Māyājāla Sūtra - Theravadin Compatibility?

[cdpatton]

@benedicere

And if the idea that scriptures could be freely revised had been widely accepted, we would probably see a much stronger influence of the Abhidhamma throughout the Sutta.

I’m not sure if that’s a good assumption. My working theory at present is that the early scriptures were more fluid and improvised during the oral tradition, and then at a certain point, the Sutra Pitakas became closed canons. That point probably coincided with the rising popularity of Abhidharma texts as manuals of study. Essentially, the leading edge of new composition moves to a new genre. The creative storytelling was in avadana literature, and philosophical composition was in Abhidharma. Then, at a certain point in history, the early Abhidharma was canonized and closed to new additions. And then texts like the Abhidharma Kosa and Yogacarabhumi became the leading edge of new composition outside of the canonical Abhidharma. Eventually, Mahayana sutras and commentaries became the place where new compositions happened, and the EBT Tripitakas and paracanonical works became closed to new additions.

The end result is that Buddhist literature and scripture is like a geological formation that built up multiple layers over the centuries. There’s something like 1,000 years of literature that could be called pre-Mahayana, if not early Buddhist texts.

[knotty36]

@benedicere

And if the idea that scriptures could be freely revised had been widely accepted, we would probably see a much stronger influence of the Abhidhamma throughout the Sutta.

The suttas and vinaya both frequently mention monastics conversing on abhidhamma and abhivinaya within the Buddha’s lifetime, and we have suttas explicitly saying they were composed after the Buddha’s death: meaning disciples composed canonical discourses independently of the Buddha. Unless we are limiting them to having done nothing more than repeat verbatim what the Buddha taught. But even that can’t escape “the vicissitudes of memory.”

I think it all comes down to what one means by abhidhamma, and where one postulates sutta to end and abhidhamma to begin. For me, it’s not so clear anymore.

[Sphairos]

This thread made me think of the following – and it somehow feels like a deep personal breakthrough – is there a single, definite , articulate “Theravāda” / “early Buddhism” at all, to be somehow compatible with the Māyājāla ? Who and how would decide that precisely this, this and this is “Theravāda”?

[Dogen]

Indeed! I originally had “EBTs” but that was too wild and general a scope. So I settled for “Theravadin”.

My inquiry was to apply AN 4.180 and the Four Great References:

Take a mendicant who says: ‘Reverend, I have heard and learned this in the presence of the Buddha: this is the teaching, this is the training, this is the Teacher’s instruction.’ You should neither approve nor reject that mendicant’s statement. Instead, having carefully memorized those words and phrases, you should make sure they fit in the discourse and are exhibited in the training. If they do not fit in the discourse and are not exhibited in the training, you should draw the conclusion: ‘Clearly this is not the word of the Blessed One, the perfected one, the fully awakened Buddha. It has been incorrectly memorized by that mendicant.’ And so you should discard it.

Take another mendicant who says: ‘Reverend, I have heard and learned this in the presence of the Buddha: this is the teaching, this is the training, this is the Teacher’s instruction.’ You should neither approve nor reject that mendicant’s statement. Instead, having carefully memorized those words and phrases, you should make sure they fit in the discourse and are exhibited in the training. If they fit in the discourse and are exhibited in the training, you should draw the conclusion: ‘Clearly this is the word of the Blessed One, the perfected one, the fully awakened Buddha. It has been correctly memorized by that mendicant.’ You should remember it. This is the first great reference.

Now, a historical-textual critical approach to the text could be different.

But rather my attempt was, then - does this sūtra fit with the discourses, narrowed down to Pāli Tradition to begin with?

Do any suttas obviously disagree or support the exposition?

[Sphairos]

Difficult to say , because the discourses are too heterogenous and difficult to interpret, translate, make sense of, untangle unequivocally… And there are passages like in the Phena-sutta…

So – “it depends”…

Sure, the four mahāpadesa-s – but the above equally applies to them, unfortunately…

[Dogen]

Also, it’s hard to establish what the sūtra is actually saying.

The work here demonstrates amply (in meticulous details and examplary work) that it was used as a proof text for the non-existent-object-cognition controversy. There seems to be a variety of ancient views there.

The illusion sequence concerns appearances whose supposed referent is absent:

• there is an appearance of an army, but no real army;
• a sound is heard, but there is no speaker—only an echo;
• an image appears, but it is a reflection;
• water appears, but it is a mirage;
• dream persons appear, but are not waking persons.

