The problem with contemporary Theravada Buddhism as Mahayana Buddhism understands it, is that it moves in the direction of annihilationism. In whatever manner Theravadism choses to present its theories, it does so by laying siege to the sufferant in the guise of no-self, dogmatically stating that because the corporal entity (P., khandhas) is without a self, there is categorically no self. But this is a logical error. The fact that X does not contain Y does not mean that Y is nonexistent. Truth be known, Y might be elsewhere.
In light of the above, what, therefore, can Theravada Buddhism’s soteriology be except a strange kind of mystical suicide? This will be seen in this koan which I have constructed to illustrate the point.
A man is in a house with five rooms (the Five Aggregates). The house has no exit or windows. The house suddenly catches fire. The occupant has no way of putting out the fire that will soon engulf him and the entire house. So the question is, how does he escape his fate? To be sure, he is a sufferant and cannot even bear the thought of such a death. Now Mahayana knows the answer and how to save the occupant. The Zen masters of old could answer this koan easily. But can a Theravadin teacher answer the question, solving the koan?
Probably one of the most ridiculous answers would be just to sit and accept the conflagration, awaiting happy nirvana! But as Mahayana Buddhism judges it, such an answer is far from the truth. Like the expression, “thinking out of the box” so also must one think out their liberation from the fiery world of materialism.
It is a grievous error to assume that the Buddha ignored the sufferant. He did not. The Buddha realized that suffering arises from the sufferant’s inability to see the true ground of reality, sometimes called, Tathagata-garbha that is akin to a universal receptacle (âdhâra) of samsara and nirvana which is unchanging (nitya), fundamental (dharma), and eternal (shâsvata). Instead, the sufferant clings to the samsaric disturbances of the Tathagata-garbha in the form of the physical body. Central to the Buddha’s teaching is teaching the sufferant how to break their sympathetic connection with the carnal body—to achieve nirvana by, instead, turning to the unchanging incorporeal nature of the Tathagata-garbha.
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