Buddhism and Mathematics

One of the many topics that was raised during the talk on the Thai translation of Matthieu Ricard’s and Trinh Xuan Thuan’s book concerned the relation between Buddhist thought and mathematics. There have of course been quite a lot of talks about how Buddhism and science are related, but not much at all on Buddhism and mathematics. So that was a welcome change. Unfortunately we did not spend much time on this fascinating topic.

It was credit to Ricard and Thuan that they spend one entire chapter on this topic. The idea is how mathematics is related to reality and what the Buddhists think of that. The eleventh chapter of the book is entitled “The Grammar of the Universe” or something like that. What is interesting is how mathematics is an accurate description of reality at all. Which comes first, mathematics or the world?

On the one hand, this is a very simple point. We all know that two plus two equals four. So you have two things, add another two, and count the result, which is of course four. But the premise of mathematics is that you cannot get mathematics (or logic for that matter) out of empirical observation. You just cannot form a general statement “2 + 2 = 4″ from just observing two things and another two things. The reason is that you have somehow to know before hand that two plus two equals four in order for you to be able to get the conclusion that these two things and these other two make four! This is Kant’s main argumentative strategy in his entire critical philosophy. And for Kant mathematics is a prime example of what he calls “synthetic a priori” judgments, e.g., judgments that are true by virtue of their correspondence with some outside measuring point but which is known entirely through thinking alone.

We are not actually discussing Kant here; the point is that if the truth of mathematics does not come from observation, then it must come from inside. Ricard and Thuan discussed that perhaps this situation implies that there is some universal and all powerful mind whose thinking made all mathematical statements true (all the true ones, of course). It is this big mind that guarantees that two plus two equals four, that the sum of the squares on the side of the two legs of a right angle triangle is equal to that on the hypotenuse, that the law of modus ponens (‘p’ and ‘if p then q’ always implies ‘q’), and so on.

So this big mind might refer to God. So here the discussion went on to see what the Buddhists think about this. I don’t quite remember what Ricard, the Buddhist representative in the book, made of this, so I am going to present my own thought. I also did this during the talk last Saturday, but time was so limited then.

I think the main difference between the theistic religions like Christianity and Islam and non-theistic one like Buddhism might not appear as large as one might think. Buddhism would have no problem recognizing the Big Mind alluded to above, so long as that refers, not to some external being, but in fact to our own minds. It is us who create mathematics and it is ultimately speaking our own minds, working together collectively, that create the world such that it is true of mathematics. In other words, we could also say that we human beings are gods unto ourselves. There is a Big Mind that creates reality corresponding to math, yes, but that Mind is not apart from us.

Whether this is shocking or not depends on your view on theism. If you believe that humans are apart from God, then you’d find this shocking. However, this is entirely correspondent with the Buddhist attitude that salvation is ultimately the person’s own responsibility and lies entirely within the person’s power to achieve. The Buddha is only a teacher. You don’t need to follow his teaching. The Buddha has no power to drag you to Liberation. No being does. You have to do it yourself.

Coming down from theological discussion and back down to earth, we see that the idea that it is human mind itself that creates mathematics to which reality belongs makes quite a lot of sense. We form mathematics and we perceive the world according to the same conceptual structure that formed the math in the first place, so no wonder the world corresponds to it. However, even thought mathematics looks very certain, it does not describe what reality is like ultimately speaking. This is because all mathematics depends on concepts and language (so is logic), and once you have concepts, you have to divide reality into separate chunks. So at best mathematics is a model or a map, and no map can become identical to the reality it is the map of. This refers to the doctrine of Emptiness or sunyata. We can say that math can always approach that, but never reach it, because if it does, then it would cease to be the math that it is.

Filed under: science , Buddhism, empitness, emptiness, fabrication, Kant, logic, mathematics, matter, mind, Nagarjuna, philosophy, religion, Sunyata

The Quantum and the Lotus

My next talk will be at Thammasat University this Saturday. It is on the new translation of the book The Quantum and the Lotus, which has just been completed by Suan Ngern Mee Ma Press. The book is an extended conversation between Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan. The former is a former molecular biologist who turned to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and the latter was born in a Buddhist culture and became a well known astrophysicist working in the US.

So we have a symmetrical contrast — a French scientist who became a monk and a Vietnamese who became a scientist. The symmetry would have been more perfect if Thuan had been a monk first and then disrobed. But that is not too necessary. The idea of the book is a dialog on various topics between Buddhism, represented by Ricard, and science, represented in Thuan. This in itself is a welcoming reversal to the perhaps stereotypical perception that science belongs to the West and Buddhism to the East.

