Awakening to Reality: Christianity

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If they all were under the same post criticizing ATR, then probably that post alone is the issue. Nobody but Soh was allowed to post there by the filter. BTW I also tried to criticize carbon dating lol. It's a very naive idea.

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Mr. PP see the following comment from krodha regarding the carbon dating of Mahayana sutras: https://www.reddit.com/.../comments/1ckgcux/comment/l2xh5ot/

Carbon dating isn't a guarantee that the oral traditions originated at similar times, but then again, it also doesn't guarantee that the oral tradition the Pali suttas were based on came before Mahayana. So it is pointless to discuss. Carbon dating is the best evidence we have.

Further, in Mahayana the historical Buddha is not the only Buddha, so it doesn't actually matter. What's important is that a text corresponds to the views of Buddhadharma.

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Mr. MK

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Chris Jones Agreed that carbon dating is pointless, but a rough chronology can be worked out from the content. The suttas that are likely memorized by Ananda (in the four major Nikayas, the Udana and the Itivuttaka) have an authentic character to them as based on actual events. None of the Mahayana sutras, whatever their merits, have that quality.

Yeah, I don't think the dating is disputed much, and carbon dating was never really part of it.

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Kyle's arguments about carbon dating are very weak. He basically refuses to use any tools of early buddhist studies, besides the one he likes, carbon dating. He says all the techniques are bad, but his technique is the best we have. This is just cherry picking the evidence. It's easy to win an argument when you take off the table all methods that disagree with you by dismissing them as speculative nonsense. Relying on carbon dating actually is speculative nonsense. You simply can't judge the age of content transmitted orally (pali canon) by the time it was written down.

The reality is that carbon dating is less reliable than the other methods used in early buddhist studies which focus on analysis of content, comparison between agamas and sutta, analysis of the language, analysis of metre, analysis of structure of the texts etc etc.

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What are these indisputable, non-speculative methods that he dismisses?

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Chris Jones Those aren't my words at all.

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Mr MK I didn’t mean that carbon dating was pointless, what I meant was that we simply don’t have any definitive evidence about when the oral traditions began, the only thing we have to go on is what’s been written down and when. Carbon dating is one way of determining that.

So your argument boils down to the idea that the suttas have an “authentic character” to them, which is entirely subjective. Hopefully you are aware that we can’t definitively determine the authenticity of a text from its content. What makes the content of the Pali suttas any more “authentic” than the content of the Mahayana sutras? The fact that it describes events relating to Gautama Buddha’s life? They just have a different presentation, context, and purpose.

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Anyways, to be clear all the method of analysis in early buddhism are not absolutely certain mathematical proofs. They all involve some degree of uncertainty. This doesn't mean that they are bullshit. For instance, the foundations of science and engineering often depend on probabilistic reasoning. These are not bullshit either.

There is a difference between a valid argument which has some uncertainty about it and a very poor argument which has no grounded evidence for it. In fields like early buddhist studies most arguments have some degree of uncertainty.This doesn't mean 'anything goes', and it certainly doesn't mean carbon dating can be applied to an oral tradition to determine it's age.

Some arguments in early buddhism are bullshit though, not denying that. But more grounded approaches exist. As for what they are I already listed 4 examples of different kinds of approaches. I don't really feel like going into detail here about them, but for one example-we can analyze the metres deployed in a text to date them since some forms of poetic metre simply don't exist until after a certain date. Another more welll-known example-we can compare the content of different schools an see what is the same and what is different. What is the same is more likely to be earlier and presectarian. We can also compare content-if a doctrine in one text is described briefly but in another we get a long elaboration then it's more likely the elaboration comes later as a commentary or an expansion of the shorter text.

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A lot more than you seem to think can be determined from text, there's a lot that goes into that...

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Mr. PP feel free to correct it as you see fit, I believe your words were “take off the table all methods that disagree with you by dismissing them as speculative nonsense”, so it seemed like you were implying there were other methods, which are not speculative, that you had in mind? Otherwise I suppose we would be in agreement that carbon dating is just as effective as any other method.

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Mr. AS I didn’t say we can’t determine anything from text, I said that we can’t definitively determine the authenticity of the Pali (or Mahayana sutras) from their content alone. Otherwise, this debate would have been over a long time ago.

I agree, but we can determine there's like a thousand year difference between the bulk of the two, a century give or take.

Mr. MK

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Chris Jones Agreed that my approach is "subjective." It is based on meeting living enlightened ones, and reading the lives of far more others. They all speak in a certain way, have teachings in common, and above all interact with their interlocuters in a certain way. In addition there is contextual detail, such as descriptions of places, persons and events. Even the fact that the Buddha coughs politely before entering a bikkhus hut. The Pali suttas I list all ring true on those counts.

In contrast the Mahayana sutras are lacking in contextual detail, have teachings that contradict what is in the Pali suttas, are heavily mythologised and full of archetypal imagary entirely lacking in the Pali serious suttas.

