Thanks for your explanation. If I understand you, you’re saying that Buddhist “enlightenment” is the realization, not that everything is nothing (as critics sometimes suppose), but that ultimate reality—if such language is allowable—nothing is other than than the ultimate reality, which is not a Supreme Thing, but emptiness, no-thingness, a kind of fullness that can’t be experienced until we let go of thing-think, and so of clinging to things.

Once again, there are some parallels to Christianity. Some of the Greek Fathers talk about God as being “beyond being,” for instance.

For Christianity, Ultimate Reality is Love. God is not a Big Ego. He is a loving exchange, communion. This is one of the meanings of saying that God is Trinity.

For Christians, Personhood is ultimate, even though divine Personhood is not individual ego. Personhood is how Ultimate Fullness is “emptiness,” i.e., not-clinging-to-self—in the form of communion that Love requires in order to be Love.

All the best,

A.

As a practical matter, my teachers (who are Tibetan) say that teaching from the vantage point “of the fruition” is better for people with some experience of the Dharma than for an introduction to it.

It is possible to merely drift in dreams of “being Enlightened” and neglect to do the real work. So Buddhists generally stress suffering and confusion as the starting point, to keep a practioner grounded and motivated at the beginning.

But what they do say about the fruition is this:

The way things really are is that they are “empty, luminous, and unobstructed.” They are pure potential out of which any appearance whatever can manifest itself.

No matter what happens to appear to us, that empty, luminous, and unobstructed ground does not change–and there is no essential difference between ordinary appearances and that unobstructed ground.

“Enlightenment” means simply to realize this. The “enlightened beings” don’t live in any different world than we do, and that world has been inherently perfect, pure, and stainless from the beginning.

We are confused about it, they are not. Because our confusion is so deep and abiding, there are parts of this perfect world that we cannot even percieve and we chronically misinterpret what we can percieve.

So the world of an enlightened being is not different from ours, but they have more perceptual capacity from their enlightened knowledge, just like I have more perceptual capacity, due to knowledge, than my pet cats.

One can elaborate on the details of all this, and there are extensive Dharmic descriptions of the things that we in the “human realm” generally do not see, but that is the essence of the matter. Buddhas and enlightened Bodhisattvas manifest in ordinary appearances, but they are not limited by them.

Thanks for your detailed and eloquent response to my two questions.

I understand—I think—that, from a Buddhist perspective, the answer to my second question must be to critique the presupposition of the question itself, or, to put it another way, to point (again) to the illusory character of the ego, of a permanent, separate self.

I find helpful, too, your emphasis on the practical character of the Buddhist teaching that there is no self.

As a Catholic, I find this teaching not entirely alien to the Christian experience of creatureliness: in ourselves, we are . . . nothing. If we try nonetheless to be something in ourselves, we experience this nothingness as: disintegration, anxious care, death.

(Of course, all of us do try to be something in ourselves, and that necessarily—even though the necessity involved is a strange one: we are all inclined to do it, prior to any conscious choice, and yet, once we begin to see there’s another way, we realize that it was our fault that we sought to be something in ourselves and that we even wanted to. This is one way of explaining the doctrine of original sin, and so of answering my first question).

If, however, we accept that we are nothing in ourselves, we experience that nothingness differently. Or rather, since we don’t hypostatize that nothingness, let’s say that the experience of it is really the experience of being in a/Another, of being loved into being by a/Another.

Of course, the Christian wants to die to self, but he’s not out to destroy the self, either. The issue is neither self-assertion nor self-destruction—as works of the self performed in self-preoccupation. The point is self-forgetfulness in love.

I think that we Christians sometimes hear you Buddhists as teaching the annihilation of the self, but I realize that that’s not the case, since you don’t believe in selves! What I have been trying to say is that Christians also have a version of disbelief in self.

Of course, there are important differences between Buddhism and Christianity which we can’t gloss over. One of them concerns the nature of the alternative to the illusion of self. I am not an expert on Buddhism, but I have the impression that Buddhists are reticent on this point, or, at least, that the Buddha was. Perhaps the alternative has something to do with an experience of oneness beyond the subject-object divide.

Here, too, Christianity has something similar, for example, in the Trinity (in which Father and Son are one, not only in the divine nature, but also in the Holy Spirit). Nevertheless, Christianity, as this very doctrine implies, holds that there is a form of otherness—both in God and for the creature united with God—that does not involve subject-object dualism or any clinging to an illusory self.

This is why Christianity speaks of the person, and insists that the person remains distinct from God forever even in the midst of the highest union with him (beyond subject-object and beyond ego).

It was in light of this insistence that I asked my second question, because it seems to me that there is a paradox in the notion that we should seek to be delivered from the illusion that we are selves—a paradox that either points to something like the person rising up on the either side of the disappearance of ego-illusion or that slides into self-contradiction.

I realize, of course, that you will probably say that maintaining the paradox in all its starkness is precisely the answer to the question, and that, because it is, the answer has to be practical, and not just theorietical.

I agree, in part. However, I believe that it’s important to try to give a rational account of things, as far as possible—and that doing so doesn’t just have to be a way of clinging to self. We can’t speak the ineffable, but we have to try. That’s another paradoxical fact that has to do percisely with starting right where we are, here and now.

