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/lit/ - Literature

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19934434 No.19934434 [Reply] [Original]

Are all the sutras just various expansions on the Heart sutra? They seem to be mostly saying the same thing.
That said, have any western philosophers formulated ideas close to what can be found in those sutras? I'd like to engage with such things from a more familiar perspective.

>> No.19934575

>>19934434
Kinda, they're mostly various expansions of my dick

>> No.19934681

You will learn nothing from the sutras. Practice meditation and train your body. There is nothing to discover, nothing to be known.

>> No.19934718

>>19934681
>Practice meditation and train your body.
Which kind?
Not trying to be facetious here, but if there is nothing to discover or know, why do anything?

>> No.19935038

>>19934718
I practice Shikantaza meditation in the style of the Soto school of Zen but I'd wager any type of meditation is useful to acquire a peaceful mind.
"Why do anything?" is a very interesting question in its own right, one that may be answered in a myriad of ways. One's way of giving meaning to life is ultimately subjective and is a personal quest. One could simply answer "why not?" ie things can be done for their own sake, because they elicit happiness, etc. Meditation and exercise are worth doing because they will systematically increase your subjective well-being, which is an objectively worthy pursuit in the short and long term.

>> No.19935052

>>19934434
Isn't all corrupted compared to the original teachings? I keep seeing that argument floating around here

>> No.19935065

>>19934434
Lol, you think some medieval memory aid for Mahayana monks is the basis of the other sutras? The Heart Sutra is a condensation, and is cryptic to the point of being philosophically useless on its own.

>> No.19935075

>>19935038
Could you explain to what extent Shikantaza is different from simple Samatha? Aren't both "just sitting while paying attention to the breath"?
>subjective well-being
Sure, although meditation in a Buddhist context is usually done with Nibbana or enlightenment as the goal.

>> No.19935084

>>19935065
>cryptic to the point of being philosophically useless
How is it cryptic? Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

>> No.19935091

>>19935052
We don't really know what the original teachings are.

>> No.19935303

>>19935075
Yes it's the same thing
You see I do not believe enlightenment can be taken as a goal, if anything it's more of a path than a goal. It's not something to reach, in fact you already are enlightened in a Buddha-sense, you just have not realized it yet. Everyone is

>> No.19935304

>>19935303
Doesn't that make the goal realizing that you are already enlightened?

>> No.19935401

>>19934434
>Are all the sutras just various expansions on the Heart sutra?
No, the Heart Sutra is a condensing of the prajñaparamita literature. Within the Indian Mahayana which influenced the various Sino-Japanese developments, the main schools were Madhyamaka and Yogacara, which are the second and third "turnings" of the dharma, i.e. it goes from Buddha to Nagarjuna to Asanga/Maitreya. So the Heart Sutra essentially lands in the middle of these doxographically speaking insofar as it focuses on sunyata.

>> No.19935410

>>19935401
>Madhyamaka and Yogacara
What are the doctrinal differences between these?
Also, I thought Maitreya was still millennia away from incarnating.

>> No.19935524
File: 168 KB, 1188x798, 1593200372014.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19935524

>>19935410
It's a matter of (largely Tibetan) scholastic debate whether there was a person Maitreya-natha who instructed Asanga or if the texts are attributed to Maitreya as revelation/pseudo-authorship.
Very broadly speaking, Madhyamaka emphasizes the realization of emptiness through its dialectic and Yogacara emphasizes yoga in the sense of the transformation of consciousness and perception. Their main bodies of literature are somewhat different and are received differently by different schools in Tibet. You really could write entire books on this question. There is some good discussion in secondary literature from Stcherbatsky, Murti, and DT Suzuki (who himself translated and commented on the Lankavatara Sutra, an important Yogacara work). For the Tibetan perspective Brunnholzl has translated and given long introduction and endnotes on a number of Indian Yogacara works and their Tibetan commentaries, and discussed the issues of doxography with relation to the dominant "prasangika madhyamika" view in Tibetan Buddhism's Gelug sect, which upholds Chandrakirti's reading of Nagarjuna. The Padmakara Translation Group has an edition of Shantarakshita's Madhyamakalankara which combines Yogacara and Madhyamaka views and presents them as compatible, along with translation of a major commentary by the Tibetan scholar monk Mipham. It is worth noting that this combined view was the final development of historical Indian Buddhism, and that the philosophical differences between the two schools are often overstated—Yogacara does not particularly dispense with the notion of sunyata but presents the path to it differently than Madhyamaka. Same translation group also has Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara with commentary from Mipham

>> No.19935565

>>19935524
Why are the Tibetans the only ones who care about this issue? Aren't they kind of separate from the rest of Mahayana with their esoteric teachings and Bön syncretism?
>Madhyamaka emphasizes the realization of emptiness through its dialectic and Yogacara emphasizes yoga in the sense of the transformation of consciousness and perception
To put it another way, Madhyamaka is intellectual, Yogacara is experiential — which yogic practices does the latter recommend, since I'm guessing they don't rely on things like the Visuddhimagga?
Similarly, you mention Tibet, but doesn't the rest of Mahayana care about this?
>Lankavatara
iirc this sutra is about reality being only the mind, but I didn't think this teaching was rejected by Madhyamaka, I thought it was accepted by all Mahayana schools

>> No.19935624

>>19935565
I don't think there's anywhere else in the world that has so thoroughly preserved and elaborated the highly specific doxographical debates in Indian Mahayana as Tibet has. China and Japan have had their copies of the Indian schools (the six schools of Nara era Japan for instance are all copies of Indian or Tang China's copies of these) and developed their own indigenized systems—e.g. Chan, Zen, Huayen, Tiantai, Tendai Shingon, Pure Land—that don't have any pure 1:1 Indian connection... I think you could very broadly say Sino-Japanese Buddhism leans more toward Yogacara and its phenomenology (this gets picked up in the 20th century by some western thinkers), but even so that is not to say they do not focus on emptiness and have no Madhyamaka influence either (because obviously, if everyone is chanting the Heart Sutra...).

