Peter Brown and Dzogchen

[Anders]

Come now. It's a lot like Brahman, which is why they are so often compared.

No, brahman is sat, real, where as dharmakāya is the total realization of emptiness free from all extremes and its attendant twin omniscience.

In other words dharmakāya needs a realization to bring it about. Brahman does not.

Unless we talk of Samantabhadra who never fell into ignorance and so forth. I realise this is taken less literal than in Advaita, but I do think it goes to show that the ideas overlap and flow into each other enough that it would be fair to say the differences fall moreso on the 'subtle' side of the fence than they do 'nothing at all like each other'.

[Malcolm]

Come now. It's a lot like Brahman, which is why they are so often compared.

No, brahman is sat, real, where as dharmakāya is the total realization of emptiness free from all extremes and its attendant twin omniscience.

In other words dharmakāya needs a realization to bring it about. Brahman does not.

Unless we talk of Samantabhadra who never fell into ignorance and so forth.

Now you are making a huge mistake. Samantabhadra does experience ignorance, i.e., the ignorance identical with the cause, and the connate ignorance. What "he" never experiences is the imputing ignorance, thus Samantabhadra never experiences samsara.

Samantabhadra also experiences liberation; doing so without gathering virtue; just as sentient beings experience bondage without gathering nonvirtue.

Please study Dzogchen more carefully. Even rdzogs chen tantras themselves differentiate Dzogchen from Advaita.

[Anders]

I am all for differentiating them. I think they should be. What I am talking about is the degree to which they should be differentiated.

When we are in the ballpark of essentially saying "hinduist say their unconditioned timeless and totally free brahman is ontologically real, which makes it totally different from the unconditioned timeless and totally free Nirvana of the Buddhists, which is merely epistomologically actual" I think it ends up overstating the case.

But then I tend to lean towards the view that advaitins are, more or less, swimming in the same waters of liberation as Buddhists are, albeit in a way that, to me anyway, ends up with a coarser one due to unrecognised views added to it.

The differences can be crucial, but not to me 'totally different' since to me they are more expressions of different ceilings of efficient orthopraxy (something Buddhists with conceptual right view on this matter can just as easily fall prone to - and something that at any rate varies from school to school, guru to guru and practitioner to practitioner within Buddhism as well) than "two distinct schools with two entirely distinct results." I personally think this latter view is just religious competitiveness rearing its head, especially given how much Advaita has borrowed from Buddhism over the centuries.*

[Malcolm]

"two distinct schools with two entirely distinct results."

They are two distinct schools with entirely distinct results because they have entirely different bases.

Dzogchen is predicated on dependent origination and emptiness, Advaita refutes both dependent origination and emptiness.

I am not making any truth claim here for either one. I am merely pointing out that the truth they claim is different.

[Anders]

"two distinct schools with two entirely distinct results."

They are two distinct schools with entirely distinct results because they have entirely different bases.

Do elaborate. I realise in Vajrayana it's all about 'the basis' and such, but from where I am sitting, they are both centered around a practical basis of ethical conduct, generosity, meditative prowess and a model of liberation based on freeing oneself from mental affliction and proliferation, most importantly of the cognitive kind, of which the main one is falsely apprehending a self.

That to me is a common basis that suggest common orthopactical waters from where the differences in result to be expected are more fine-tuning the depth of such liberation (ie, advaitin models retains some clinging to various cognitions according to Buddhism) than 'entirely distinct results'.

edit:

Dzogchen is predicated on dependent origination and emptiness, Advaita refutes both dependent origination and emptiness.

I am not making any truth claim here for either one. I am merely pointing out that the truth they claim is different.

I don't consider these bases, moreso fruits. Bases are, to me, what I described above. And cause and effect would dictate that, name-and-form of sectarian adherence aside, the results of such a shared basis ought to be broadly similar.

I think they are. 'broadly' speaking that is. They both arrive at an unconditioned 'state' of liberation that supposedly frees one from all future karma. From here the streams diverge, but I tend to consider such divergences as family differences more than 'fundamentally distinct'. Of course, such differences may themselves also be rather crucial in regards to the effiency of a given path towards the actual liberation we all presuppose is the case (and the extent of which Buddhism and Advaita also differs on). But given that Shrvavakayana is to me in the family of liberation, I don't find it a huge stretch to consider Advaita not that far off either.

