Sam said...

"What interests me nowadays is the complete and total termination of the taints, clinging, karmic propensities, the complete and total termination of suffering."

I totally agree. I hope to see your future posts regarding this and how the experiences and realizations so far have been or will be useful for this.

(Excerpt)

Nagarjuna's Critique of the Dharma

In chapter XXIV of the Karikas, NAgarjuna continues his attack on the Abhidharma philosophers by analyzing the Four Noble Truths, and argues that-like causality, impermanence, suffering, and bondage-they, too, are "empty." The problem of this chapter needs to be seen against the background of the preceding section. If the Abhidharma views of causality are "empty," as Nagarjuna says they are, and if causality is a central feature of Buddhist praxis, then Nagarjuna seems to undermine everything that is vital to Buddhism. He begins chapter XXIV by expressing the Abhidharma position in the following way:

If all of this is empty,
Neither arising nor ceasing,
Then for you, it follows that
The Four Noble Truths do ont exist.

If the Four Noble Truths do not exist,
Then knowledge, abandonment,
Meditation and manifestation
Will be completely impossible.

p.571

If these things do not exist,
The four fruits will not arise.
Without the four fruits, there will be no attainers of the fruits.
Nor will there be the faithful.

If so, the spiritual community will not exist.
Nor will the eight kinds of person.
If the Four Noble Truths do not exists,
There will be no true Dharma.

If there is no doctrine and spiritual community,
How can there be a Buddha?
If emptiness is conceived in this way,
The three jewels are contradicted.
(Garfield 1995, p.67)

In the passages above, the Abhidharma opponent is saying that if Nagarjuna is right about "emptiness," then the very practices that make Buddhism soteriologically efficacious will be destroyed. That is, if it is true that the Four Noble Truths are "empty," then there is no such thing as the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, no such thing as impermanence, "non-self," and nirvana, and the practices that supposedly lead to liberation will be destroyed. Nagarjuna responds to the opponent by saying that he has misunderstood "emptiness":

We say that this understanding of yours
Of emptiness and purpose of emptiness
And of the significance of emptiness is incorrect.
As a consequence you are harmed by it.
(Garfield 1995, p.68)

Because the opponent has taken "emptiness" to signify the nonexistence of the Four Noble Truths, he is "harmed by it"-in other words, he sees "emptiness" as destructive. But his reason for thinking of "emptiness" in this way is that he thinks that a "correct" meditation on causality, the aggregates, and the Four Noble Truths is necessary for liberation.

Nagarjuna responds to this assumption by reversing the tables and saying, in effect, that it is not "emptiness" that destroys practice, but the very idea that such things as causality, the aggregates, and the Four Noble Truths are "inherent," essential, or necessary:

If you perceive the existence of all things
In terms of svabhava,
Then this perception of all things
Will be without the perception of causes and conditions.

Effects and causes
And agent and action
And conditions and arising and ceasing
And effects will be rendered impossible.
(Garfield 1995, p.69)

p.572

Nagarjuna goes on to say that the reason essences militate against causal conditions, arising, ceasing, agency, and so forth is that the idea of essence entails independence, and if things are by nature independent then it is impossible for them to interact causally. If this is true then there is no "dependent arising," and without "dependent arising" it is impossible to make sense of the ability to cultivate a virtuous life. In other words, without the process of change the whole idea of cultivating the "fruits" of a Buddhist life is rendered nonsensical. Nagarjuna responds by saying that Buddhist praxis must be "empty" if we are to make any sense of the Four Noble Truths:

If dependent arising is denied,
Emptiness itself is rejected.
This would contradict
All of the worldly conventions.

If emptiness is rejected,
No action will be appropriate.
There would be action which did not begin,
And there would be agent without action.

If there is svabhava, the whole world
Will be unarising, unceasing,
And static. The entire phenomenal world
Would be immutable.

