Can we (at least the meditators) agree that my conscious conviction is just a small part of the mental party? I sit down, try to ‘meditate’ and find out that my mind holds on to thoughts and feelings without ‘me’ wanting it. The clinging to life, to an ego, and the fear that comes along with it - is instinctual, involuntary and real on that level, no matter if in conversations people think they are pure materialists etc. A real materialist (i.e. including the subconscious) is free from a lot of suffering, same as a real nihilist.
On Sutta Central, it is Snp 5.7 (which allows readers the courtesy to easily click on it & find it).
It may possibly be a very early text. Who really knows? For example, it uses the term ‘nāmakāyā’, which is not common in the EBTs.
However, all texts must be reconciled with the core teachings (& their terminology) since the Buddha-Dhamma is not something diverse. In other words, the core Dhamma is rarely found in obscure texts like Snp 5.7 because the Buddha is often talking to Joe Blow wandering down the road rather than to his monks and thus the language used can be rather obscure & not conform to core definitions.
This is because the discussion is conducted based on the language of the ‘outsider’. Thus the Buddha often responds with language suitable for the outsider. The Buddha does not simply recite a stock teaching but actually engages in a ‘client-centred’ discussion or ‘interaction’.
The Buddha actually listens to the other person, replying to sentence with sentence, rather than merely dictates in an authoritarian & dogmatic manner.[quote=“cjmacie, post:21, topic:5468”]
Wynne summarizes this as (pp.98-99 print; p.86 Ebook):
1075–76 Upasīva asks if the one who is liberated/dead exists in a state of eternal bliss, or ceases to exist.
[/quote]
The above is an example of the problem I was referring to.
Obscure words (atthaṅgato so udauda vā so natthi) are used in Snp 5.7, which Wynne interprets to mean " dead".
Upasīva asks:
The one who has come to rest/ceased, is he then nothing? or is he actually eternally healthy?
Contrary to the interpretation of Wynne (of " liberated/dead"), which sounds wrong to me, Upasīva here is caught up in the two wrong views of ‘nihilism’ & ‘eternalism’, because Upasīva seems to believe a “self” (“atta”), i.e., a “he”, will be nothing (so natthi) or be eternally free from disease (sassatiyā arogo). Upasīva seems lost in ‘self-views’; to which the Lord Buddha replies:
There is no measure when coming to rest
Yet the Lord Buddha does not mention ‘anatta’ (‘not-self’). Instead, he gives a fairly standard response as he often does to stop devotees becoming personally obsessed with him in terms of a ‘clung-to-guru-personality’.
So how does this quote relate to this topic of ‘nihilism’? 
It is a discussion subforum rather than a blind faith in gurus forum. It is important for trainees to become fluent in study & analysis rather than copy, paste & recite excerpts from clung-to-gurus.
When right view is perfected, there is only one Teacher; thus discussion helps the perfection of right view:
It is impossible that one come to right view should go to another Teacher. It is possible that an ordinary person (puthujjana) should go to another Teacher.
MN 115
Kind regards
You seem to be approaching the issue from a dogmatic stance. You seem to be saying that only buddhists, and no others, can achieve nibbana. Whereas, in fact, it is entirely possible that an atheist may to some degree be freed from clinging and may in fact achieve some independent knowledge of the dhamma.
Your very reasoning discounts the possibility of Pacceka-Buddhas, which Gotama himself said existed. Pacceka-Buddha were not buddhists. The whole point is that they taught themselves and achieved knowledge of the dhamma independently. In that sense, the dhamma is not ‘buddhist’. It is there to be investigated by anyone as Gotama himself invited us to do so. Invited us to investigate not the suttas, not buddhist doctrine and not the pali language, but the dhamma itself.
Furthermore, a corollary of your view is that if we found one non-buddhist that is genuinely not scared of death, then we invalidate the dhamma.
Epicurus argued and believed that death is not to be feared, since while we exist, our death does not occur; and when our death occurs, we do not exist. In other words, it is genuinely irrational to fear death which is the end of existence, since when we cease to exist we experience naught. He then argued that this irrational fear is one source of mental suffering, and is a type of psychological curse. He taught way of life leading to the absence of such mental suffering, called ataraxia: (@Ataraxia_Now 
) the state of perfect equanimity and freedom from worry and anxiety. His ideas are not radically different to Gotama and in fact share some genuine similarity.
