Zen Pali Buddhism primer

Here is a Zen primer of Pali Buddhism. It goes something like this: The noble truth of suffering pertains to the five aggregates called khandhas. They are the prisim through which we veiw the world, which we believe to be our true self. But in truth, the five aggregates are suffering.

“And what, Monks, is the noble truth of suffering? It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging; that is, the form aggregates subject to clinging...the consciousness aggregate subject to clinging. This is called the noble truth of suffering” (S.v.425).

Noting the above, there is never any mention in any discourse by the Buddha that the self suffers or is the cause of suffering. The problem is the five aggregates which we mistake for our true self. In other words, we view them as our self. The crux of the matter is our craving for the five aggregates, in the belief that they are our self. This craving has to be eliminated.

The Buddha, in many of his discourses, has certainly made it unambiguously clear that the five aggregates are not the self. It is also true that the self is not the aggregates. And given that these aggregates are suffering, they cannot be our refuge. Only that which is not the aggregates can be our refuge. Thus, only "the self is the refuge of the self" according to the Dhammapada (160). Such marks the end of our craving. This is also Nirvana.

“Thus in this very life he is free from craving, he is released, he has become cool: by the self, he abides in experience of bliss, by becoming Brahma” (A.i.193, III, 7,. § 66).

From the above passage we can see that the Buddha did not mince his words. Nirvana is really about the self being free from craving the five aggregates which are viewed to be the self called in Pali, attaditthi. Once free of them we will understood who we really are; and that we have reached the undying. There is no more to be done or worry about.

Comments

[Lebensgeist]

and by the way,those who regard Nirvana as extinction in a literal sense, robbing it its purely allegorical meaning; or saying such nonsenese as "Nirvana cannot be experienced".. they should read AN, the book of the tens, Anisamsavaggo, Number 6

Here, Ananda, the bhikkhu is perceptive thus:- This is peaceful, this is exalted, such as the appeasement of all determinations, giving up of all endearments, destruction of craving, disenchantment, cessation and extinction(nibbànanti). Ananda, in this manner, there is that concentration to the bhikkhu, abiding in which, in earth he has no perceptions of earth, in water he has no perceptions of water, in fire he has no perceptions of fire, in air he has no perceptions of air, in the sphere of space, he has no perceptions of the sphere of space, in the sphere of consciousness, he has no perceptions of the sphere of consciousness, in the sphere of nothingness, he has no perceptions of the sphere of nothingness, in the sphere of neither perceptions nor non-perceptions, he has no perceptions of the sphere of neither perceptions nor non-perceptions. In this world, he has no perceptions of this world. In the other world, he has no perceptions of the other world. Yet he is perceptive.

[Lebensgeist]

Actually,

Frauwallner argued that the Buddha started from the Samkhya position and did never break with it in the book kojizen cited. He there writes that in Samkyha, the self is the passive observer, and the Buddha`s aim was, according to Frauwallner, to free the self from all wordly sorrows. I am not aware that Frauwallner later departed from that view in his book "Die Philosophy des Buddhismus". Instead, he insisted more or less that this was the reason for the Buddha`s silence on the well known questions.

[Martin]

@kojizen
I consider it with being in the same spirit as "the not-self strategy" of Thanissaro, the practical way understandable by the average man to detach from the skandhas, not as an ontological statement that there exists no self. I see it like Radhakrishnan: The Buddha made the true spirit of the indian genius expressed in the Upanisads available for everyone. A.P. Buddhadatta also said that Georg Grimm rediscovered that the doctrine of the Buddha was the work of a genius, enabling the average man to relize their self indirectly, that is realizing what it is not, without getting involved in subtle speculation about a "True Self" that can lead the philosophical uneducated man astray easily.

Thanks for posting the excerpt!

[Kojizen]

He [the Buddha] does not say that we should know the true self, but that we must not regard as the self (âtmâ, p. attâ) that which is not the self. For otherwise craving clings to this false self, and thus brings about an entanglement in the cycle of beings. And salvation takes place not through our becoming consciousness of the true self, but through our recognizing as not-self (anatmâ, P. anattâ) all that is falsely regarded as the self, and so detaching desire therefrom.. — Erich Frauwallner (Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, vol. I, 1953)

[Martin]

The topic is controversial, but the evidence seems to be clear. Serious scholars argued from the beginning the way Thanissaro put it, such brilliant geniuses as Frauwallner bein among them. It is only because of Sectarian Dogma of the surviving schools and nowdays dominant sects that the flat rejection of a self is the dominant view. Far from judging of what is the only right view, it is clear that the picture we are presented today in favor of "no-self" is historically unbalanced, as well as not justifiable without the Abhidhamma.