The most vicious battles I have encountered have not been with non-buddhists but, instead, with Buddhists who believe Buddhism is an Indian form of materialism which denies the transcendent or the same, the ātman. These same Buddhists refuse to purchase the thought that the Buddha taught the denial of ātman in the unconditioned, impermanent and suffering five aggregates. He never once taught the categorical denial of ātman.
No thanks to the awkward translations which have turned the noun ātman (or attā in Pali) into a pronoun, English speakers have no sense of what the Buddha is really teaching. The pronoun "yourself" gives not a single clue as to the real meaning of ātman which is closer to our word spirit which, by the way, happens to be a noun. We learn from the Nirukta, which is the oldest Indian treatise on etymology, philology and semantics which predates Buddhism, that ātman is the animative principle (cetana-tattva). In this it is closer to spirit and mind, mind also being a noun ( in the commentarial literature ātman and mind are the same).
Yes, ātman can do, sometimes, the work of a pronoun but in religious literature its meaning cannot be only that of a pronoun. For example, when we see that "the ātman within you knows", ātman is more than a pronoun. When we see ātman, the subject, said to be an island or light, it is a noun. This means we are fundamentally spirit (the noun) not illusory things or phenomena like the five aggregates which we appropriate (upadāna) wrongly believing them to be the ātman.
We are fundamentally spirit. We have never been other than spirit or ātman. But our imperfect knowledge of spirit, because of avidya, has caused what can only be described as an antithesis which seems to confront us in a very painful way at times. We call this our material universe. But it is only a species-specific construct by spirit including even space & time. The obvious path we must take is to penetrate through this illusory antithesis which begins with our very thoughts.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-growing-evidence-that-our-universe-is-a-giant-hologram?utm_source=vicefbus
Posted by: M | May 06, 2015 at 03:51 AM