Re: Termas and Cultural Paradigms
Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2013 3:38 am
So you personally believe in crow's teeth and turtle fur?Yudron wrote:Husung: The Dzogchen tradition does not have a dichotomy between relative and absolute truth.
A Buddhist discussion forum on Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism
https://www.dharmawheel.net:443/
So you personally believe in crow's teeth and turtle fur?Yudron wrote:Husung: The Dzogchen tradition does not have a dichotomy between relative and absolute truth.
I haven't come across references to crows feet and turtle fur, but in this amazing universe it wouldn't surprise me if something like that existed somewhere.Huseng wrote:So you personally believe in crow's teeth and turtle fur?Yudron wrote:Husung: The Dzogchen tradition does not have a dichotomy between relative and absolute truth.
Crow's teeth, turtle fur and flowers in the sky refer to phenomena that are never observed. This is from Indian philosophy.Yudron wrote: I haven't come across references to crows feet and turtle fur, but in this amazing universe it wouldn't surprise me if something like that existed somewhere.
Huseng wrote:Crow's teeth, turtle fur and flowers in the sky refer to phenomena that are never observed. This is from Indian philosophy.Yudron wrote: I haven't come across references to crows feet and turtle fur, but in this amazing universe it wouldn't surprise me if something like that existed somewhere.
The point is that arguing for the existence of phenomena that nobody has observed and that cannot be inferred as having occurred given reasonable evidence is foolish. It doesn't serve anyone's benefit to promote fantasy as reality and then conflate well defined Buddhist ideas with it to justify one's belief in the existence of phenomena nobody witnesses.
Plenty of people have ghost experiences or memories of past lives, which are evidence for the actual occurrence of such phenomena, but nobody witnesses infants literally conceived in lotuses and/or the sun being stopped in its tracks.
What occurs in the mental sphere of course is different. You can witness such things and they might hold great meaning, but our physical world conventionally operates on different principles.
The two truths or the negation thereof does not render fantasy a reality.Yudron wrote:Well, truly--I ain't kidding--the idea of the two truths is strongly critiqued in the Dzogchen literature. This is a key point of Dzogchen.
Conventionally the sun rises and sets. Ultimately there is no sun that could ever rise. The rejection of both truths renders speech insufficient, hence to speak of fantasy as a reality by virtue of negating the two truths is truly fallacious.So-- the sun does not stop "moving" in the sky, because human beings perceive that time is linear. Humans take a series of moments of the reflection of electromagnetic waves in the retina of a human eyeball... and make up a story that that "the sun is moving across the sky." It's just a concept.
The evolution of hagiographical literature should be understood.Yudron wrote:Your suggestion is, that the lamas of the Nyingma lineage should condemn all the parts our lineage history that aren't believable to people in modern developed societies, and move toward promoting a Vajrayana that does not believe in siddhis... past, present, or future.
The idea that literal interpretation somehow corresponds to ordinary beings' perceptions just seems a bit wrong. I'm not even sure it could really be said to come under the heading of relative truth.Huseng wrote:The evolution of hagiographical literature should be understood.Yudron wrote:Your suggestion is, that the lamas of the Nyingma lineage should condemn all the parts our lineage history that aren't believable to people in modern developed societies, and move toward promoting a Vajrayana that does not believe in siddhis... past, present, or future.
This is not to say that extraordinary and supermundane abilities do not and cannot exist, but for ordinary beings the sun rises and sets. To say it really did get literally stopped one day is simply ludicrous (as I said show me in ancient records another example where people witnessed the sun halting, which would have been a very big deal for the astronomers and historians of Europe, India and China).
On the other hand, there might be a symbolic or mystical purport behind such narratives where the sun is halted. It also might have been a vision given to disciples or something to that effect.
If so, the sun did not get stopped in the sky at least as far as ordinary beings' perception goes. In which case there is no point advocating that this really did happen as far as conventional reality goes.futerko wrote: The idea that literal interpretation somehow corresponds to ordinary beings' perceptions just seems a bit wrong. I'm not even sure it could really be said to come under the heading of relative truth.
Maybe it was a particularly dull talk and time appeared to stand still?Huseng wrote:If so, the sun did not get stopped in the sky at least as far as ordinary beings' perception goes. In which case there is no point advocating that this really did happen as far as conventional reality goes.futerko wrote: The idea that literal interpretation somehow corresponds to ordinary beings' perceptions just seems a bit wrong. I'm not even sure it could really be said to come under the heading of relative truth.
Yeh, he probably started on that jaded old story: "remember that time I burnt down the Sandal Wood Forest..."futerko wrote:Maybe it was a particularly dull talk and time appeared to stand still?
Emptiness refutes the possibility of self-nature (sva-bhava).futerko wrote:The "ordinary" view is that things only appear a certain way and that there is in fact some real/literal Truth behind them, variously explained by ideas such as; God, the Devil, luck, fate, witchcraft, the C.I.A., the Illuminati, etc. etc., and is exactly what is refuted by the doctrine of emptiness.
...and yet you still insist on some kind of independent consistency to conventional "reality" - if someone sees the sun stand still then that is what they see, arguments concerning the objective truth about the sun are based entirely on the possibility of the idea of self-nature.Huseng wrote:Emptiness refutes the possibility of self-nature (sva-bhava).futerko wrote:The "ordinary" view is that things only appear a certain way and that there is in fact some real/literal Truth behind them, variously explained by ideas such as; God, the Devil, luck, fate, witchcraft, the C.I.A., the Illuminati, etc. etc., and is exactly what is refuted by the doctrine of emptiness.
I don't think Yudron is talking about fantasy or reality. I'm not sure who you're debating in that sense.Huseng wrote:The two truths or the negation thereof does not render fantasy a reality.Yudron wrote:Well, truly--I ain't kidding--the idea of the two truths is strongly critiqued in the Dzogchen literature. This is a key point of Dzogchen.
Conventionally the sun rises and sets. Ultimately there is no sun that could ever rise. The rejection of both truths renders speech insufficient, hence to speak of fantasy as a reality by virtue of negating the two truths is truly fallacious.So-- the sun does not stop "moving" in the sky, because human beings perceive that time is linear. Humans take a series of moments of the reflection of electromagnetic waves in the retina of a human eyeball... and make up a story that that "the sun is moving across the sky." It's just a concept.
Conventional reality has much observed consistency to it. Fire warms. Water moistens. The sun rises and sets. All organisms die.futerko wrote: ...and yet you still insist on some kind of independent consistency to conventional "reality" - if someone sees the sun stand still then that is what they see, arguments concerning the objective truth about the sun are based entirely on the possibility of the idea of self-nature.