahayana Buddhist school, which became established in the north (Ladakh, Tibet, Bhutan) and the Far East (Korea, China, Japan).
Non-duality (Sanskrit, advaita) is oneness, not-two-ism, and the whole is often called "God." This realization, while satisfying and fulsome, is NOT enlightenment, is not nirvana, is not the end of all suffering.
There is an object of perception. We see (or otherwise perceive) it. Therefore, we conclude, there must be a perceiver distinct from the perception.
Although it seems this way, it is an illusion. There is. That much can be said. But what is there? Perception goes on. But who is there?
The Buddha laid out a never-before-heard Middle Path that avoids two extremes in views -- one that things are eternal vs. another that asserts that things are annihilated. But how could it be that it is neither one way nor the other?
To the wise the Buddha explained what really happens, contrary to appearances. "Things" (conditional phenomena, i.e., things that depend on component parts for their existence) do not really arise. Illusion arises. Never having been they certainly cannot be annihilated.
While this may be true for "things" throughout the universe, there are five that arise much closer to home: groups known as form, feeling, perceptions, formations, and consciousness.
These things are clung to as self, as the property of a self, as the manifestations of self. When the Buddha mindbogglingly proclaimed that, ultimately speaking, there is no-self (an-atta), he was not at all saying there is nothing.
Things are "empty" (shunyata), that is, devoid of self-existence, identity, continuity. They are impersonal. When we let go, we reduce suffering (the anguish associated with the conjoining of impermanence and clinging).
We (as conglomerates sustained by nourishment, composite entities with five very general components, processes), conventionally speaking, may refer to the aggregates of clinging as ourselves, knowing full well that they do not constitute any kind of self.
This is possible to achieve through deep learning, but it is only really useful when understood through insight (vipassana) on foundations of virtue and concentration (samadhi). Samadhi (the jhanas) is not enough.
What is Duality?
Perceiver vs. perceived, self vs. external phenomena -- this is the fundamental duality. In Vedic Hindu terms, it is the separation of us and the ALL (Brahman, GOD, the ultimate reality). That separation is painful, a severe form of alienation. The solution, then, is given by seers and pundits: It is a blissful reunion (yoga), binding with the supreme (Brahma). It is perceiving the inter-connectedness of ALL in Mahayana Buddhist terms.
But Mahayana was a movement much influenced by Brahmins in India. It relies on the assumptions of a self (atman, atta, soul, self, ego).
This union, this yoga or "yoking" of little-self with the Grand-Self (God or the entire cosmos as an expression of Brahman, the Godhead or ultimate reality behind Maya, the illusion). It runs contrary to the historical Buddha's teachings but is very much in line with the previous Brahminical views espoused in the Vedas and promoted by priests all the way down to Adi Shankara, who formalized "Hinduism" out of the disparate teachings of India based on the Vedas (Knowledge Books, sacred Indian texts).
Non-Duality Panel, Part 1
If one experiences our inter-connectedness, that will be wonderful and is likely to inspire compassion and a liberating feeling of unselfishness. But the way to liberation the Buddha was teaching was selflessness, the realization that nothing can be identified as a self (not even consciousness, which is an ever-changing and insubstantial process rather than any kind of substance).
The moral to the story is that not all spiritual experiences, of which there are many, are fundamental to awakening/enlightenment (bodhi), and liberation (moksha) from rebirth-and-suffering (samsara). What the Buddha designated as nirvana (the unconditioned element as distinct from all conditional phenomena) is very specific; many other traditions simply call their highest experience "nirvana" as if it were referring to the same accomplishment.
