According to Alexander Wynne (in The Origin of Buddhist Meditation, 2007), in the PĀRĀYANAVAGGA (SuttaNipata), considered very early EBT (pp.76-77 print edition; pp.66-67 Ebook):
1076 atthangatassa na pamānam (Upasīvā ti Bhagavā), yena nam vajju tam tassa natthi. sabbesu dhammesu samūhatesu, samūhatā vādapathā pi sabbe ti.
1076 ‘There is no measuring of one who has gone out, Upasīva,’ said the Blessed One. ‘That no longer exists for him by which they might speak of him. When all phenomena have been removed, then all ways of speaking [about it/him] are also removed.’ [K.R.Norman trans]
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. The Buddha again denies the possibility of answering this question, because all modes of speaking do not apply to this living person. The conceptual framework upon which the dichotomies of existence and non existence are based has ceased to function for the sage, even when he is alive.
One might ask, then, what’s all this disputation (vādapathā) here about? We seek an answer to what the Buddha considered unanswerable? (Or does “EBT” refer maybe only to the 4 Nikayas?)
Generally it’s a relatively save bet to consider the four nikayas EBT - more specifically you might be aware of course of discussions questioning if a particular sutta is old or not. Personally - because of a rather wide scholarly consensus - I follow the understanding that Snp 4 and Snp 5 are also old. So thanks for your quote!
ditthi-wise we get on a slippery slope here (as I tried to show in the first place with the original post). If we say that in a mysterious way with liberation ‘one-who-has-gone-out’ exits our way of conceptualizing, perceiving or thinking, it is the same as saying, “they exited our reach with words and thoughts and entered an atta beyond any reach of conceptualizing”. It’s just that Buddhists developed an allergy against the word ‘atta’ but they’re fine with saying “there is no way to speak about the Tathagata”
[Edit: unless we have to redefine what ‘atta’ meant. If it was from the beginning something conceivable, attainable, experiencable, then of course it’s safe to say that it doesn’t exist. But that would need a separate comparative treatment I think]
Isn’t the end result the same though? I know some atheists who don’t believe we have a permanent self or a soul. I’d venture to say nearly all atheists don’t believe there is a permanent self or soul. Then it becomes not an annihilation at death because there was no soul anyway. The Buddhist view according to EBTs is the same. The enlightened person doesn’t exist after death but never existed anyway. The only difference from the materialist atheist view and the Buddhist view is that Buddhists believe in some kind of rebirth for un-enlightened ones even tho there is no soul.
Sounds the same depressing goal as the materialist atheist goal.
The path re-discovered by the Buddhas and recorded in EBTs leads to a cessation born out of vision and knowledge. Suttas as AN11.2 / AN10.2, SN12.23 and SN46.3 provide an outline of how that work, while DN2 presents the rationale for the contemplative life encouraged by the Buddha.
The Buddha’s Dhamma Vinaya and its “goal” of individual verification of the cessation of suffering is not about a point of view or hypothesis but making room, through active cultivation of positive states, to a welcome development of a natural process. In a nutshell, it is about a beautiful possibility of dependent origination: dependent cessation.
On the other hand, the atheistic materialist proposition is just this, a proposition, born of pure wishful thinking, cheap rhetoric, a hypothesis definitely welcomed by many back then and nowadays. And it was probably mostly used to justify either inaction or worse, bad actions.
I bet Ajita and his followers were probably very dodgy characters. While they denied the value of generosity they probably did not see a problem in partake in the selfish and exclusive banquets and (maybe even orgies) they probably managed to get their supporters comfortable to indulge into.
Indeed some so-called Buddhist groups found nowadays tend to make the same mistake Ajita Kesakambali used to make when they propose the fallacious shortcut to the path of samsara is nibbana and vice-versa.
As a result, we come across sad characters like the by-some-revered Chögyam Trungpa, a very peculiar “master” who is as known for his wise words as for his weird taste for young ladies, alcohol and voyerism.
The goal is happiness: the pure, blissful, unpollutted happiness that remains when all suffering has ceased, or alternatively put, when the defilements have been entirely eradicated and the asavas destroyed.
Despite their assertion that they don’t believe in an innate soul, the prospect of death still produces fright and consternation in atheists. The looming threat of physical pain is unnerving, but contemplating death while still healthy will produce mental anxiety in one who’s attached to a variety of things, people, experiences, goals etc. This sense of posession also appears to be especially strong in people who are allegedly free of religious dogma.
An arahant, on the other hand, no longer fears death, since all delusion that produces the notion of individuality (and consequently vanity) has been eradicated. The fact that an arahant faces death with complete equanimity makes it quite clear that there is a vast difference between a run-of-the-mill atheist and an arahant.
Aye. Better to focus on nibbana-here-and-now. Freedom delusion and ignorance. Freedom from Greed and Hatred. Freedom from the insanity of consumerism. Freedom from craving rubbish. Freedom from dukkha:
The escape from that, the peaceful,
Beyond reasoning, everlasting,
The not-born, the unproduced,
The sorrowless state that is void of stain,
The cessation of states linked to suffering,
The stilling of the conditioned—bliss.
Iti43
To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to cleanse one’s mind—this is the teaching of the Buddhas.
dhp 183
Out of conviction I am of the same opinion that the Buddha-dhamma provides the [quote=“gnlaera, post:24, topic:5468”]
beautiful possibility of dependent origination: dependent cessation.
[/quote]
But I wouldn’t be too quick with looking down on other ascetics. A lot of peace of mind can be found there. The Buddha was not arguing against mass murderers, rapists and thieves. He contrasted his path against highly esteemed other ascetics. And I guess they wouldn’t have had a following if they were not legit.
Take as modern examples for an Ajita-type UG Krishnamurti, or for an Ajivika-type Ramesh Balsekar. They have a lot to offer to a spiritual seeker.
I don’t have more than what DN2 tells about these guys to form a different view. There we read they denied generosity, this is the step zero towards any good as per the gradual teaching of the Buddha.
Mind that people like Ajita Kesambali and Purana Kassapa were not necessarily contemplative individuals, spiritual teachers. I bet they were close to ancient Greece’s sophists selling for a good price just what people wanted to buy.
We have lots of them active nowadays making fortune by being hired by companies’ human resource department to do motivational speeches.
But indeed we have to acknowledge that materialism does not necessarily lead to a lack of good. Karl Marx based his idealistic socialism on a materialistic view of humans and their history. It is a pity sad things like communism ended up being done in the name of his views.
No. But it is a valid deduction that can be made. Attachment to ever-changing phenomena will produce mental agitation and imagining the cessation of things, life, phenomena etc. even more so. And apart from an arahant, no individual is completely free of clinging. Many suttas clarify this: SN 22.7 etc…
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.
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’.
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…
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.
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.
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.
"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.
) 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.