Pratityasamutpada mon amour

[Rick]

Are these similar in essence?

Positing/imagining that the agent of a thunderstorm is Zeus.
Positing/imagining that the agent of a human action/emotion/thought is the self.

[PadmaVonSamba]

Are these similar in essence?

Positing/imagining that the agent of a thunderstorm is Zeus.
Positing/imagining that the agent of a human action/emotion/thought is the self.

You forgot positing about
the one asking if the two are similar.


If by your question you mean that basically there’s just material phenomena going on, but people tend to give it an identity, then yeah, the two are kind of similar.

That’s why, when my friends ask me whether I think that bodhisattvas and hungry ghosts and other non-human/animal beings in Buddhist texts are “real” or not, I like to tell them, “no more real than you are” because basically, as you suggest, what we call “me” is basically giving a name and face to a stream of neurological electricity and carbon-based cells.

[Aemilius]

Are these similar in essence?

Positing/imagining that the agent of a thunderstorm is Zeus.
Positing/imagining that the agent of a human action/emotion/thought is the self.

Hua Yen School gives a new perspective to this old buddhist theme. There is a whole series of meditations in this. The following is only the beginning of it:

"First, noumenon and phenomena mutually interpenetrate and are (in a sense) identical. There is no opposition between the two. The one does not cancel out the other. Second, Fazang explains elsewhere that since all things arise interdependently (following Madhyamika), and since the links of interdependence expand throughout the entire universe and at all time (past, present, and future depend upon each other, which is to say the total dharmadhatu arises simultaneously), so in the totality of interdependence, the dharmadhatu, all phenomena are mutually interpenetrating and identical."

"In Fazang's influential Essay on the Golden Lion (Taishō no. 1881), Fazang uses the statue of a golden Chinese lion as a metaphor for reality. The gold itself stands in for the ultimate principle, which the appearance and relative shape of the lion statue is the relative and dependent phenomena as they are perceived by living beings. Because the ultimate principle is boundless, empty and ceaseless, it is like gold in that it can be transformed into many forms and shapes. Also, even though phenomena appear as particular things, they lack any independent existence, since they all depend on the ultimate principle."

[Aemilius]

This is an other kind of issue or view. How does the rope arise? for example.

"Nature origination
According to Fazang's commentary on Mahayana Awakening of Faith, all phenomena (dharmas) arise from a single ultimate source, the "nature" or "One Mind".This is variously described as Suchness, the tathagatagarbha (the womb of tathagatas), buddha-nature, or just "nature". This nature is the ontological source and basis of all things, which is prior to any objects or conscious subjects. This doctrine which states that all dharmas arise from the buddha-nature has been termed "nature-origination" (xingqi), and the term derives from chapter 32 of the Avatamsaka Sutra, titled Nature Origination of the Jewel King Tathagata (Baowang rulai xingqi pin, Skt. Tathâgata-utpatti-sambhava-nirdesa-sûtra).

For Fazang, nature origination means "the appearance of the Absolute in the phenomenal world...this is the appearance of Tathagata in the world as a teacher for benefit of living beings and the appearance of the wisdom of Tathagata in living beings."This pure nature is also not separate froom living beings and all the phenomena (dharmas) in the universe. This is because the Buddha only manifests in the world due to the needs of sentient beings and he would not come into the world if there were no impure phenomena. Thus, for Fazang, the ultimate nature is non-dual with all relative phenomena and interconnected with all of them. As such, the source is still empty of self-existence (svabhava) and is not an essential nature that is independent of all things, but rather it is interdependent on the whole of all phenomena."
(Van Norden, Bryan and Nicholaos Jones, "Huayan Buddhism")