Some things we believe in without hesitation—they never were tentative for us. This is dogma. Yes, you could say we have walked into a kind of prison cell of the mind. Was this credulity on our part? Yes, to a certain extent it was.
Such things as the Nazis killed six million Jews, and radiation can kill you, are examples of very powerful dogmas although for the careful researcher they are still hypotheses. We can surmise that if the evidence were to suddenly come forth overturning these dogmas people would experience acute cognitive dissonance and likely punish the bearers of the bad news. But what if William Casey, former director of the CIA, said was absolutely true: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Our first response to this might be something like this, “I can’t be fooled.” But the fact is that we are being constantly fooled and suffer from credulity, holding on to many dogmas which we refuse to let go of.
I mean, we can’t be that easily fooled, right? Wrong.
If I were to do a book on the actual way Buddhism is, I would receive a lot of scorn, to say the least (this is why I do a blog). And this is because those interested in Buddhism including long time Buddhists have been dogmatized to such an extent that their open minds are firmly shut and have been this way for many years. I am only going to be able to change a few minds that are more open; that have an inner sense that what is presented as Buddhism is far from Buddhism.
Some if not all of their information came from the academic world which had been spoon fed on the not-self and emptiness dogmas which can be put under the rubric of non-essentialism. But this was about to change. Eventually, when the tathagatagarbha doctrine and the pro-ātman doctrine found in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra hit the scene, those who still adhered to the dogma of non-self (anātamn) and emptiness were forced to explain it away or just ignore it for as long as possible. What they were faced with were words like the following:
“The Self spoken of in Buddhism is the Buddha-Nature.”
“O good man! "Self" means "Tathagatagarbha" [Buddha-Womb, Buddha-Embryo, Buddha-Nature]. Every being has Buddha-Nature. This is the Self. Such Self has, from the very beginning, been under cover of innumerable defilements. That is why man cannot see it.”
“The nature of the Self and the Buddha-Nature do not differ.”
“And the non-Self is nothing but birth and death. The Self refers to Great Nirvana.”
Excerpts like these, and many more, confront the old dogmas causing much consternation. The only place where the old dogma of non-self (anātamn) and emptiness appear to be maintained is on social media like Reddit whose moderators are bent on looking at Buddhism through the prism of non-essentialism. Social media is out of touch with the tathagatagarbha doctrine and the Mahaparinirvana Sutra which fall under the rubric of essentialism which my dictionary defines as “a theory subscribing to the idea that metaphysical essences really subsist and are intuitively accessible.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAwyIDKoXYY&list=PLZqlasNR4OUDzWLKdqZ44HXNJhOwO4g3n
Posted by: smith | November 20, 2018 at 02:57 PM