Adrian

“As for Buddhism, I would like to ask Joseph Marshall to explain: (a) why do we all NECESSARILY start out ignorant of our true nature? (which even the Buddha did); (b) is the self who desires liberation the same as the self who disappears once liberation happens?”

As far as I can see, the Dharma asserts no absolute “necessity” for our confusion and corresponding suffering. It merely points out that we all ARE confused, why we are all confused, and what we can do about it.

The power of it, for someone with the karma to become a Buddhist (which not everbody has in any given lifetime), is that it describes your confusion so exactly, it pins the WHY down in such a way that it makes perfect sense, and offers you realistic solutions to the problem.

The second part of the question is a little harder to answer because the way the question is phrased is tangled up in the problem of our confusion itself.

To quote from a favorite commentary of mine, “Enlightenment does not mean going somewhere else or becoming someone else.” “Desire” itself, even “desire for liberation” is part of the problem because it is a craving to go somewhere else and become someone else, to run away from who we are rather than work with it.

The solution to the problem is to stick right here where we are and work with “right here where we are” undistractedly clearing away our confusion. The “self” does not disappear. The “self” has never been there from the first, any more than Wolf Blitzer (say) really lives in the box with the buttons that sits in the corner of our room.

There is no Wolf in the box, there is no “self” in us, and there is no eternal permanence in any of the things we see around us. They are all “mere appearance”. What “liberation” consists of is the total dispersion of our confusion about these things down to the subtlest and most persistent habits that persuade us to “reify” anything.

In that sense, “liberation” is a process. If I sit and think about it, I know Wolf doesn’t live in my TV. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not prone to throw the sofa pillows at him when I think his election coverage is unfair!

On one level, I know this is silly, on another level the emotional impulse to do it is quite strong. What practical Buddhism consists of is working with stuff like that. And the confidence in the results, which AWG has asked about so pointedly, comes from staying right here, getting familiar with right here, and not trying to go to some “more spiritual” somewhere else or to prove some more spiritual something else.

If you’d like a Christian comment that points in the same direction, try St. Catherine of Sienna: “All the way to Heaven is Heaven. For He said, ‘I am the Way.’”

I have, and everyone else has for that matter, the potential to clear away ALL of that confusion–not immediately, and not by merely snapping the fingers, but we have it none the less. We call this “buddha nature” which is inherent in everyone.

Once you start the process of clearing away some of your confusion through Buddhist “skillful means” the results become quite plain. You are a little less confused than you were and you can see how you could disperse the rest of your confusion with a lot more effort and work.

You realize that Wolf isn’t really in the TV and your impulse to throw a pillow at him is part of the confusion that could use some more work. And you can perfectly well concieve of simply letting the emotional impulse go for good, to cease to be bothered, particularly, about the pointless jabber in a box which you yourself can turn on and off. You could do that. It is possible.

Now I myself can claim no great progress at this. For I am lazy and Buddhism is very hard work. The Japanese describe it as like being a mosquito trying to bite an iron ball.

But even the small amount of work I have done has not been totally fruitless. After almost 25 years of it, I am somewhat less confused than I was when I started (I was quite confused then, by the way!) and I’m perfectly confident that I could get clearer if I just worked harder, even to the point of complete and total “liberation”. It is possible, and, however many lifetimes it may take, I am committed to do it and help everyone I can along the way.

Since this discussion must, sooner or later, come to an end, I just want to thank our hostess, and all my friends here for its liveliness and its courtesy.

To all the Christians here I say–be the very best Christian you can be–nothing will be more important for your future.

To all the non-Christians I say–keep focused on the religious questions, even if you don’t come to religious answers.

For in this matter, working on the questions is far more important than “finding the right answer”. This is, at least, what a Buddhist believes.

I did’nt realize you considered your post preaching. I’m not dumb enough to tell someone what to do on their blog.
Besides, I never consider written material I have choosen to read preaching.

And even though the ’state’ is not self aware, what is the reason for government if not to perpetuate itself through the human administrators which means the ship of state is aware, after a fashion. It just isn’t Hal.

About responsibility: As an objectivist, if your damaged something some one loaned you, would you volunteer to replace it? Doesn’t matter how it was damaged, would you
volunteer to replace it? Or would you rationalize it by saying that since there was no clear cut contract or definitive person responsible, you are not therefore accountable?

It is a small hypothetical, but it does contain a moral.
Are we responsible for what is given to us or on loan to us, and if it gets damaged while in our care, do we try to make an effort to repair, replace or restore that which was lost?

Thanks for your defense of the idea that religious truth claims are susceptible of being right and wrong, and are not just matters of opinion, feeling, and the like. True, faith—at least as Christians understand that word—is not simply the outcome of argument, but it isn’t a simple leap in the dark, either. How people get converted may not seem rational to the rationalist, but that doesn’t mean much: rationalism itself is a world-view commitment that itself is bedeviled by all sorts of intellectual difficulties.

Adrian

First I’d have to figure all the nuances out. But, I’m not sure if I’d have something to discuss on a consistent basis. Also, I wouldn’t stop coming to your site because I believe that the way you become better is through keeping near the heat; only way to stay warm(or in this case,SHARP).