If it (the world) were not empty,
Then action would be without profit.
The act of ending suffering and
Abandoning misery and defilement would not exist.
(Garfield 1995, p.72)

Nagarjuna has thus shifted the debate. Whereas the Abhidharma thinker begins with the assumption that a "correct" meditation on the Dharma is a necessary prerequisite for liberation, Nagarjuna undercuts this by saying that if one takes the Dharma as essential, that is, as necessary, then the very essence of Buddhism is undermined. Like the first chapter on causation, Nagarjuna is reminding the Abhidharma philosophers here about nonattachment. The Four Noble Truths are supposed to be medicinal "rafts" that help specific sentient beings overcome their attachments, but if one becomes attached to the practices of nonattachment then one has missed the entire point of Buddhism. Thus, Nagarjuna says that the Dharma-which includes causation, impermanence, suffering, bondage, and liberation-is "empty."

Buddha:


25 (5) The Destruction of the Taints

“Bhikkhus, I say that the destruction of the taints is for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and does not see. For one who knows what, for one who sees what, does the destruction of the taints come about? The destruction of the taints comes about for one who knows and sees: ‘This is suffering’; for one who knows and sees: ‘This is the origin of suffering’; for one who knows and sees: ‘This is the cessation of suffering’; for one who knows and sees: ‘This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’ It is for one who knows thus, for one who sees thus, that the destruction of the taints comes about.
“Therefore, bhikkhus, an exertion should be made to understand: ‘This is suffering.’… An exertion should be made to understand: ‘This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’”

- http://www.wisdompubs.org/book/connected-discourses-buddha/selections/connected-discourses-part-v-kotigama

....

"The Noble Truth of Suffering (dukkha), monks, is this: Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering, not to receive what one desires is suffering — in brief the five aggregates subject to grasping are suffering.

"The Noble Truth of the Origin (cause) of Suffering is this: It is this craving (thirst) which produces re-becoming (rebirth) accompanied by passionate greed, and finding fresh delight now here, and now there, namely craving for sense pleasure, craving for existence and craving for non-existence (self-annihilation).

"The Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering is this: It is the complete cessation of that very craving, giving it up, relinquishing it, liberating oneself from it, and detaching oneself from it.

"The Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering is this: It is the Noble Eightfold Path, and nothing else, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.[2]

- Partial excerpt from http://www.accesstoinsight.org/.../sn56/sn56.011.piya.html

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  Kyle Dixon Nenad, If you insist that your point of view is somehow the correct treatment of these issues, then yes it may certainly appear as if "this group seems to be too much focused on that type of confusion". However, this group also does not insist that the so-called individual is merely a thought, but rather explores the fact that the illusion of an individual reference point depends on multiple factors.
  
  So while HoM is very happy with simply denying thought, and then identifying with 'this that is', touting that there cannot be multiple factors because "there is only one"... emptiness traditions do not do this. For traditions associated with emptiness inquiry, the illusion of an individual is also created by imputation, but other factors such as habitual patterns of grasping which create the appearance of identification go into the illusion as well.
  
  HoM may state that a belief cannot be held, nor let go of, on the grounds that the individual who would perform such actions is an abstraction which is suggested by thought. However, in the opinion of emptiness traditions; while the alleged identity may be partly a byproduct of imputation, that imputation also becomes interwoven into the fabric of behavior that the illusory entity appears to involve itself with. So in addition to that imputation, there is other conditioning. And the actions predicated upon that conditioning occur habitually.
  
  I bring this up because the very act of 'holding' or grasping is another factor which reifies a subject relating to objects. For the very act of 'holding' presupposes something to be held and a subject to hold it, and that activity in and of itself implies these two. The action or activity literally creates the illusion of a subject-object dichotomy, and if that illusion is not seen for what it is, then the entire process runs away with itself, becoming an intricate and delusional structure of habitual tendencies which are conventionally referred to as a 'self'. Again, there is no self contained therein, within, or apart from that activity, but the delusion surrounding that activity cannot see that in the absence of insight which reveals it to be so.
  