[Malcolm]

"two distinct schools with two entirely distinct results."

They are two distinct schools with entirely distinct results because they have entirely different bases.

Do elaborate.

Dzogchen is predicated on dependent origination and emptiness, Advaita refutes both dependent origination and emptiness. The difference, as always, is view.

If you confine your notion of liberation to controlling afflictions, there there is no difference at all between all the various ethical systems which recommend self-control in conjunction with contemplative quietude.

The question here is whether or not the cessation of rebirth is effected by seeing dependent origination or by seeing an ontological totality. Take your pick and run with it. But you cannot pick both because they are mutually exclusive views.

One of the key points of the Dzogchen tradition is understanding all these different tīrthika [samsaric] and bauddha [nirvanic] tenet systems.

[Anders]

Maybe a few (very) crude diagrams will illustrate the difference I am talking about:





Where 'catholicism' would fall under the umbrella of those who do good creating good karma to increase the odds of meeting with the dharma of liberation, etc.

More or less the difference I suppose between the Ekayana view of Arhats, who will continue towards buddhahood so long as they do not fall into the view of personal nirvana and the 'seed of bodhi' model, where the fruit of the Arhat is fundamentally and irreversibly distinct from the fruit of Buddhahood.

[Malcolm]

Maybe a few (very) crude diagrams will illustrate the difference I am talking about:





Where 'catholicism' would fall under the umbrella of those who do good creating good karma to increase the odds of meeting with the dharma of liberation, etc.

More or less the difference I suppose between the Ekayana view of Arhats, who will continue towards buddhahood so long as they do not fall into the view of personal nirvana and the 'seed of bodhi' model, where the fruit of the Arhat is fundamentally and irreversibly distinct from the fruit of Buddhahood.

I don't really buy into the integral models of world spirituality.

[Anders]

The question here is whether or not the cessation of rebirth is effected by seeing dependent origination or by seeing an ontological totality. Take your pick and run with it. But you cannot pick both because they are mutually exclusive views.

I get that, but this still revolves around a 'view of the ultimate' model of liberation. If we take a 'shred of affliction' model as early Buddhism does (I think the former is really mostly useful for determining how practically useful a model is) for our measurement, it comes out to 'no-thing at all to hang a shred of clinging to' vs 'a few ontological shreds of clinging of a mostly purified mind'. Ie, cessation of rebirth is not so much effected by 'seeing dependent origination' as it is by 'ending clinging to views of self' and so forth (from which the perception of dependent origination is produced).

I am understating it here for dramatic effect and all and I do appreciate that the expected view of liberation seems to have a strong effect on the eventual outcome for its successful practitioners.

[Anders]

I don't really buy into the integral models of world spirituality.

Practically or fundamentally? Practically speaking, I could be inclined to agree. But doesn't karma more or less dictate that spirituality is fundamentally integral?

[Malcolm]

The question here is whether or not the cessation of rebirth is effected by seeing dependent origination or by seeing an ontological totality. Take your pick and run with it. But you cannot pick both because they are mutually exclusive views.

I get that, but this still revolves around a 'view of the ultimate' model of liberation. If we take a 'shred of affliction' model as early Buddhism does (I think the former is really mostly useful for determining how practically useful a model is) for our measurement, it comes out to 'no-thing at all to hang a shred of clinging to' vs 'a few ontological shreds of clinging of a mostly purified mind'. Ie, cessation of rebirth is not so much effected by 'seeing dependent origination' as it is by 'ending clinging to views of self' and so forth (from which the perception of dependent origination is produced).

I am understating it here for dramatic effect and all and I do appreciate that the expected view of liberation seems to have a strong effect on the eventual outcome for its successful practitioners.

Any shred of clinging is sufficient to sink your battleship.

[Anders]

Any shred of clinging is sufficient to sink your battleship.

Ha! I will concede to that, but I am dragging all the Buddhist below the status of arhats and mahasattvas with me to a watery grave.

[DGA]

I don't really buy into the integral models of world spirituality.