The book started with a background of both Ricard and Thuan — how both became what they are right now, and it gave an account of the two’s long conversation together when they met in a conference, an event which led to the present book. The chapters deal with topics which are of interest to both Buddhists and the scientists, such as, the structure of matter, the beginning and the end of the universe, mind, consciousness, mathematics, whether real knowledge and truth can be obtained through either Buddhism or science, and so on.

The first chapter opened with a general account of the orientation of both Buddhism and science. What are the purposes or the objectives of both enterprises? Science, of course, aims at finding truth about the natural phenomena, theories that would explain how the phenomena came about and how they are to be understood. Buddhism, according to Ricard, aims at the same goal. Buddhism has an interest in knowing what the truth is like, because then the practitioner would gain an insight which will lead him or her to attain the Final Goal, that of liberation from all sufferings.

And here is the main difference between science and Buddhism lies. Science appears to want to know how things are just for the sake of it, or at least that is the version usually put to us by scientists, who claim that the purpose of basic, in contrast to applied, science, is just to know the truth without using the acquired knowledge for some other purposes. This account of the distinction between basic and applied science is very much contested, because even the so-called basic science is fraught with interests which are immediate and social, but that would take us further from the present point of this essay, so more on this later. The point here is that the version of the real distinction between basic and applied science here appears to contrast with Buddhism. For Buddhism it is not enough just to learn how things are just for the sake of it. Buddhists would say that that is an example of lobha, or desire, in this case desire for more and more knowledge. If this is so, then the desire for more knowledge would lead us further away from the Final Goal. So if science is viewed in this way, then the objectives of both seem to lead each in opposite directions.

The Thai version

That does not seem to be what Ricard has in mind in his dialog with his physicist counterpart. According to Ricard, Buddhism has an interest in finding truth about the natural phenomena, and he apparently believes that only through getting at this truth is the Goal possible. However, if such is really the case, then it becomes difficult to understand how the Goal has actually been achieved by countless practitioners of Buddhism throughout the ages. This is because even now such truth about the natural phenomena has not been fully achieved. Scientists are still debating among themselves and are frankly acknowledging that there is a lot that we do not yet know about our natural world. What, for example, is Dark Matter or Dark Energy? Right now there is no satisfactory account. Are there really parallel universes or ‘multiverses’ where our own is just one among countlessly many?

According to Ricard, one would have to learn about how things really are before one has a chance to gain Realization. After quoting the Buddha in one of the sutras when he told his students that his teachings were only a handful when compared to the whole of knowable things, which were as many as all the leaves in the forest, Ricard says:

But experience shows that it is necessary to understand correctly the nature of the exterior world and of the ego, or what we term ‘reality,’ if we want to eliminate ignorance. That is why the Buddha made this the central theme of his teaching. (The Quantum and the Lotus, Random House 2001, pp. 12-13.)

The problem here is how much of this ‘correct understanding’ would suffice. The Buddha’s parable of the leaves in his hand and the leaves in the forest shows that we can make do with the small amount we have and achieve the Goal. This would be all we need if what we really want is to achieve the Goal and nothing else. Science, on the other hand, seems to want more and more. You can’t stop at the level where you smash atoms to bits; you have to smash the bits further and get even smaller bits. You can’t stop at seeing this far out in space; you have see even further and further. But do the ever smaller bits belong to the leaves in the Buddha’s hands or out there in the forest?

It is true in a way that Buddhism has an interest in knowing the reality. Ricard’s examples of knowing the real nature of the ego and the “empty” characteristic of everything are good ones. But in Buddhism it does ultimately speaking not matter whether what you get is the real truth any way, so long as you sincerely believe it is. This is very difficult for non-Buddhists and especially scientists to understand, because they typically would think that our own thinking or conception of things is one thing, and what is out there objectively is another. But that is not the case in Buddhism. You will achieve Liberation if you sincerely believe that the ego is just a mental or conceptual construction and that reality is empty of inherent characteristics. What things really are outside of our conception or perception is not so important. They can be anything they like. They don’t matter at all.

One of the main practices in Tantric Buddhism is to visualize that the place that we are in right now is the Buddha’s realm full of jewels and the like. Every sound that we hear is mantra; every sight that of an enlightened being; the air we breathe is the air of Enlightenment, and so on. Here what scientists or empiricists usually take to be the “truth” has no place. In full visualization, in the eyes of an enlightened one, a “truth” is just that, a bubble in the water.

