I don't want to discuss the book itself, there are good points and weak points, but those two passages prompted me some reflection:
[Commenting DN11: http://leighb.com/dn11_85.htm ]
The last line is really puzzling. “With the cessation of consciousness, all this comes to an end.” Does that mean you have to become
unconscious? The usual explanation is that, at a path moment – a momentary experience of Nibbāna – there’s a cessation experience
where everything stops, then it starts up again, only it’s really different on the other side. That turns out not to be what’s being talked
about here, because the idea of “path moments” is from the later commentaries and this is a sutta.
The word viññāṇa which we translate as “consciousness” literally means “divided knowing.” When divided knowing comes to an end,
all these dualities come to an end. When we stop chopping up the holistic unfolding into bits and pieces, then all this comes to an end.
As Ud 8.1 says, “Just this is the end of dukkha.”
This required holistic experience is expressed so very eloquently by Kitaro Nishida in his work The Nothingness Beyond God:
Pure experience is the beginning of Zen. It is awareness stripped of all thought, all conceptualization, all categorization, and all
distinctions between subject-as-having-an-experience and experience-as-having-been-had-by-a-subject. It is prior to all judgment.
Pure experience is without all distinction; it is pure no-thingness, pure no-this-or-that. It is empty of any and all distinctions. It is
absolutely no-thing at all. Yet its emptiness and nothingness is a chock-a-block fullness, for it is all experience-to-come. It is rose,
child, river, anger, death, pain, rocks, and cicada sounds. We carve these discrete events and entities out of a richer-yet-non-
distinct manifold of pure experience.
I'm interest in the point of view of the users, but also about the knowledge of the users, in the sense that if there are academic interpretations that are interesting I would like to know about them so to recollect all the possible opinions on this matter. Since the last time with Dhamma I've had so much helpful and variegated response that helped immensely, I will simply try to do the same with viññāṇa“Consciousness” is a translation of the Pāli word viññāṇa, which literally means “divided knowing.” It maybe best understood as “that which knows.” “Consciousness” in Buddhist philosophy is not the same thing as either what the word would mean to a doctor (i.e.
global level of awareness) or to a Western philosopher of mind (where the word means roughly “experiencing,” – peripheral vision, for
example, is always conscious, even though one doesn’t have any kind of metacognitive awareness of it). “Viññāṇa” is not a “well
defined” term in the suttas – it's used slightly differently in multiple contexts. In fact, MN 112 uses the word in four different ways in a
single sutta.
Some thoughts, you can just pick one or none and simply comment freely as you like in a way that you think that is useful to understand more about viññāṇa.
- How the experiences described by Brasington relates to Theravada and EBT? (btw it is always dangerous in my opinion to use Zen to explain EBT and/or Theravada).
- How the translation "Divided knowing" can be helpful? It is correct? There are usages that clarify?
- I fear that this focus of non-duality, divided knowing, to a different way of seeing is related to a mode of perception, while I feel that the message of the Dhamma here-and-now is about non-delighting, non-craving, feeling equanimity as pleasurable, being at peace, non-anxiety, but maybe the result of Dhamma is not simply the non-arising of Dukkha, but also this mode of perception? Is it essential? It is a byproduct?
- Can path moments be dismissed so easily for EBT?
- How the term viññāṇa relates to concurrent religions and beliefs at the time of the Buddha? Does this knowledge changes something/helps to better frame the issue?
Thank you very much for your responses and effort.