So, by your own view, if Epicurus genuinely didn’t fear death, then he invalidates the dhamma.
Personally, I think the dhamma is not the exclusive domain of ‘buddhists’. One look at nationalist monks convinces me of that. The dhamma exists and is to be investigated by anyone that wants to do so, irrespective of their ‘religion’.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/
Ataraxia: a state of freedom from emotional disturbance and anxiety; tranquillity. ATARAXIA Definition & Usage Examples | Dictionary.com
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Nibbana can be attained only by someone who follows the Path. And the Path begins with right view: the view that all does not come to an end with death and the cycle of birth, suffering and death is without a discernible beginning and will continue to happen as long as delusion is present.
Someone unfamiliar with the Dhamma might very well live a comparatively peaceful life with little to no material posessions. There are innumerable examples of such people, including all the ascetics in India, wandering with a robe and maybe a staff. But, do they have complete knowledge of the origin of suffering and thus see the way to eradicate suffering altogether ?
Well, I don’t recall saying that no one should investigate the Dhamma, so I am not sure what you are arguing here…
Coincidentally, I was reading MN 116 yesterday. 
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.116.piya.html
Not really. An arahant has eradicated other pollutants in the mind too. Lust, greed, hatred, anger, possessiveness and everything else that can give rise to suffering.
The Dhamma is for the eradication of suffering and to bring the cycle of suffering to an end. Mere sophistry and wordplay is not enough to attain this. Ancient Greeks, in general, were mostly concerned about how to get through this life in the most painless way that is possible. Yes, there are similarities with their outlook that posited renunciation and the Dhamma, but that’s where it ends. Just saying ‘I don’t fear death’ doesn’t mean that one is actually devoid of fear. If that where the case, then all the soldiers who don armor and walk into a bloody battlefield saying that they are fearless and are prepared to die for their country would be our role-models.
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That just begs the question. Why is belief in rebirth a necessary prerequisite to seeing things as they are tilakkhaṇa (anatta, anicca, dukkha)?
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Precisely. If materialism is true, the noble eightfold path is really redundant. It is only in the context of rebirth that early Buddhism makes sense.
There is no real Tathāgata, in the sense of something you can pin down as ever-present. This does not make the Tathāgata irrelevant as a phenomenon of nature. The Tathāgata is the manifestation of five khandhas, five constituents of existence, imbued with exceptional wisdom. We should be extremely grateful that the five khandhas can manifest in this way, for they are the foundation upon which we may reduce and even eliminate suffering in our lives.
There is nothing mysterious about the Tathāgata or the arahant, apart from their supreme insight into the nature of existence.
I would suggest the following translations are more accurate:
Abrahmacariya: “Not abstaining from sexuality.” Kāmesumicchācāra: “Wrong sensual conduct,” which is really a reference to sexuality.
I believe we tend to read too much into such passages. The Buddha is here speaking to Brahmins, all of whom would have taken the existence of an attā for granted. The Buddha’s idea that someone might just cease at death is revolutionary and different from all philosophies that existed at the time. The simplest and most straightforward way of understanding “there is no measuring” of the arahant who has died and “all ways of speaking [about it/him] are also removed” is that the arahant has just ceased. There is no need to bring in any mystical dimension.
I would argue that the Buddha used such indirect language because he was dealing with a very delicate subject. He would be mistaken for an annihilationist unless he chose his words with great care. To state outright the arahant ceases at death would probably have been misunderstood, and thus the more roundabout and cumbersome formulation.
It is not depressing! It is the highest happiness. It only appears depressing because of the sense of self. It is delusion that is letting you down.
There is an important distinction between the materialist point of view and the Buddhist view, as pointed out by @dxm_dxm above. Materialist have a sense of self, and it is for this reason that death does not appeal to many materialists (although it may of course appeal to those who have had enough of all this). Whether this sense of self is solidified into a view of self or not is really irrelevant. The arahant, by contrast, has no sense of self. For them all there is is suffering; experience itself is seen as suffering. When experience comes to an end, they attain the highest happiness. And they have nothing to lose, since there never was anything apart from changeable and unsatisfactory phenomena. When it comes to an end … hurray! All you have lost is suffering.