Filed under: science , Buddhism, emptiness, lotus, Matthieu Ricard, quantum, science, Thai, translation, Trinh Xuan Thuan

Heart Sutra in Sanskrit

I found this engaging video containing the chant in Chinese style of the Heart Sutra, or Prajña-paramita Hrdaya Sutra, in its entirely (which is quite short). Listen while you meditate on Emptiness:

Please click here for the text and translation in English.

Filed under: music , Buddhism, Mahayana, emptiness, Sunyata, Heart Sutra, prajnaparamita

Einstein explaining the famous matter-energy formula

Here is a Youtube video that captures the voice of the great physicist Albert Einstein explaining his famous equation, e=mc2. 

There are a number of implications for Buddhist thought. First of all, the interchangeability between matter and energy seems to support the notion that things do not have inherent characteristics. If a seemingly solid thing like a lump of matter could be interchangeable with energy, then matter itself does not have what is normally conceived of as having, namely its spatial shape, its mass, its solidity, and so on. It’s only a short route from this to the claim that all things are but “empty” as Nagarjuna said. Whether something is matter or energy perhaps depends ultimately on *our* point of view. Language and conceptualization have a magical way of “creating” something out of what is essentially “nothing.”

Filed under: Zen , Einstein, emptiness, energy, equation, formula, matter, Nagarjuna, physics, relativity

Buddha, God, and Emptiness

During the symposium on Buddhism in German philosophy and literature, there was a lively discussion on how to compare Buddhism and Christianity on the topic of God and ultimate reality. There was a question from the audience whether the difference between Buddhism as a non-theistic and Christianity as a theistic religion would be a significant matter in an attempt to compare the two. In short, whether the fact that Buddhism is a non-theistic religion would make it inadequate in some way to answer the people’s needs.

This is an age-old matter. The talk started out with the comparison between the two religions on meditation. There is meditation in Christianity too, and it was kind of marginalized as a result of the movement toward rationality in the modern age. Thus meditation came to be regarded as some kind of mysticism. But it was there in the Christian tradition. So the question was posed whether the difference between Buddhism and Christianity on the existence of God would make any differences in meditative experiences. Christians presumably meditate on God and the purpose of the meditation is to get closer to God, but if there is no God in Buddhism, what do the Buddhist meditators meditate on?

For Buddhists this question sounds quite strange, because there are so many things one can meditate on, and there is no restriction that one has to meditate on God only. God does not have a monopoly when it comes to meditative object. In any case, I said during the talk that one way to find a common ground between the two religions is that, instead of looking at God as the creator, one might look at God rather as the Ultimate Reality, one whom the meditator tries to get closer to. If God is identified with this Ultimate Reality, then He would have a lot of affinity with Buddhism, because in Buddhism meditation the goal is also to get closer to Ultimate Reality, to become one with it, in effect.

This Ultimate Reality is known in some traditions of Buddhism as Emptiness. This is the ultimate nature of all reality; it is the real nature of everything. Thus God can be identified with Emptiness, and since Emptiness is just another word for Nirvana, God and Nirvana are in fact one and the same. The goal of the Christian is to become “one” with God, and the goal of the Buddhist is to realize Nirvana, which in other words is to become “one” with it too.

I also said that the perceptible world, according to the Buddhists, has no beginning nor end. The world has existed “since beginningless time,” as Buddhists are wont to say, and it will continue to exist so long as there are causes and conditions for it. Thus there is no creator God, but there is the God that is to be identified with this beginningless world. What both share in common is that they are eternal. God always IS, and reality, Emptiness, whatever it is called, always IS also.

The problem, of course, is that Christians do not accept this picture. Since to say of God that He is identified with the world is to destroy the distinction between the creator and his creation, and if there is no definite future, then no eschatology is possible. No dramatic story of Jesus coming down and give the final judgment.

The Buddhists have no idea whatsoever of eschatology. This only makes sense in the theistic setting and in the context of putting everything under a dramatic plot or a narrative. For the Buddhist future is an illusion created by the deceived mind, and there is no metanarrative that informs every event in the universe. Your future depends on what you do at this moment. You might be born as a god in heaven if you acquire some positive merits, or you go to hell. This is entirely up to your choosing. But there is no such story for the world as such. No, the world is definitely not going to be any particular way according to some preordained plan. The world is just there, and what it is like is up to the people inside it who do their various actions.

