The Vedanta question

Prior to the end of Buddhism in its homeland of India, Vedanta philosophers raised the question of how bondage and liberation are possible if Buddhists believe there is no self or âtman, and things exist only momentarily.  I am not sure modern Buddhists would find it easy to answer this question given their belief that there is fundamentally nothing beyond the psychophysical body, and phenomenal reality has only momentary duration.

Given the modern Buddhist penchant to read only half of Buddhism, the half that is concerned with the conditioned, finite world, it should not be surprising that modern Buddhists have no idea how bondage and liberation are possible.  If we had to rely on a secular Buddhist like Stephen Batchelor to provide a coherent answer to the question, we would be out of luck.  Nothing adds up, in other words, when we scout the transcendent and believe reality is momentary all the way down!  Certainly, there is nothing of any measure redemptive with such a view—and there should be.

Over the years I have seen this view gradually gain dominance in Buddhism.  The Zennist blog is sometimes attacked as being Vedantic although this objection bears little or no relation with the actual historical facts.  If anything, the Buddhist objection to Vedanta, surprisingly, was that Vedanta stole Buddhist theories making Vedanta essentially crypto-Buddhist!  The implication here is that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Buddhism and Vedanta.

Of course modern Buddhists don’t want to accept this as close to being the historical truth and certain sects of Buddhism don’t want to accept this view either, fighting against it tooth and nail.  Their belief all hinges on no self theory or anâtmavâda which as they present it (which is totally wrong), makes the Vedanta question impossible to answer.  The scholars and monks who support this wrong headed view seem to have spent little time and have given even less intelligent thought to the older discourses in which the term anattâ/anâtman is used.  From the huge number of discourses in which anattâ/anâtman appears we learn that we are not to regard the Five Aggregates of material shape, feeling, perception, habitual tendencies and consciousness as our self. They are anattâ/anâtman:—not the âtman.  This then makes the Vedanta question easy to answer.  Bondage arises by attaching to what is not the self (i.e., the Five Aggregates).  Liberation is abandoning the Five Aggregates. 

Comments

[The Zennist]

Solon:

Putting the matter bluntly, the philosopher Colin McGinn believes that presently we are too stupid to see how consciousness and the brain really connect. He writes:

"So we are left with an introspection-based view of consciousness and a perception-based view of the brain, staring at each other across a yawning conceptual divide. These two faculties must be providing us with a partial and skewed picture of what they are directed toward, and hence fail to disclose the underlying unity of mind and brain. Cognitive closure results from the fact that this partialness is inherent in the two modes of apprehension. There is no way to modify or extend introspection and perception so that they can transcend their present limitations. That is like hoping that if we tinker with our sense of touch it will eventually give us perceptions of color. To put it baldly, it is part of the very essence of consciousness that it not be perceptible by the kinds of senses we have, but that means that it can never be integrated with an object--the brain-- whose essence is to be perceptible" (The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World).

[solon]

There are many reasons to such spiritual myopia and general human stupidity. Perhaps this article might offer some answers:

Leading Geneticist: Human Intelligence is Slowly Declining

Would you be surprised to hear that the human race is slowly becoming dumber, and dumber? Despite our advancements over the last tens or even hundreds of years, some ‘experts’ believe that humans are losing cognitive capabilities and becoming more emotionally unstable. One Stanford University researcher and geneticist, Dr. Gerald Crabtree, believes that our intellectual decline as a race has much to do with adverse genetic mutations. But there is more to it than that.

According to Crabtree, our cognitive and emotional capabilities are fueled and determined by the combined effort of thousands of genes. If a mutation occurred in any of of these genes, which is quite likely, then intelligence or emotional stability can be negatively impacted.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues,” the geneticist began his article in the scientific journal Trends in Genetics.

Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/leading-geneticist-human-intelligence-slowly-declining/#ixzz2LFZZy3HA