This seems overly optimistic to me. The world is, and has been, full of dodgy but charismatic spiritual leaders with heaps of followers. Check out this one, for example.
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The topic of rebirth has been thrashed endlessly in numerous forum threads, in essays etc. It gets tiring at some point. Sorry
I believe this is a misconception. It is based on the idea that the the goal of the Buddha’s path is something that is only fully realized at the point of the arahant’s death. But the goal of the Buddha’s path is attained during life. It is the unsurpassed bliss, peace and freedom that are experienced when the asavas are totally destroyed, the burden of attachments is fully released, the I-making and my-making processes are temporarily halted and dukkha is brought completely to an end.
K. R. Norman has a paper in which he clarifies the distinction between nibbana and parinibbana. This is not distinction between nibbana during life and nibbana in death. Similarly it is not a distinction between a “preliminary” nibbana and “final” nibbana. According to Norman, the prefix “pari” is just used to signify the difference between a state and the event of the attainment of that state. Nibbana is the state of being released, and a parinibbana is the attainment or achievement of nibbana.
The Mahaparinibbana sutta is not a sutta which describes how the Buddha, at long last, achieved some exceptional condition of “parinibbana” which can only occur at death. It is a sutta which describes the last time the Buddha attained nibbana, something he had done many times before. It is a “great” sutta because it is very long, and describes events of great significance.
Perhaps one problem in contemporary treatments of nibbana is that they are strongly inflected by the western Protestant conception of the “assurance of salvation”. There are some versions of this notion in some of the early texts as well. The idea here seems to be that the real or total nibbana is both the ultimate goal and something that only happens when the arahant dies. So that then raises the question about what the heck happened under that Bodhi tree. The answer that is sometimes given is that the main point of what happened under the Bodhi tree is that that’s when the Buddha realized that he had finally brought an end to the kammic processes that produce rebirth, and so his happiness consisted mainly in the assurance of the fact that he was bearing his last body. Salvation is construed purely negatively as the ending of everything, and the greatest happiness that occurs during life is nothing but the pessimist’s relief over the fact that he has finally succeeded in bringing it all to an and, and now all he has to do is wait patiently for his long sought-after extinguishment. Apparently he even wants happiness to be extinguished.
This misconception, if I am right, risks turning “Buddhism” into little more than a miserable but pious suicide cult in which people are terrified by the endless stretches of sadness they imagine before them, and desperately try to end it all. Ending it all is itself mistakenly viewed as the goal. They only reason such people don’t “use the knife” is because they think they are trapped and will only be reborn again. Practicing this form of Buddhism actually risks making people more unhappy and depressed.
This completely misses the happiness the Buddha taught people how to achieve, and that is frequently attested in the joyful verses and other recorded words of the arahants. The correct conception of the goal is a much more optimistic picture, because even if one doesn’t attain the summum bonum, the supreme bliss of total release, the path through lesser attainments is an assent through higher and higher forms of happiness. So the path is eminently worth pursuing even if the goal isn’t achieved.
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In the words of the Buddha himself:
"When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two…five, ten…fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion: ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.’ Thus I remembered my manifold past lives in their modes & details.
"This was the first knowledge I attained in the first watch of the night. Ignorance was destroyed; knowledge arose; darkness was destroyed; light arose — as happens in one who is heedful, ardent, & resolute. But the pleasant feeling that arose in this way did not invade my mind or remain.
And he goes on to describe his attainment of the other two knowledges.
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Maybe those are the words of the Buddha; maybe they aren’t.
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But by that yardstick, we can discard anything in the Canon that doesn’t appeal to our intellect.
I am ambivalent about rebirth and the current age doesn’t really foster such apparently quaint theories, but my view doesn’t matter here at all. As far as the EBTs are concerned, rebirth is thoroughly stitched into its fabric.
And the Buddha made it clear that his Dhamma is patisotagami and an individual needs to shed all pre-conceived notions about the world. Some of the images that the Buddha drew are quite unsettling: food as cannibalistic fodder, sensuality as a pit of flaming hot charcoal, copulation with a snake is the lesser evil etc.
Selective interpretation while disregarding the giant elephant in the room would be a half-hearted inquiry, IMHO.