One way to understand what I am saying here is this. It is accepted that God creates Himself (sui generis), so isn’t there a problem here about the created and the creator? So why don’t we look at everything as God? God creates the world when we look at Him in one way, but in another way God does create Himself, and He does this continually.

I know I am encroaching upon Christian theology, a topic which I claim no expertise whatsoever. My aim here is only to find a common ground between Buddhism and Christianity and other monotheistic religions. This picture would be quite compatible with Buddhism, just change the word ‘God’ to ‘Emptiness’ according to the Madhyamika, or ‘Ultimate Reality’ according to the Abhidhamma, or the ‘Mind’ according to the Yogacara.

I also know that this picture is pantheistic, and thus unacceptable as a Christian doctrine. But that is not my problem. So Christian theologians would have to find their own solution if they do not want to go the pantheistic route. If the goal of the meditation is to enter the state of union with God, how is that going to be possible if there is this unbridgeable gulf between the creator and what is created?

Filed under: meditation , Buddhism, Christianity, emptiness, eschatology, meditation, religion, samsara, theology

Buddhism and Schopenhauer

At the end of Book Four of The World as Will and as Representation, Schopenhauer has the following to say:

Thus, in this way, by contemplation of life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and his denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways—is nothing.

This passage is important in that it points toward the role of “nothingness” in his philosophy. The basic idea is clear enough. The denial of the Will, which is the route towward total abandonment of the perceptible world or the world of representations, which leads eventually to total extinction of the Will itself and all sufferings, results ultimately in “nothing”. The world of the saints who have successfully extinguished all their desires is nothing for us. Analogously, our own world, which is full of individual objects and all the desires, is “nothing” for the saints and the holy men and women too.

This may sound quite like Buddhism, but in fact it is not. Anyway it depends very much on how the word “nothing” is interpreted. Does Schopenhauer mean that, beyond the perceptual capacity of an ordinary person who is still under the influence of the Will to perceive, any aspect of reality is ultimately nothing at all? Does ‘nothing’ mean ‘no thing’? But in a real sense the world beyond the Principle of Individuation consists of no thing at all, because for anything to be a thing it has to be individuated, and that requires the work of the Will itself through the Principle of Indivuduation. Since Schopenhauer is saying that the Will itself constitutes the material world, then what results from the denial of the Will should be absolutely nothing, zip, nada.

But if that is an accurate interpretation of Schopenhauer, then not only does this contradict with what the Buddhists, especially Nagarjuna, has to say regarding their own ideas on Emptiness, it also creates a lot of difficulty for Schopenhauer’s overall argument itself. If what results from deying the Will is just nothing, then why spent many hundred pages talking about it as if it is worth taking the effort to do so? Why praise all these saints and holy people since what they finally achieve for their strenuous efforts is, well, nothing? If nothing results from denying the will, then why put this topic as a separate section as if it is something important?

But the problem is that Schopenhauer does not talk much at all about this nothing. Perhaps there’s nothing to say. But at the very end of Book Four he has a quote to a German translation of the Prajñā-pāramitā, which, as Buddhists know, talks about there being “no things” too. Is Schopenhauer confused between the “nothing” mentioned in the Prajñā-pāramitā with the usual conception of nothing in Western philosophy?

In any case, it does not make much sense for Schopenhauer to say that the “nothing” which results from denying the Will is just nothing at all. This also pertains to the bedrock of his system — the argument about the distinction between the representations and the Will itself. I believe that Schopenhauer believes that the two are ultimately one and the same, since he says repeatedly that the representations themselves are nothing but the Will. So if they are separate then the representaions would not be the same as the Will.

So it seems that the “nothing” is not “nothing” at all; there has to be something in the nothing. And this is in accord with what the Prajñā-pāramitā is saying. But what Schopenhauer does not spell out is how something could be “not nothing” (because if it were nothing then there would not be any point to the denial of the Will as I have said)  and at the same time actually “nothing” (because it has to go beyond the Principle of Indivduation). But this is exactly what Nāgārjuna is doing.

Filed under: philosophy , Buddhism, emptiness, metaphysics, Nagarjuna, nothing, nothingness, philosophy, representation, Schopenhauer, will

Schopenhauer and Buddhism

My current project is writing a paper on Schopenhauer and Buddhism for presentation at the workshop on “Reception of Buddhism in German Culture,” which will be organized at Chulalongkorn University next month. So this is something I have been thinking for a while.