Practically or fundamentally? Practically speaking, I could be inclined to agree. But doesn't karma more or less dictate that spirituality is fundamentally integral?

the word "integral" means many different things. Would you mind explaining what you mean by the term for the purpose of this discussion?

[gad rgyangs]

doesn't it say somewhere something about "relinquishing all views"?

[Malcolm]

I don't really buy into the integral models of world spirituality.

Practically or fundamentally? Practically speaking, I could be inclined to agree. But doesn't karma more or less dictate that spirituality is fundamentally integral?

the word "integral" means many different things. Would you mind explaining what you mean by the term for the purpose of this discussion?

Well, I had in mind the the attempt by various modern perennialists to come up with models that allows absolute equivalencies to be made and hierarchies to be established among various spiritual traditions.

M

[Malcolm]

doesn't it say somewhere something about "relinquishing all views"?

Well, there is the intellectual "giving up of views" and then there is realizing the nature of dependent origination which is free from views.

[Anders]

I don't really buy into the integral models of world spirituality.

Practically or fundamentally? Practically speaking, I could be inclined to agree. But doesn't karma more or less dictate that spirituality is fundamentally integral?

the word "integral" means many different things. Would you mind explaining what you mean by the term for the purpose of this discussion?

What I mean by 'integral' here is that fundamentally, since all beings are driven by impersonal karma which does not adhere to arbitrary labels of 'Buddhism', 'Hinduism' and so forth, we are all of one spirituality, in the sense that we are all driven by various degrees of skilful and unskilful habits, the exact direction and outcome of can not be determined by the crude appelations of 'Buddhist', 'hindu' and so forth that this Saha world enjoins us to pin beings into. They are at best roughly denominated fellowships of common karma, but even then it is hard to say what kind of common karma that may be from case to case.

Practically speaking, I think there are better results from not picking and choosing from all traditions on the premise that 'they are all the same'; on the basis of the maxim that it is 'better to dig deeply from one well than shallowly from many'. So in that sense, I am much in favour of the 'each tradition to its own'.

Being able to correctly make such distinctions between traditions is to me a good sign of immersion in a tradition and so can be a positive thing (although just as often, a sign of inherited and rehearsed sectarianism). But I make such distinctions against the assumed backdrop that they are fundamentally arbitrary distinctions which we can not in good faith expect reality to rigorously follow.

And besides the practical side of that, I do think that there are fundamental differences in result between most of these paths, within and outside of Buddhism.

[Grigoris]

What I mean by 'integral' here is that fundamentally, since all beings are driven by impersonal karma which does not adhere to arbitrary labels of 'Buddhism', 'Hinduism' and so forth, we are all of one spirituality, in the sense that we are all driven by various degrees of skilful and unskilful habits, the exact direction and outcome of can not be determined by the crude appelations of 'Buddhist', 'hindu' and so forth that this Saha world enjoins us to pin beings into. They are at best roughly denominated fellowships of common karma, but even then it is hard to say what kind of common karma that may be from case to case.

I can dig what you are saying here, but where does Mahamudra and Dzogchen (and maybe even Chan, I say maybe coz I don't know enough about it) fit into this model? I ask this because, according to Mahamudra and Dzogchen, when you are realising the state, karma doesn't come into play at all ie it goes beyond a mere ethical system based on the accumulation of merit and the forgoing of demerit .

[krodha]

'Permanent' and 'unchanging' in the buddhadharma, are different from 'permanent' and 'unchanging' in Hindu Vedanta etc.

Buddhahood is 'permanent' in that it's irreversible. Emptiness is 'permanent' and 'unchanging' because it is non-arising. That which is non-arisen is unborn, what does not originate does not cease, ergo the terms 'permanent' and 'unchanging' are sometimes used to describe dharmakāya.

Dharmakāya is nothing like Brahman.

Come now. It's a lot like Brahman, which is why they are so often compared.

Which is not to say there or not more or less subtle differences. But they obviously have a great many strong similarities.

Not even close to Brahman.

[gad rgyangs]

doesn't it say somewhere something about "relinquishing all views"?

Well, there is the intellectual "giving up of views" and then there is realizing the nature of dependent origination which is free from views.

"dependent origination" is also a view.