So agreed, all of this is "subjective". So let us be content to identify our thinking as "Pali" on the one hand and "Mahayana" on the other, as we engage in dharma talk. We will still gain by it.

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Mr. PP I think you are putting words in my mouth because I didn’t call these methods bullshit, nor did I say that carbon dating can be used to determine the age of an oral tradition. They just have to be taken in context and their respective purposes understood.

Even if we know one text is a commentary of another, we can’t say that the “original” text comes from the Buddha in the first place. It could be one witness of an event describing it in detail, and another witness of the same event describing it briefly. We still can’t determine from this *when* the original text was written, nor the commentary, and this says even less about the oral tradition. The text and it’s commentary could have been written at the same time, for all we know. Unless of course we use carbon dating.

Also hopefully you can see the problem with “grouping” texts from different schools based on their content and then using this to make assumptions on the age or authenticity of said schools. If we have two groups of similar texts, they could just be from different authors (disciples of the Buddha, for example) from around the same time who have their own unique writing styles. They could be similar for all kinds of reasons. This is by no means proof of authenticity or age.

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I think we should be speaking of "evidence" rather than "proof".

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Chris Jones I wasn't implying you said anything was BS, but Kyle does seem to dismiss these things. Anyways, at the end of the day I really don't care that much about this topic. If people want to believe prajnaparamitra is the same age as the suttas, fine. That's definitely an extreme minority view among academics afaik, but my concern really is practice and liberation.

I only responded to Kyle's stuff at all out of irritation that such unfair reasoning was being repeated again and again. This argument from carbon dating is being used to combat 'pali canon fundamentalism'. I can be on board with criticizing that at least, but I would prefer better arguments were used.

So that's all from me.

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Mr. AS Yeap.

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Mr. MK I am of course happy to make the distinction between Pali/Theravada and Mahayana views, and do.

Unrelated, but this group primarily consists of Mahayana and Vajrayana practitioners, FWIW. You may have met people you believed were “enlightene…

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Mr. PP If you mean the written sutras and not the oral tradition, there’s not much debate about when they were written down. The margin of error for radiocarbon dating is about 2-5%. That’s what I was trying to point out. But I don’t really need to labour the point further.

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Chris Jones No one disagrees about the written date. Carbon dating does work to tell you that much. Hopefully it was clear that we were talking about the antiquity of the content. But with that clarification down, I would like to be done with this conversation. (Feel free to reply, but that's really all from me)

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I personally believe most Mahayana sutras are visionary revelations, in the same way Chogyal Namkhai Norbu and other tertons received many visionary revelations perhaps from pure realms. The way they are received are not hazy like a dream, and the visions of those masters/Buddhas miraculously pointed out information not previously known that they later verified to be factually true.

So personally I have no problem if it turns out that Prajnaparamita sutras did not come from historical Buddha. I find them to be completely profound and worthy of studying and a source of great insight.

Acarya Malcolm said in 2017,

"I once speculated that Mahāyāna Sūtras were visionary revelations, but not records of actual historical events.

However, clinging to the events described in the Lotus Sūtra, or any other Mahāyāna Sūtra, opens up an uncomfortable can of worms for those who literally believe in the text of the sūtra in question.

For example, have you ever seen Vulture's Peak where the Buddha is said to have taught this sūtra?

Image

How are 12,000 arhat bhikṣus supposed to fit there? Let alone, 2,000 extra, 6,000 nuns, and 80,000 bodhisattvas? Were they all levitating in space around the mountain?"

Acarya Malcolm said in 2021,

"So, do you literally believe the events of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra happened? Do you believe the Buddha flew through the air to Śṛī Lanka to have a buddy to buddy conversation with rakṣasa king, Ravana, as the Lankāvatāra portrays? Do you literally believe thousands of monks and bodhisattvas can fit on Rajagriha?

More to the point, does it actually matter if these things happened in history, or is the content and message of these texts more important?

If you decided that these events did not happen in history, that they were a kind of religious fictional narrative, would you lose confidence in Mahāyāna teachings? And if you did lose confidence in Mahāyāna teachings, wouldn't that mean the provenance of a teaching is more important to you than its doctrine?

When it comes to history, I read historians; when it comes to tenets, I read panditas; when it comes to the meaning of sūtras, I read the charioteers, Nāgārjuna, and the rest; when it comes to Vajrayāna, I read the mahāsiddhas, like Virupa, Indrabhuti, etc. I am perfectly comfortable adapting my perspective based on what is useful in that moment. Here, in the academic forum, what is useful is history and modern scholarship."

May be an image of temple and text that says '© www.40kmph.com www'

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That being said, I also like what Anzan Hoshin Roshi said about Prajnaparamita sutras:

Excerpt from https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/transparent

Returning to the text. Subhuti now says:

That thought is no thought, since in its essential original nature thought is transparently luminous.

The Roshi says:

That is the whole Teaching, right there in these opening passages. This is extraordinary. If the Buddha didn't Teach this, then he should have. If the Buddha didn't Teach this, then he wasn't a quarter of the Teacher that he should have been.