This led me to go back to Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea” translated by Haldane and Kemp. The copy from the library that I borrowed is so worn out that it literally crumbles when I open it, so I have to take a rather special care of the book. Moreover, the book has been eaten quite a lot by boring insects. So there is a lot of dust deposited by the book wherever I put it down. So reading it is quite an experience.

As is well known, Schopenhauer expounds that idea that the ultimate reality that underlies what we perceive is the will. The will manifests itself through our body; Schopenhauer said that the body itself is the objectification of the will. What this means is that the will, being the ultimate driving force behind reality, comes to be perceptible empirically only through its action of the consciousness that recognizes itself when it engages in a thought process directed at something. Since only human beings are capable of this action, Schopenhauer says that the will reveals itself through our own (as conscious human beings) act of willing, that is, thoughts, desires, or movement of the consciousness toward something else. And since Schopenhauer has argued earlier that material reality itself is ultimately speaking projection of the individual mind, material or external reality is just a picture that the will puts up. The world is at the same time both “will” and “idea”. It is “idea” in the sense of something directly perceptible as one thing rather than another. It is the same with Locke’s view. The German term for this is Vorstellung, which is perhaps better translated as “representation.” But somehow Haldane and Kemp translated as “idea” so we are stuck with this term in the book.

So the idea of the paper is that I will compare this with the Buddhist teaching, especially Nagarjuna’s view on Emptiness. The will and Emptiness are the same in that they are supposed to be ultimate reality. But there the similarity ends. Nagarjuna himself stated emphatically that Emptiness itself is empty, in that one should not reify Emptiness itself and take it as just another form of ultimate reality. On the contrary, “Emptiness” is just a name for whatever reality that is there for us, only when it is not conceptually or linguistically fabricated. There is absolutely no distinction or difference between Emptiness and perceptible reality. Schopenhauer’s will, on the other hand, has the characteristic of always driving and striving. This is lacking in Emptiness.

This is all for now. I’ll certainly come back to this later.

Filed under: philosophy , Buddhism, culture, dharma, emptiness, German, metaphysics, philosophy, reality, Schopenhauer, will

Bhavaviveka and Candrakirti

Those who study Mahayana Buddhism perhaps know about Bhavaviveka as one who espouses the position known as “Svatantrika Madhyamika”, and that this is opposed by Candrakirti, whose position is “Prasangika Madhayamika”. All schools of Tibetan Buddhism follow Candrakirti, and the Svatantrika school is kind of denigrated by the Tibetan schools as being incomplete or as having been soundly refuted by Candrakirti.

This is an arcane issue. At the heart of the dispute is the nature of argumentation leading to the conclusion of the doctrine of Emptiness. According to Nagarjuna, no views are tenable. That is, the correct “view” of the Madhayamika is the “extinguishing of all views.” This is deeply ironic, but the intent of Nagarjuna is that the correct view is not describable through language. Since it is language itself, together with conceptualization and mental fabrication that accompany it, that is the culprit, then any view that is expressible through language in propositional or logical form is ultimately misguided.

Bhavaviveka

Bhavaviveka was known as one of the greatest exponents of Nagarjuna’s teaching. He was a Madhyamika after all. He tried to found Nagarjuna’s teaching on a sound logical basis by constructing a system of argument purporting to show, as logical conclusion, the truth of the Emptiness doctrine. By doing this, it is necessary to posit an existence of some referents of the statements used in the argument. Without it, no logical argumentation would be possible because if you do not posit anything as putatively real (perhaps only for the purpose of the argument), then you don’t have any fixed point at which to tie up the argument, so to speak.

So this is Bhavaviveka’s strategy. He is known to criticize the work of Buddhapalita, who claimed, on the contrary, that it was actually impossible to found Nagarjuna’s teaching on any logical argumentation because no fixture was possible. Then Candrakirti came about after Bhavaviveka’s time and defended Buddhapalita, thereby refuting Bhavaviveka in his celebrated works, Madhyamakavatara and Prasannapada.

We don’t have all the time and space to deal adequately with this dispute here. Works abound on this topic. My goal here in this post is to point out that perhaps Bhavaviveka has been unjustly portrayed in the scholarly literature, and perhaps the distinction between the Prasangika and the Svatantrika might not be as great as sometimes mentioned.