And right afterwards, we have:

However there are those beings that are not of foolish nature, not of deluded nature, the bright ones, who think: “there is not truly and reliably an elephant army, cavalry, army of chariots or infantry, that is seen – but that is indeed a magical creation, a delusion of the eye.” … etc.

nāsty eṣa satyataḥ sthitito hastikāyo ʼśvakāyo rathakāyaḥ pattikāyo ya eṣa dṛśyate | api tv asty etan māyākṛtam | asty etac cakṣurmohanam iti |

The Sanskrit has nasti/asti: “There is no (elephant army as it is seen)", there is this illusory creation, a delusion of the eye.” Establishing the ontological weight of that “asty etad” seems crucial here to me.

In this very way a noble disciple reflects thus: “to me, in whatever forms recognizable by the eye of the past, present and future there is no permanency or stability or eternity or thusness or non-not-thusness or non-other-thusness or reality or truth-ness or true existence or according-ness or non-perversion or non-distortedness.

Cognition could occur even when the object as represented is absent. This principle refutes the Vaibhasika equation “cognizable = existent.”

Adding to the previous “they don’t seem to exist in a way they are thought to exist.”; perhaps they can’t be at all perceived in such a way that anything can be established about them, except this transcended perception (lokottaraṃ satyam?).

Declaring this much does not seem all that different than how Ven Analayo explains Signlessness. Though with caveat:

The word “sign” renders the Pāli and Sanskrit term nimitta, which stands for the characteristic mark of things: that which in a way “sign”-als to the perceiver what that thing is, thereby enabling its recognition. Due to this function, the sign has a causal nuance: taking up a sign causes the process of making sense of experiences through the operation of perception.

… Helmholtz also reasons that, even though sensory experiences are based on mere signs, these should nevertheless not be dismissed as just illusory, as they are the sign of something, be it something existing or happening.

So, experiencing itself need not be an illusion, for everything that is experienced to be illusion. Does that make sense? Circling back to the Asti/Nasti distinction: There is no elephant army, there is this illusion.

Hence, the supramundane truth can be inferred, seen and practiced: A truthfulness against the illusion, an accurate view and understanding, contrasting the errant, deluded perception.

Otherwise, if there’s no “satyatā” to any Dharma cognized, then what about the “āryaṃ lokottaraṃ satyam”? Is that not cognized? Or is the text simply illogical?

I don’t know. There are many weird things about this sūtra. Indeed, of it could be said: No suchness, no not-non-otherwiseness, etc…

Anyway, once again, what a priceless work. One would think it should sit at the crossroads of any serious EBT studies, alas.

[Sumana]

@Dogen

The illusion sequence concerns appearances whose supposed referent is absent:

• there is an appearance of an army, but no real army;
• a sound is heard, but there is no speaker—only an echo;
• an image appears, but it is a reflection;
• water appears, but it is a mirage;
• dream persons appear, but are not waking persons.

Dogen san,
When I read this sutra, I thought of the 31 planes of existence, which are truly embraced in the EBTs. I feel all of these above described the Paranimmita-vasavatti deva realm. According to Access to insight graphs, in this realm, the devas enjoy sense pleasures created by others for them. Mara, the personification of delusion and desire, lives here.

@Dogen

However there are those beings that are not of foolish nature, not of deluded nature, the bright ones, who think: “there is not truly and reliably an elephant army, cavalry, army of chariots or infantry, that is seen – but that is indeed a magical creation, a delusion of the eye.” … etc.

It seems this describes the " brahma-parisajja deva" realm, where beings in these realms enjoy varying degrees of jhanic bliss.

@Dogen

Adding to the previous “they don’t seem to exist in a way they are thought to exist.”; perhaps they can’t be at all perceived in such a way that anything can be established about them, except this meta perception (lokottaraṃ satyam?).

Declaring this much does not seem all that different than how Ven Analayo explains Signlessness

This seems to describe asaññasatta realm, in which beings only has body, no mind.

@Dogen

Experiences are based on mere signs; these should nevertheless not be dismissed as just illusory, as they are the sign of something, be it something existing or happening.

Yup! They are in the 4th dhyāna here.

@Dogen

I don’t know. There are many weird things about this sūtra. Indeed, of it could be said: No suchness, no not-non-otherwiseness, etc…

I am not sure, somehow, when I use 31 planes of existence as a basis for understanding, this sutra makes sense to me.
But I could completely push it too far. They might not be related to each other at all, who knows.

[Dogen]

@Sumana

I am not sure, somehow, when I use 31 planes of existence as a basis for understanding, this sutra makes sense to me.
But I could completely push it too far. They might not be related to each other at all, who knows.

Interesting! With Jhanic descriptions being used for not just realms of existence and meditative states, but sometimes more broadly to encompass something like worldview, your interpretation might have some interesting implications.

I’d like to note for this part though:

@Sumana

@Dogen

Adding to the previous “they don’t seem to exist in a way they are thought to exist.”; perhaps they can’t be at all perceived in such a way that anything can be established about them, except this meta perception (lokottaraṃ satyam?).

