Do us people have a name already?
Posting this is watercooler because it’s not inviting a serious discussion. But I think I’m just tired of being assumed one or the another when I reject either side. 
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Is yet another label required? 
To quote the Buddha: "One uninvolved has nothing embraced or rejected, has sloughed off every view right here - every one."
gassho
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Of course. More entrapment is more samsara. More samsara is more nirvana! 
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You’re too Mahayana even for me… 
gassho
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Wonder where this view comes from is it related to your name Dogen?
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What about Majjhimāpaṭipadā - The middle path/way? 
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Dependent Originationist. 
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gassho, satlah bhante.
Probably. But I think it’s just the straightforward study of EBTs, really.
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LOL wrong forum!
On a different note, I am not a “permanent consciousness” person at all. I don’t remember where exactly, but the Buddha specifically says consciousness is conditioned; therefore, as all conditioned things, it is impermanent. As for cessation… do you mean cessation of consciousness?
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Agree that words and labels can never convey the full import of anything, let alone this topic.
Maybe the via negativa works a little bit…
Full cessation (nirodha) or complete extinguishment (nibbāna)
vs
Not full cessation, not complete extinguishment
The latter offers no positive assertion or label, such as “consciousness”, yet denies the former.
Imo, it can help to keep the context in terms of dukkha and its cessation.
Both “sides” agree that dukkha has ceased in final nibbāna. The understanding of whether that’s all or whether final nibbana in some way “is” is the question and “There’s the rub”, (Hamlet Act 3 scene 1).
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I don’t want to cessationalise anything.
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Can it be, “It’s the middle all the way down” ? MiddleDowners??!!
As a play on its turtles all the way down lol
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
ps: other options might be the “StickAparters” as in the discordian motto, or maybe the “TwasNeverThereToEnders”
pss maybe it could be the “YourPremiseIsWrongers” or “YourPremiseIsWrongIsts” if you’re in to the whole ists vs ers thing
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Nagarjuna bookclub, you mean?
The name doesn’t matter. What matters are actions, intentions. You can call yourself whatever you like, but your actions, intentions could be of only two types: out of a wrong understanding of your situation, or out of the right understanding.
So being neither doesn’t mean automatically being right — without the actual right understanding, this inevitably be just another sort of being wrong.
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I thought about ‘Vibhajjavadin’, but it’s sounds like a sect…
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Hi @Dogen .
Given the context, and I’m curious: do you reject the law of the excluded middle?
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As far as I know Vibhajjavadin believes as well that the 5 aggregates ceases.
It’s fair to say anyone might take that stance, isn’t it?
Yes, as does the Buddha in numerous places (“Neither one, nor many”; “Neither finite, nor infinite”, “Neither same, nor different”, etc).
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Hi @Dogen , thanks for the reply.
My first point (or perhaps suspicion), speaking strictly as a logician and not a Sutta scholar, is this: I don’t think the Buddha universally rejects the law of excluded middle. In those specific dialogues, his dialectic is highly circumscribed. That is not what it actually means to deny this logical law, because of how the quantifiers work. He is merely stating that for a specific object, both a position x and its negation are essentially category mistakes—they simply don’t apply. There are several examples of that.
Interestingly, when he isn’t tailoring his response to a specific interlocutor’s flawed premise but speaking generally, he explicitly refutes views via contradiction and clearly operates on the assumption of the excluded middle. If we assume he universally denies it, we must logically conclude he also denies the law of non-contradiction, which is false; he routinely dismisses arguments precisely because they contradict themselves.
My second point looks beyond the Suttas at broader Buddhist history: how exactly would a Buddhist who rejects the excluded middle differ from the Pudgalavādins? In the extant Chinese sources, the supplementary entity they championed (the pudgala) is characterised as ineffable (avācya) precisely because it cannot be framed by binaries like the excluded middle. Yet, they still assumed it because they felt it was structurally necessary to account for mechanisms like kamma. My suggestion, then, is to simply call any Buddhist who is neither a cessationalist nor a believer in permanent consciousness a “Pudgalavādin”.
A curious side note: something most people don’t realise—perhaps because it’s such a specialised topic—is that nowadays it’s rarely considered possible to reject the excluded middle while still accepting the law of non-contradiction.
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