The strategy of Buddhapalita and Candrakirti was different from that of Bhavaviveka. Instead of attempting to formulate an argument aiming to establish as logical conclusion the truth of Nagarjuna’s Emptiness Doctrine, they employ the strategy of reductio ad absurdum. No positive statement is made. Any posited statement at all is deduced to get at their conclusions and these conclusions would be shown to be contradictory, thereby refuting the posited statement. This is the standard method of the reductio. The idea is that, since according to Nagarjuna no statement can be defended (“extinguishing of all views”), no posited statement can be allowed which is necessary to construct a positive argument purporting to prove the Doctrine. So no positive argument. Everything that is asserted of anything is refuted completely.

Candrakirti

In fact both sides can’t avoid their own paradoxes. Bhavaviveka has to answer how it is possible to posit fixed statement in order just to argue that no fixed statement is possible. Candrakirti, on the other hand, also has to say how it is possible that understanding anything through language is possible at all. No fixed category, no fixed meaning. Furthermore, the reductio itself is a form of an argument, so in order for even the reductio to work, some fixed categories have to be presupposed too.

The typical answer is that one has to bear in mind the distinction between the conventional truth (samvrtti-satya) and the ultimate truth (paramartha-satya). But this is equally applicable both to Bhavaviveka and Candrakirti. So it appears that their disagreement is only superficial and deep down they completely agree on the import of Nagarjuna’s and in fact the Buddha’s teaching. Since emptiness is very difficult to spell out through language, one either has to remain silent, or if one ventures out loud, one has to be willing to accept the paradoxes.

Filed under: Mahayana , Bhavaviveka, Candrakirti, emptiness, Language, logic, Mahayana, meaning, Nagarjuna, paradox, philosophy, prasangika madhayamika, Sunyata, svatantrika madhyamika, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen

The Buddha’s Silence

Browsing the web and wordpress blogs (especially this one) I came across this Sutta translated by Ven Thanissaro. This is a very deep Sutta on emptiness and the self. Since this is about silence, I’ll say no more…

***

Then the wanderer Vacchagotta went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there he asked the Blessed One: “Now then, Venerable Gotama, is there a self?”

When this was said, the Blessed One was silent.

“Then is there no self?”

A second time, the Blessed One was silent.

Then Vacchagotta the wanderer got up from his seat and left.

Then, not long after Vacchagotta the wanderer had left, Ven. Ananda said to the Blessed One, “Why, lord, did the Blessed One not answer when asked a question by Vacchagotta the wanderer?”

“Ananda, if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, that would be conforming with those priests & contemplatives who are exponents of eternalism [the view that there is an eternal, unchanging soul]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, that would be conforming with those priests & contemplatives who are exponents of annihilationism [the view that death is the annihilation of consciousness]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, would that be in keeping with the arising of knowledge that all phenomena are not-self?”

“No, lord.”

“And if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, the bewildered Vacchagotta would become even more bewildered: ‘Does the self I used to have now not exist?’”

(Ananda Sutta, translated by Ven. Thanissaro)

Filed under: Buddhism , Ananda, anatta, atta, Buddha, Buddhism, emptiness, no-self, philosophy, self, silence

Luang Pu Doon on Emptiness

Luang Pu Doon

Here is another piece of great wisdom from Luang Pu Doon, the late master of the forest tradition from Surin, Thailand:

No More Rebirth

Many senior practicing monks came to talk about the teachings with Luang Pu. They usually ended with the remark about some famous practicing monks who looked very worthy of respect and who behaved very well within the Vinaya rules, and who was recognized by their fellow monks of being steadfast in the religion, yet in the end could not make it and had to disrobe, or behaved themselves in such a way that blemished the Order. They would like to know how advanced in the practice they had to be in order to cut themselves off from samsara so that they did not have to be reborn.

Luang Pu said:

“Observing the Vinaya rules strictly and taking up the vows of a forest monk are very good practices. They are very worthy of respect. However, if the practitioner does not practice so that they attain great mind and great wisdom, it is always possible to become blemished. This is because they have not attained the state of going beyond the world. In fact the arahants themselves do not know many things at all. They only train the mind so that they fully understand the five skandhas. They fully understand the twelve links of dependent origination. They cease searching; they cease having fabricating mental activities. This is all there is to it. And it all ends here. What remains is only pure, clean, bright, empty. It is Great Emptiness.”

Filed under: meditation , Buddhism, dependent origination, emptiness, Luang Pu Doon, nibbana, Nirvana, skandha, Sunyata, Theravada, vinaya