Ceisiwr wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:49 pm
riceandcashews wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2022 2:41 pm
And lastly, I think idealism is probably the best way to read Buddhism, but only if that is understood as only an effective designation and not a reified reality.
I don’t think the Buddha wanted us to view things in terms of idealism. Rather he wanted us to see things in terms of dependent origination, so as to let go. Anything that arises is constantly changing, becoming other, so there is no safety is adhering to anything not even the view of dependent origination itself.
I think idealism (epistemological, phenomenological, not metaphysical or substantialist) is intimately tied to dependent origination and impermanence. What is it that arises and ceases? Appearances, or conscious states. All 5 aggregates are known through the sense-consciousnesses. The All is only known through the sense-consciousnesses. In fact, the Buddha over and over repeats that speculations about what is beyond experience is fruitless and unhelpful and wrong view. Even our very conceptions of things within consciousness, and conceptions of consciousness itself arise within consciousness. It's all absolutely impermanent and dependently originated. And clinging to views (unnecessarily harmful repetitions of thoughts taken as reified things) about consciousness or about dependent origination are of course missing the point that even views about dependent origination and consciousness arise impermanently as conscious state (or 'within consciousness' conventionally, as long as this isn't reified as a substance).
I think physicalism, dualism, substantialist idealism, and nihilism present much greater potential threats to a practitioner in terms of wrong view than phenomenological idealism.
Physicalism: no rebirth
Dualism: Substantialist views about the world
Substantialist Idealism: Substantialist views about self/mind
Nihilism: No progress, no goal, no change, nothing to attain, etc.
I suspect your natural response would be to say that phenomenological idealism is a wrong view because it is a form of view-clinging? But this would be just as true of dependent origination, and as I've argued, the two are intertwined.
Last, I'd like to note that arahants don't cease to be conscious. Instead, they cease to cling, to fabricate, to move beyond the six sense spheres. They retain awareness of everything as just the impermanent arising and passing of states of consciousness. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not intending to reify arahants here. There is no subject of consciousness or agent of action that 'arahant' corresponds to (in fact, there's no subject of consciousness or agent of action that 'run of the mill person' corresponds to either, only the confused arising of views and clinging and actions related to such views), only the continuation of the six sense spheres. Consciousness is the one thing that would seem to persist in arahants (although not reification of consciousness, it's important to note. That's why the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness is NOT itself the state of liberation).
Anywho, that's a start for a defense of my position. I'd be happy to hear your response.