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It’s not just Buddhists who claim to have witnessed (through deep samadhi) rebirth and planes of existence of beings in other dimensions .
Taoists, christian mystics, hindus, pretty anyone who has deep samadhi has the potential to verify for themselves.
Here’s an eminent American scientist who was previously a skeptic, and Atheist if I remember correctly, but through his experiences working with his patients he becomes convinced of reincarnation of souls.
https://www.amazon.com/Many-Lives-Masters-Prominent-Psychiatrist-ebook/dp/B007EDYNAO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496157298&sr=8-1&keywords=many+lives+many+masters
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And neither does the public opinion in you’re country foster materialism. Creationism is still the dominant world view in you’re country.
As for current discoveries supporting materialism, that could not be further from the truth. Not only does “the hard problem of consciousness” have never been solved despite so many brilliant minds trying to solve it for centuries, but materialism has been refuted by modern discoveries.
Those that study sociology for example are overwhealmingly postmodernist. They start from the truth that society does have an influence on culture. A child raised in saudi arabia will be different than a child raised in Switzerland. Nobody can deny the importance of society and culture. But they fall into an extreme and go on to say that everything comes from cultural conditioning and end up contradicted by reality. They end up saying gender is just a social construct and other such ideas. They end up saying “everything comes from cultural conditioning” and ignore the importance of matter or other things. As Buddha would say, “they overshoot what can be know though direct observance and end up contradicted by reality”.
In the same way, those who study form end up in an extreme. Nobody can deny the importance of matter and how many things it does determine. But when they say “everything comes from matter, including consciousness, including volition” they overshoot what can be known through direct ovservence, since the hard problem of consciousness is called like that for a reason. And they end up contradicted by reality, such as neuroplasticity, the placebo effect, quantum phisics etc. They fall into an extreme.
Buddha path is the middle way and that is why it can not be contradicted by direct observence from reality. It if would ever get contradicted, then it would be proven false same as materialism or postmodernism for example.
In order to know what happens with consciousness after death, you need to know where it originated from. Unless you know the cause because of witch it originated in the first place, you can never know if it will originate again like it did before or weather it will cease without reminder. You can not know that unless you know the cause because of witch it originated in the first place. And current knowledge does not support the materialist view. As for popular opinion in one country or another, it could not matter less for the truth. Many people believing in an idea in a certain country at a certain point in time does not make an idea right.
A good example of a person falling into an extreme recently is me in this topic: Buddhism and society - What did Buddha really had to say about it? - #16 by dxm_dxm
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Not necessarily. But we do have to bring all of our intelligence to bear on figuring out what was actually going on during the events and teaching situations the suttas record. The suttas are not themselves 100% internally consistent. And in some cases, even where competing doctrines might be logically consistent in a strict sense, they seem to point in very different directions with great difference in emphasis. The suttas also contains separate bodies of schematic teachings and systematizations that seem to treat some of the same phenomena from overlapping, but conceptually distinct points of view. I am increasingly of the view that, in addition to containing many, many words of the Buddha himself, the suttas also record teachings from a variety of earlier, contemporaneous and later spiritual teachers, not all clearly distinguished by the tradition from those of the Buddha.
We also have to keep in mind that the more spontaneous, on-the-spot, teachings that were not given in the form of a prepared discourse to be committed to memory, were remembered and passed down not by the Buddha, but by lesser minds and disciples who were struggling to understand teachings that were obscure to them. In some cases, it appears that occasions on which the Buddha was merely describing or reporting the teachings of other teachers and sects were mistakenly construed by someone as the views of the Buddha himself. It is also possible that poetic utterances, stories and parables whose intended meaning was figurative were sometimes mistakenly interpreted by some disciples as literal accounts. And in many cases, what a reciter honestly thinks he heard might have been conditioned by his own predispositions and limits.
We also have to interpret both the words and the deeds recorded in the suttas. Sometimes the deeds speak louder than the words. For example, if there are doctrinal teachings in the suttas that suggest that, following his awakening under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha never again experienced suffering, these have to be balanced against those texts in which the Buddha is depicted a experiencing irritation, weariness or exasperation. One way of harmonizing these conflicts is to assume that what the Buddha learned is how to reach and enter the suffering-free state whenever he wanted to. But when he emerged from that perfectly detached and secluded state into more ordinary states in which he had to interact with people and the material world, although he remained generally quite peaceful and composed, he was somewhat subject to renewed suffering.