Perhaps the Prajnaparamita Teachings were Teachings that originally had been given by the Buddha in some context. This is certainly possible in that if we look at the fact that the sutras were fragments of discourses which were compiled together, mainly sets of stock phrases which were built together to form some kind of storyline and that many of these were not written down until many hundreds of years after the Buddha's death and that monks would wander from place to place and sometimes they would meet and they would share and compare little bits of Teachings that they had heard and in this way texts would form. Perhaps the Prajnaparamita Teachings do form part of the authentic body of the Buddha's words, but we really have no way of knowing what the Buddha actually taught.

The remarkable thing here is that if the Buddha did not Teach these, he should have; and that the people who did compile and present these Teachings did not just simply start their own School. They weren't particularly into any kind of trip. They weren't saying, "Well, look what I've realized and blah blah blah blah blah." They said, "Well here is a tradition which is working - the Dharma - but there are certain points at which people are getting stuck. We don't need to get stuck in that kind of way. We need to go past that." And so they realized that the Prajnaparamita Teachings are the most radical and direct Path and yet they are only really comprehensible in the context of the Gradual Path, only in the context of moment-to-moment mindfulness, paying attention to what is going on, being able to see the process of the five skandhas, so on and so forth. Only when one has encompassed all levels of Dharma is it really Dharma. The radical Path is not something which is completely split off from the rest of the Dharma. It is a way in which the rest of the Dharma can be approached right at the beginning of the Path, or it can be the fruit of the Path, or it can be what one is practicing. But it is not really separate from the Abhidharma Teachings or any of the other things that the Buddha taught. It is not so much a new Teaching as a new view, a new orientation. It is not a doctrine; it is not a Teaching. It is a practice and it is a view.

WWZC.ORG

Transparent | White Wind Zen Community

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On a side note and perhaps totally off topic, I personally believe that Gospel of Thomas is Jesus's authentic words. Even if they weren't officially sanctioned by the church as canonical. Even a mainstream Christian once admitted to me that due to the early nature of that gospel, it could very well have come from Jesus's mouth.

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Soh Wei Yu that was quite off topic indeed, but interesting! what do you think of Christianity in general? Do you think there is some truth to it?

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Chris Jones Gospel of Thomas imo points more towards I AM and no mind. There's a passage inside that sounded like Bahiya Sutta. Other gospels (the four canonized ones) also points towards I AM (before abraham was, I AM, and other passages) and impersonality. It's clear to me that Jesus was a mystic that was crucified (like many mystics of his days) for stating the truth he realized, also because of the political threat he became.*

I just told someone yesterday: I think theres a saying maybe by alan watts, something like in the west if you say you are god, you will be treated like madmen or likely in the olden days be executed.

In India if you say that, people will say oh congratulations, you found out.

Jesus was just born in the wrong place.

I quoted some passages from bible here: https://www.awakeningtoreality.com/.../all-religions-on...

AWAKENINGTOREALITY.COM

What All Religions Have in Common: Light

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*I also told someone yesterday: More like he (Jesus) was seen as a political threat at that time i think.

In india it was always a much more permissive and safe environment for various ascetics of different views to thrive. Less persecutions

Im glad that modern societies tend towards the indian pluralistic style

Chatgpt:

Jesus' persecution and the relative safety of ascetics in ancient India are influenced by very different historical, cultural, and political contexts.

1. Jesus' Persecution: Jesus lived in Roman-occupied Judea, a region marked by political tension and resistance against Roman authority. His teachings, which were seen as radical at the time, challenged the established religious and social order. This posed a threat not only to the Jewish religious leaders but also to the Roman rulers who feared any form of uprising or challenge to their authority. Jesus' claim to being the Son of God was viewed as blasphemy by Jewish authorities and as subversive by the Romans, leading to his crucifixion.

2. Safety of Ascetics in India: In contrast, ancient India was known for its philosophical diversity and spiritual tolerance. The region was home to a variety of religious and philosophical traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and others, each of which supported ascetic practices to varying degrees. Indian society was generally more accepting of spiritual experimentation and ascetic lifestyles. The rulers and the common people often respected ascetics and viewed them as harmless and sometimes even as beneficial for spiritual guidance or as intercessors with the divine.

The difference in these environments highlights the impact of the socio-political context on religious figures. In Rome, a monotheistic framework and an imperial system that did not tolerate opposition shaped Jesus' fate. In India, a pluralistic religious landscape allowed for a greater tolerance of diverse spiritual practices.

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Chris Jones Mainstream Christianity however is mostly about believing etc, few go into the contemplative/mystical side and could not see what Jesus was pointing to.

But the same goes for Hinduism, etc. How many Hindus are actually Advaita Vedantins? Maybe in the West you hear a lot about Advaita, but in India probably most are just devotional Hindus.

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Soh Wei Yu really cool and fascinating, thanks. Will check out the link

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