retrofuturist wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 9:40 pm
Ceisiwr wrote: "It’s that and the cessation of rebirth, the central problem the Buddha was concerned with."
Retro wrote: "The central problem is obviously dukkha. See:
the Four Noble Truths.
If rebirth were the "central problem" nobody would ever want to be reborn or to live again. The pyramids would never have existed.
Nobody would want to be reborn in heaven!
Why
did the Buddha teach the way to higher rebirth for lay puthujjanas then, if "rebirth [was] the central problem the Buddha was concerned with"?"
You've got a hard sell in front of you, with that characterisation of the Dhamma.
Existence is dukkha Retro. The body is dukkha. The mind is dukkha. Any form of life is suffering. People want to be reborn because they are ignorant of this fact of nature. For those who just cannot understand, in this life at least, he taught the way to heaven as a way of choosing the path with the least amount of suffering. Those who propose an alternative to the traditional explanation are subtlety proposing that this vale of tears can somehow be made right, that what is impermanent be sukha rather than dukkha. That in this life, whilst still having a body and mind, there can be no dukkha at all. That is a vast delusion, and if you are deluded you aren't ever awake. Furthermore, birth in the 4NT is literal birth from the womb (for humans).
The consciousness of eye-consciousness is called viññāṇa because it discriminates - the prefix vi implies two, as per the Latin word bi and -jñā implies knowledge. Per PTS, "it arises through the mutual relation of sense and sense-object"... so it can be explained as the discrimination of an object, i.e. a fabricated dhamma, i.e. a phenomena, from the raw sensory data enabled by the eye-faculty.
Not every prefix in Pāli is meaningful. Vitakka is one such example. This is folk etymology of the kind ToVincent peddles in. What is presented to the eye and cognised by consciousness is an external object. The distortion is in following signs of permanence, satisfaction and self in relation to the external
and the internal.
Paticcasamuppada then shows this fabricated object flowing in a whirlpool motion with nama-rupa, whereby the fabricated object becomes the rupa of nama-rupa, which is then further molested (ruppati) by the consistutents of name... feeling, perception, intention, attention and contact. Consciousness is thus no longer eye-consciousness, but mind-consciousness reflecting the nama-rupa (name and form) of the fabricated object, and that vortex, causes further evolution of the name-and-form until it falls apart once attention, as one of the constituents of name, is no longer paid to it.
Rūpa is that which is "molested" by cold, heat, flies etc. In other words, rūpa is that which is physical. We today would call it matter. It is not "molested" by nāma. That is your own distorted reading of both SN 22.79 and DN 15. We can also add SN 47.42 to the list of suttas you have misunderstood and misrepresented. The dhammā spoken of in that sutta and similar ones are the dhammā of the original Satipaṭṭhāna sutta. They are the dhammā of the hindrances and the awakening factors. Those are the dhammā which are tied up with attention. Unwise attention nourishes the hindrances, whilst wise attention starves them and feeds the awakening factors. The Buddha taught what was practical, rather than a convoluted and abstract phenomenology. Furthermore nāmarūpa doesn't fall apart when attention isn't on it. Nāmarūpa is your mentality & physical form. It is what makes "you" you. It is what makes Sujato a liberal, and you right wing. It is what makes me a homosexual and you straight, and so on. Apart from that, attention is part of nāma.
Paticcasamuppada also shows eye-consciousness becoming the basis for salayatana. As mentioned previously, salayatana involves the bifurcation of an internal sense base (which comes later to be known as "me") from an "external sense-base", i.e. the object that eye-consciousness created (which can later come to be known as "mine"). The following steps in paticcasamuppada show the further iterations of that I-making process, which gives rise to identification (jati) as "I".
Eye-consciousness arises dependent upon the sense bases. It can't arise without the sense bases being there. The subject vs object distinction also persists even for Buddhas and Arahants, so it's not something inherently tied up with notions of the atta. Birth also is not the atta notion. The sense of "I" comes from clinging, whilst birth in dependent origination is literally being expelled from the vaginal canal (for a human).