In reading the suttas, I am guided by the working assumption that the Buddha was a great spiritual master who achieved something exceptional, and was able to pass on what he achieved, and the means to achieving it, to others. The task is to understand the nature of that achievement and the path to it. How the achievement and path are described, in the tradition that has come down to us, are very helpful and should be referred to again and again. They record how the Buddha, and perhaps others, understood the nature of that attainment. But we have to balance these descriptions against the dhamma as it is directly experienced in practice, and also against everything else we know about the world from other sources.
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I’m grateful to read so many different perspectives. And I’m further interested in how you guys interpret the quote from the first post…
Maybe those are the words of the Buddha but; the maybe interpretations of those words aren’t of the Buddha.
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In my opinion, what is meant by “tahagatha” in that quote is a self, not the 5 aggregates. It is because of the same reason that he replyed in that way to a Bhramin when asked weather the tahagatha exists after death. And he explains this in that very sutta at the end.
If one is asking: Does the tahagatha (as a self) exist - then the answer is no.
If one is asking: Does the tahagatha in the sense of the 5 aggregates (body, consciousness etc that make up the tahagatha) exist or not, then yes the 5 do aggregates exist. Check SN 22.94
The person asking the question might understand a tahagatha in any of the 2 ways described above. In the case of that sutta, the Buddha answered like that because the person understood the tahagatha as in the first way of understanding. That is why he explains “If I were to say the tahagatha does not exist, then he would become more confused and understand that the self that used to exist now is no more” - when in reality there was never a self to begin with.
The tahagatha, just like any other being, is just like a machine, like a mountain, like a computer. An amalgam of aggregates that work according to conditions. There is no self to be found in the tahagatha just like there is no self to be found in a computer or in a forest.
One of the contemplations recommanded is about contemplating how both the internal world and the external world are empty of a self. The Buddha too was empty of a self. He was just like a machine, like a computer.
I interpret it to mean something like, “Since nothing that either is the Tathāgata or belongs to Tathāgata can be grasped in any way, there can be no basis for affirming either that the Tathāgata exists after the breakup of the body or does not exist after the breakup of the body. We just don’t know, and can’t say. There is nothing we apprehend upon which we could base a judgment either way.”
Everything we can apprehend is constructed, and belongs to the conditioned realm of birth and death. The Tathāgata has gone beyond birth and death.
How far away are we here from ‘Buddha-nature’? Because clearly ‘I’ or ‘you’ also neither exist nor don’t exist. Only a fake self continues to exist conditionally - but it has nothing to do with the ‘Tathagata-in-us’. So, if the Tathagata can’t be apprehended, it might follow that the ‘potential-tathagata-in-us’ can’t be apprehended, a disappearance yet to be realized.
I think it’s relatively easy at this point - if we slip away from the dukkha-orientation of the EBT to an ontological philosophy - to say that we’re all already enlightened (or have Buddha-nature) but just have to see it.
I think this is missing the point I was trying to make. Let’s say for the sake of argument that materialism was true, but you could still achieve arahantship in this life. The difference between the person who achieves arahantship and the one who does not is still marginal in the big picture. After death they will both partake of the highest happiness. What happens in this life hardly registers by comparison. Whether it is really worthwhile to undertake a very demanding practice, that may or may not give the desired result, when the ultimate prize is just around the corner anyway, is a very open question. In my experience those who do not have any confidence in rebirth do not tend to become monastics, or they end up disrobing. The stakes are just not high enough to enter a demanding monastic path.
The bigger problem, however, is that I do not think it is possible to achieve awakening with a materialist outlook. So far as I am concerned, materialism is a misconception of the nature of the mind and the forces that sustain it. Without seeing this reality - that is, dependent origination - awakening cannot happen at all.
Indeed. But this is the apparent paradox at the heart of the Buddhist path. The path is full of happiness and bliss, and a continuous reduction of suffering. At the same time the ending of everything is an even higher happiness. It is precisely this that makes this teaching so profound and hard to see.
I certainly agree that every step on the path brings its own rewards. But a full a commitment to and perseverance on the path is much more difficult without confidence in the idea of samsāric existence.
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