Declaring this much does not seem all that different than how Ven Analayo explains Signlessness

This seems to describe asaññasatta realm, in which beings only has body, no mind.

Asaññasatta often isn’t praised as a lofty goal in the early suttas; however, “Cessation of Perception” and most crucially Signlesss Immersion (animitta samadhi) are often spoken of highly.

Sign here being nimitta, and animitta samadhi being one of the three nirvanic samadhi attainments, I think it might be a useful comparison.

[Sumana]

@Dogen

Interesting! With Jhanic descriptions being used for not just realms of existence and meditative states, but sometimes more broadly to encompass something like worldview, your interpretation might have some interesting implications.

Thank you. The notion of world system “lokadhātu” in Buddhist Cosmology is a rich and fascinating subject. If we locate the sutra within this “worldview”, as you eloquently put it, it opens a never-ending mode of expansion in understanding. Hopefully, that expansion leads us toward Nibbāna rather than devolving into papañca.

@Dogen

Asaññasatta often isn’t praised as a lofty goal in the early suttas; however, “Cessation of Perception” and most crucially* Signless Immersion* (animitta samadhi) are often spoken of highly.

That’s a great distinction! Thank you for pointing that out.

My understanding is that if one reaches this " asaññasatta" realm with one’s meditative absorption, beings who are reborn here have a lifespan of 500 eons, accompanied by great bliss and delusion together.

After one’s lifespan ends, sometimes one is reborn back into the hell realm (AN 4:123). So, it is not a desirable “achievement”. All of that effort to get into jhana, just to go back to the start again. So it’s not encouraged.

As you noted, signless immersion (animitta) is a totally different story and highly praised!

[Dogen]

One final thing I’ll just hastily note here:

Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya.

This, paired with the simile of the raft, provides a framework to understand Māyājāla within the broader EBT landscape, I think.

Too often we divide whether Dhamma means logos, physis, nomos, pragmata or phenomena in a given passage, while ignoring the crucial implications of why this word carries the polysemy of all of these at once.

Epistemologically: if occurrence and norm share a name, knowing is seeing the law in the instance and the fourth satipatthana is that polysemy made method:

The dhamma you contemplate are simultaneously live mental events and doctrine: experience, hindrances, aggregates, awakening-factors, truths.

Experience and taxonomy get one name because the epistemic act is treated as their convergence. Truth isn’t treated as correspondence of statement to world but the taught and the seen coming to coincide: sanditthiko, ehipassiko is built into the lexeme.

(And the is/ought seam never gets cut either: dhammacariya and dhammata are one family, so right action is moving with the flow of things — ethics as the physics of mind.)

So, having such an anchor on the very word dhamma, which reveals a certain kind of epistemology, I am tempted to read Māyājāla thus — radical and explicit in its exposition, perhaps precisely because it’s main point that’s often alluded gently elsewhere in the suttas needed to be brought out in plainly.

So once again:

Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya.

[Dogen]

Going through Saḷāyatanasaṁyutta to see if I could find anything interesting, we have SN 35.30 as an interesting oddity.

And what is the practice fit for uprooting all conceiving?

It’s when a mendicant does not conceive anything to be the eye, does not conceive it in the eye, does not conceive it as the eye, and does not conceive that ‘the eye is mine.’ They don’t conceive anything to be sights, they don’t conceive it in sights, they don’t conceive it as sights, and they don’t conceive that ‘sights are mine.’ They don’t conceive eye consciousness … eye contact … They don’t conceive anything to be the pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on eye contact. They don’t conceive it in that, they don’t conceive it as that, and they don’t conceive that ‘that is mine.’

Now, this looks remarkably like MN1, but with some crucial differences.

When MN1 blames maññeti, and then counters it with “They directly know…” (abhiññāya), this part is completely missing in SN 35.30.

Second of all, there’s the three valences of vedana in SN 35.30 that is completely missing in MN1.

SN 35.31, the very next sutta, has:

For whatever you conceive it to be, whatever you conceive it in, whatever you conceive it as, and whatever you conceive to be ‘mine’: that becomes something else. The world is attached to being, taking pleasure only in being, yet it becomes something else.

So we need to circle back to what mano / maññeti mean.

Today, it’s more or less crystallized as taking something as self, as per MN1. However, that seems like a pedagogical shorthand, rather than covering the entire lexical usage of the words. Indeed, in many places, maññeti is used in a general sense (and even in a positive sense, in a few examples I should’ve noted down!).

Additionally, SN 22.89 has good reasons for us to question that maññeti should exclusively mean “Conceiving with regards to a self”. In this sutta, Ven. Khemeka says:

“I do not regard anything among these five aggregates subject to clinging as self or belonging to self, yet I am not an arahant… The notion ‘I am’ has not vanished, though I do not regard anything as ‘This I am.’”