Presumably, but it would be sufficient to know that what is being referred to as an indriya is not a phenomena, nor is it dependent upon avijja. Thus, when the avijja is removed and all fabricated sankharas cease... the arahant isn't left deaf, dumb, numb, blind, mindless and anosmic, as some wags would have it.
No, they aren't. They aren't because ignorance is a direct cause in the way you are painting it here. It is a root condition. On the basis of ignorance there is kammic action, that is to say intentional activity motivated by greed, lust or delusion. When ignorance is abolished and understanding arises the 6 senses still remain, as they are the result of previous action. Once a dhamma has arisen due to conditions, it has to run it's course. When ignorance is gone the awakened individual's consciousness still arises and ceases based on contact, but there is no more kammic activity. There is no more intending towards this or that sign, and so kamma ceases. With the cessation of kamma no name & form can come to be, and so on.
How would one train the eye-faculty, by the way? Eating carrots? Laser-eye surgery?
By not following the signs which arise because of it.
That doesn't sounds compatible with the notion that the Dhamma is about the past and the future, but clearly such preoccupations have captured the minds of many. The Buddha addresses this propensity in a variety of ways in the Brahmajala Sutta (DN1) in which the Buddha says,
Once again, what "visible here and now" relates to if the āsavā are present or not. On the knowledge of their absence, one knows there is nothing else to be done. What exists now will run it's course, growing cold at death. What the ascetics of DN 1 were doing, well some of them, was fabricating an atta and superimposing that onto reality, onto what they were seeing in past lives. They saw a real person, instead of an empty flow of dhammas arising and ceasing due to conditions. The traditional explanation is not comparable to what DN 1 was warning against. The traditional model actually negates it.
The Buddha in DN1, as quoted above.
You said:
"In other words, if we conceive of a self (even if we tell ourselves that's not what we're doing) that experiences past and future, or transmigrates to past and future, then by sheer virtue of perceiving that, we're creating phassa, and actually fuelling paticcasamuppada itself through such wrongness."
I asked who is doing that? Who is conceiving a self here? You obviously think the traditional teaching lends itself to that. How?
As I alluded to, "the standard explanation of dependent origination" is derived from the "traditions of scholastic academia". That you conflate it as being one and the same as the Buddha's Dhamma speaks volumes.
The traditional explanation, at it's core, is simply the teaching as laid out in the suttas and other early buddhist texts. All of the known early schools accepted it. What they disagreed on was the details. What was a scholastic development, in different schools, was the idea that the 12-links, well some of them, occur solely as mental events. Essentially what you are trying to argue here. This innovation is your modern re-interpretation. The original is that of dependent origination operating over lifespans.
What's described in the Bahiya Sutta. What is described there is not dependently co-arisen, hence why in this topic we've placed such a focus upon differentiating between salayatana (which is dependently co-arisen), versus the panc'indriyani and "in reference to the seen, there will be only the seen (etc.)" which aren't.
Earlier you argued that the faculties are dependently arisen, albeit not as part of the 12-links. Now you are saying they aren't. Regarding "in the seen, only the seen" I prefer to look at the SN 35.95 (likely the original sutta out of the two). There we are given some more details on what this means. We find the following
“When, firmly mindful, one sees a form,
One is not inflamed by lust for forms;
One experiences it with dispassionate mind
And does not remain holding it tightly.
“One fares mindfully in such a way
That even as one sees the form,
And while one undergoes a feeling,
Suffering is exhausted, not built up.
For one dismantling suffering thus,
Nibbāna is said to be close by.
“When, firmly mindful, one hears a sound,
One is not inflamed by lust for sounds; …
“When, firmly mindful, one smells an odour,
One is not inflamed by lust for odours; …
There is still sense experience happening, in terms of sense objects being cognised by an internal consciousness. What we are supposed to do is remove craving for said sights, sounds etc. It says nothing about not fabricating senses and sense objects.
There was more that I wanted to address from you, but I'll probably write that post tomorrow.
Nobody would want to be reborn in heaven! 