  For example, if we were to say there is only unpleasant emotions and no entity which is feeling those emotions; emptiness would argue that those emotions are still arising due to either accepting or rejecting. The very act of accepting and/or rejecting presupposes something to be accepted or rejected, and the very act itself (along with the presupposition the action is based upon) is precisely what the entity is. The entity cannot be found apart from that action, and ultimately the so-called entity cannot be found within that action either, but under the sway of delusion this is not apparent. That is what the notion of karma truly is: 'action', but it is delusional action which is predicated upon the misunderstanding that the apparent dependencies and relationships between subjects and objects, or objects and objects etc., is valid. So emptiness seeks to penetrate these subtle assumptions, presuppositions, conditioning behaviors and so on by revealing the unreality of the factors they are based upon. It is a very thorough and comprehensive process, which is also very liberating. If done skillfully it utterly exhausts these subtle tendencies and neuroses, and with the pacification of those tendencies, the illusion of the entity which can exist or not exist is also pacified.
  
  HoM of course scoffs at this because in your view you merely negate the thought of an 'I', or the thought of a 'me', thoughts of 'they', 'he', 'she', etc., on the presupposition that what you really are is the faculty of knowing which is inseparable from what is known. So your 'ultimate' (knowing-known) is readily available and quite easy to intuit by dispensing with what you refer to as 'thought-stories' and simply recognizing the inseparability of the knower and known. And that is all well and good, but a completely different view.
  
  So when you make a statement such as 'this group is focused too much on that type of confusion', it is because in your opinion, and in the opinion of HoM, who carry a certain view, such things are not required. And this is due to the nature of the view you seek to engender, which is utterly different from the view of emptiness.
  
  Now, does emptiness ultimately contend that all of the aforementioned delusional actions, dependencies, illusory entities and so on are valid and true? Not at all. But they appear to be for those who are caught up in the throes of that ignorance. In response to that HoM would merely say, "well there is no one to be caught up in anything!" And that is partly true, but not in the sense that HoM means, where thought is merely being objectified by thought. That type of view does not cut through the illusion of entityhood. That is why you see people in HoM who merely state that negative emotions and expressions of that nature simply appear 'to no one', which honestly is just a subtle form of depersonalization it is little more than a form of suppression and repression, where you identify with the knowing and attempt to intuit that "everything is me", "I'm all of this, even the so-called negative stuff which really isn't negative because it's all me and I am it, yet at the same time there is no me".... that type of view is all well and good but it is not an acceptable resolution to the deeply engrained habitual patterns which give rise to the illusion of an individual. The individual still persists in that type of view, it is only transferred onto a new form of itself, in most cases far more fortified than the previous individual.

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  Kyle Dixon In addition to 'action' which is predicated upon the misunderstanding that the apparent dependencies and relationships between subjects and objects, or objects and objects etc., are valid; another aspect of the issue is that those dependencies and relationships themselves, directly arise from that action. Though only apparently. The grasping [action predicated upon delusion] presupposes the grasped [object], however the very act of grasping directly manifests the grasped through implication, the very arising of the grasped [object] implies, and therefore appears to give rise to the grasper [subject] and so on. Each implied factor becomes the cause for (and effect of) each corresponding factor, and the illusory web of factors build exponentially as a result.
  
  At no time within this apparent process do any of these attributes (subjects, objects and so on) actually inherently arise, but they appear to. And becoming taken in by that process, conditioned by it and investing in it, is precisely the occurrences which solidify our experiences as independent and autonomous beings which exist in an environment separate from us, living lives extended in time which will eventually end, and so on.
  
  As familiarization with these afflictive processes build up and solidify, they become more deeply engrained and at a certain point, the myriad pieces of our experiences (which are implied by these processes) are then mistaken to be inherent aspects of an inherent experience. We become conditioned, and we only ever know and relate to the imaginary figments of these processes, so attachment to them arises, aversion to other aspects arise, and as a result of that, the implied aspects of experience are solidified even further. Eventually we are here, as we are, fully entrenched in this intricate and deceitful web.

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