So it seems Khemeka doesn’t regard anything in MN1 as self, but he’s still not an arahat.

Direct knowledge part comes in SN 35.80:

“Take a mendicant who has heard: ‘Nothing is worth insisting on.’ When a mendicant has heard that nothing is worth insisting on, they directly know all things. Directly knowing all things, they completely understand all things. Completely understanding all things, they see all signs as other. They see the eye, sights, eye consciousness, and eye contact as other. And they also see the pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on eye contact as other. …

They see the mind, ideas, mind consciousness, and mind contact as other. And they also see the pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on mind contact as other. That’s how a mendicant knows and sees so as to give up ignorance and give rise to knowledge.”

This is one of the suttas that can be read as an epistemic insight on the fallibility of dharmas as ideas, and unreliability of signs; or a simple rejection of phenomenon because it just doesn’t belong to a self.

Bhante Sujato notes that “Other … is a term for non-self.” But, I wonder if that’s too restricted a reading.

---

How Sunyata is understood as regarding absence of self in Dharmas (Theravadin) vs absence of any signs to any phenomenon (Mahāyāna) is a topic of tension, it seems the same tension can be felt in the EBTs and indeed with Māyājāla Sūtra; which, while still emphasising not-self, its rejection goes beyond the mere absence of a self in the observed phenomenon.

With it and rest of the post-canonical literature talking about it, we can see how Buddhists might’ve understood maññeti beyond merely talking about appropiration with regards to a self.

[Sphairos]

@Dogen [SN 35.30]

And what is the practice fit for uprooting all conceiving?

It’s when a mendicant does not conceive anything to be the eye, does not conceive it in the eye, does not conceive it as the eye, and does not conceive that ‘the eye is mine.’They don’t conceive anything to be sights, they don’t conceive it in sights, they don’t conceive it as sights, and they don’t conceive that ‘sights are mine.’They don’t conceive eye consciousness …eye contact …They don’t conceive anything to be the pleasant, painful, or neutral feeling that arises dependent on eye contact. They don’t conceive it in that, they don’t conceive it as that, and they don’t conceive that ‘that is mine.’

A great reference. Compare the Aṣṭasāhasrikā:

Subhuti: How does the development of perfect wisdom, on the part of a
Bodhisattva who courses in perfect wisdom, become increasingly perfect?
The Lord: A Bodhisattva courses in perfect wisdom when he reviews
neither the growth nor the diminution of form, etc., when he does not review
either dharma or no-dharma. It is thus that his development of perfect wisdom
becomes increasingly perfect.
Subhuti: This explanation is surely unthinkable.
https://huntingtonarchive.org/resources/downloads/sutras/02Prajnaparamita/Astasahasrika.pdf
Conze pp. 219-220, PDF p. 149

(“review” stands for samanupaśyati, if memory serves me; so, it is also some kind of “understanding”, “construal”, etc.)

Also, it’s hard to establish what the sūtra is actually saying.

Absolutely…

[moxu]

First of all, thank you for bringing up this sutra. I am very glad that there’s not any grandiose discourse, just plain teaching.

What strikes me different is the idea of seeing the world as an illusion. The idea here seems to show that the problem is in finding something to be real when it isn’t, it’s an illusion. And the medicine is to see it as non-real, as an illusion. This, in my head, seems to argue that the problem is in my perception of reality and not on my attitude regarding that perception.

If I have lust towards an experience the way it appear to me either the problem is how that experience appear to me (as a real thing or as an illusion) or the problem is how I relate to that experience (with a mind of lust, regardless of what experience I’m talking about). You can argue that when you know how the magic is done, the same magic show will have a different impact on you, in this case I would argue that now these two experiences are fundamentally different, now it’s a magic show where I know how the trick is done.

And even if we accept that, supposing that knowing that is just an illusion or knowing how the magic is done in real life that is not a important factor in enjoying the show or not, or in getting worked up by the show or not. When we reach a certain age we know that the movies are just movies, but we cry, and get anxious and suffer watching movies knowing well that it’s just a movie. An adult who likes Star Wars movies will be much more affected in watching it than a child who doesn’t know better, but don’t have much interest in Star Wars.

A reflection, a dream, a mirage all can cause us lust, fear, doubt, anxiety, suffering even when we know that they are thus.

However, even the Theravadins can fall in this kind of idea too. With the “objective reality”, “conventional and ultimate truth” etc. In this case they are very close. The idea of “using conventional truths” while keeping in mind the “ultimate truth” is close to “living life while knowing it’s an illusion, that nothing is real, we all live in a dream”.

I would also point out that the sutra indicates that feelings are subjective, it pertains to the idea of that there is a self, however vedāna, as I understand, does not.