Skeptical Buddhism

Over on the Discord channel we were just talking yesterday about how hard it is to simply muster the effort to be just a practicing Buddhist; monastic life is at least that hard though I imagine it can help to have a supportive community around you. So: different hurdles, same path.

I believe that whether you succeed so well you manage it for a lifetime, or do it just as long as you can, the journey will enrich your life and enhance the lives of those you meet along the way. It's a challenging path.

Very clear and it is incredible that people continue to support an administration that so obvious lies. It is a clear indicator that they see their supporters as either stupid or as immoral as they are.

Not wanting to lose the thread of this conversation, picked up when I'd inadvertently put the wrong setting on one of my long threads.

It is simply unbelievable that there are so many who can't see how wrong that death, the action taken was.

I don't think I'd introduce it as "a short exercise" though, since both listening to the instructions and taking the time to work on visualizations or other variations on experiencing the connections would take time, and I assume the "x2" means "do this twice" for each variation.

Read through, not listened to.

Nice variation on the theme of Metta. I'm not someone much triggered by past memories or the like so I'm not helpful in judging how free of triggering it is, but I appreciate the thoroughness of the guidance on building connection and recognizing emotion.

26/ More to say on the subject but I'm off to have an early Thanksgiving Dinner with family. Next week we'll talk about the last link, aging-and-death. Hope your holiday brings you peace and joy.

25/ So he can't say, "Well, there is a self, it's just that it's not separate, not eternal, not changeless. It's contingent, impermanent, and always changing." So he just doesn't give it a name. But I do: I say it is *anattā* -- it is what is *not* the separate, eternal, changeless self.

24/ We hear echoes of this problem of language in his attempts to straighten out confused listeners who can't quite understand him saying that what they believe is *ātman* is not. "He's destroying the *ātman*!" they say.

23/ I suspect the reason he didn't give our ever-changing selves a name is because, in his culture, anything with a name had an eternal existence, its own slice of Brahman within it.

22/ In the suttas the Buddha never uses the word *anattā* to express what we mistake for a lasting (for some, "eternal") self. It's always used to point out what isn't *ātman*.

21/ All the words used to express "beings" being born are suggestive of what we mistake for *ātman* coming into existence again and again and again, endlessly, with no recognizable beginning, and only one possible ending, which is the hoped-for result of following the eightfold path.

20/ As I said in #16 above, I agree the Buddha's description of birth (*jāti*) here is meant to read as literal because it's being clear in expressing that top-level pattern, but by this point in the lesson it's hoped we understand that's metaphorical.

19/ But it isn't that world, as the next link will tell us (next thread).

18/ At the level of his meaning, though, DA discusses the origin of what we mistake for *ātman*, & the rituals we perform to create and modify that not-self (*anattā*), & in this final "Results" section, that not-self arising in a world that looks to it like the world it has believed in all along.

17/ At that level he's saying, "What I am talking about is *like* this; but it's not exactly that." That's the way the teachers before him taught; the method the Vedas used to introduce new ideas.

16/ I read it as saying exactly that, but not only that. It *is* talking about literal rebirth after death because at the top level of the Buddha's lesson of DA, he has three sections: first about the origin of the *ātman*, then the middle about rituals modifying it, then what happens after death.

15/ Not that any of that in any way denies a traditional interpretation of what the Buddha is saying in DA. If he was describing literal rebirth, he would (I think we'd all agree) be describing a self that is reborn that is transient, changeable, not eternal.

14/ The compound for "manifestation" -- *pātubhāvo* -- shares its base word *bhāvo* with becoming's *bhava* since both have the Vedic root *bhu*. There's a repeated theme of bringing up what's transient.

13/ Other notable words he chose include the "manifestation of the aggregates" which the Buddha frequently tells us are "not self" though they're mistaken for the *ātman*. Are we to realize he is talking about what is "not self" arising?

12/ opens the possibility of what we can see -- if we are mindfully looking -- a life of change.

11/ So "being" is not just a good, but a great translation, since it captures the way *jāti* arises from *bhava*'s "becoming" as well as, perhaps, conveying what the Buddha is subtly saying: that the being that arises is not existing in the sense of "fixed, permanent, changeless" but instead

10/ We can see that *satta*'s second definition is that it's a "a living being, creature, a sentient & rational being, a person" and that it's drawn from the Vedic term *satva*. Pali-wise, its root is in *sant* which derives from *atthi* which means "being, existing".

Images from the Digital Pali Reader showing the "birth" portion of SN 12.2 in Pali with translations of chosen Pali words below.

9/ For example, *sattānaṃ* and *sattanikāye* where the *satta* (purple) is a word for a living being, and *nikāye* (light purple) is compounded with it, adding the sense of a "collection, class, or group" of such beings. Some images from the Digital Pali Reader, below, show translations.

quote from MN 9 translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi At the top, the Pali language that was translated. Below, Bodhi's translation. The words being translated each have their own background color, which is matched to those words' translations. “And what, bhikkhus, is birth? The birth of various beings into the various orders of beings, being born, descent [into the womb], production, the manifestation of the aggregates, the obtaining of the sense bases. This is called birth."

8/ Below is an image of how I go about looking at other authors' translations. In this case it's Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of Sariputta's explanation of birth in MN 9, very similar to the Buddha's, above.

7/ But some of the word-choices the Buddha made are still interesting.

6/ Nothing in it even limits the discussion to humans or even mammals, despite Bodhi's insertion of one possible connotation of the word meaning "descent" to include its occasional association with conception in a womb, though I note "descent into the womb" is not birth, but conception.

5/ Seen standing alone like that and so, taken literally, yes, it's about birth.

4/ Unlike the descriptions found in the "Rituals" section, which focus on examples of what he is specifically pointing out (e.g. *taṇhā*'s craving as problematic views about who we are and what we should believe in) here he is clearly using then-common understandings of what birth is about.