>> No.19935685

>>19935624
The diversity between Indian, Chinese and Japanese sects of Mahayana confuses me somewhat. Even if it's kind of accurate to sat Tibet falls under Madhyamaka and China/Japan under Yogacara, there are also individual divergences in interpretation there, right?

>> No.19935742

>>19935685
There are indeed divergences, since not all of Tibet is Gelug for instance. It's like that with any classification system really, not just Buddhism. Even when Asian countries have had something approximating a "national church" it is not as if all the other schools were entirely purged permanently from the territory with fire and sword, and everything made 100% this or that; at worst they were suppressed by the authorities, but often there was open competition for the favor of patronage, and this could change from sovereign to sovereign, especially in Japan and China. A school could simply die out or get absorbed into the general curriculum as it were. The Lankavatara gets cited often in Zen or Chan going back to Bodhidharma bringing it with him to China, but Zen has its own schools debating one another rather than debating whether it is itself Madhyamaka or Yogacara.

>> No.19935828

>>19935038
>>19935303
Do you have a lot of knowledge on Japanese Buddhism? I actually need some advice from someone who has a strong background in it. I was close to becoming a Soto Zen lay practitioner by accepting my Bodhisattva vows. However, I did not go through with it because of the overemphasis on proper lotus posture. I did sit in half Lotus for many, many hours, sometimes for days with intermittent breaks, but I noticed I would feel immense pain in my left knee a few weeks later. Many other longtime visitors also had to undergo knee surgery. Do you know if Rinzai is as concerned with formal lotus posture? I know Rinzai also places equal, if not more, emphasis on koan study from texts like the Blue Cliff Record or Joshu. Do you think sitting in a chair is a proper substitute so long as you use the cosmic mudra? I remember reading articles from Brad Warner, who received Dharma transmission from Nishijima, arguing that sitting posture in Burmese, seiza, or half or full Lotus is the only acceptable form of Shikantaza, and sitting in a chair is not acceptable. As a consequence, I always avoided the chair, but a part of me feels like the emphasis on sitting posture is merely a cultural relic and that only proper breathing is necessary. If I remember correctly, Kusan Sunim of the Korean Zen tradition would do more standing meditation.

>> No.19936682

So how do we know Buddhism and Mahayana to be true?

>> No.19937568

>>19936682
No one answers lol

>> No.19937780

>>19936682
>>19937568
You don't, it's a religion

>> No.19938294

>>19936682
Because when I practice it I cease to suffer.

>>19934434
Study this: http://www.buddhanet.net/audio-lectures.htm before going too deep into mayahana. Learn to stand before you can walk, walk before you can run; learn where you are before you repose.

>> No.19938764

>>19934434
The heart sutra is a fraud. It was first written in Chinese.

>> No.19938824

>>19938294
Theravada and Mahayana might as well be entirely different religions.

>> No.19939033

>>19936682
Nagarjuna is impossible to refute.

>> No.19939346
File: 158 KB, 487x578, 1629996181351.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
19939346

>>19939033

>> No.19939376

>>19939033
He was refuted by Richard Robinson and Avi Sion.

>> No.19939384

>>19939376
Literally who

>> No.19939838

>>19939384
>literally who
Avi Sion (Ph.D. Philosophy) is a researcher and writer in logic and philosophy, including original writings on the theory and practice of inductive and deductive logic, phenomenology, epistemology, aetiology, psychology, meditation, ethics, and much more

http://www.avisionbooks.com/

Richard Hugh Robinson was a scholar of Buddhism and the founder of the first Buddhist studies program in the United States that awarded a dedicated doctorate degree. Nearly fifty years after his death, in 2019, Robinson was profiled in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and described as "the most important scholar of Buddhism you've never heard of"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Robinson_(Buddhism_scholar)

Avi Sion refuted Nagarjuna in his book “Buddhist Illogic” and Robinson refuted Nagarjuna in an article titled “Did Nagarjuna really refute all philosophical views”

>> No.19939866

>>19934434
Slightly off topic, but where is the best place to get the entire Hindu cannon in one volume?

>> No.19939879

>>19935084
>Emptiness is form
>In emptiness there is no form
There have been loads of commentarial attempts to make sense of this. Thich Nhat Hanh (the translator cited in OP's pic) even came to the conclusion that the Chinese version was poorly recorded by an early patriarch and "corrected" it in his 2014 translation (http://jayarava.blogspot.com/2016/03/thich-nhat-hanhs-changes-to-heart-sutra.html?m=1))

>> No.19939898

>>19939838
Pack it up boys, western scholars disagree with Buddhism. We wouldn't listen to them otherwise about religion or philosophy but on this surely they know something we don't.

>> No.19939910

>>19939866
There is no complete Hindu canon and it certainly wouldn't fit in one volume even if it existed. What specific texts do you want?

>> No.19941584

>>19939838
Explain how in your own words instead of posting links, assuming you understand them

>> No.19941712

Stop reading about buddhism, start a practice instead. It's life changing.

>>19934718
Read The Mind Illuminated, or Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.

Or if you dont want any of this modern shit read Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw.

Also dont bother with this "There is nothing to discover, nothing to be known" crowd. There's a grain of truth there but not really because most people unfamiliar with all this shit will just completely misunderstand the point.

>>19935828

Look this does not directly answer your question but there's nothing inherently magical about any posture. The posture is not what is important. It's means for a purpose, I'm not very familiar with shikantaza but there's lots of posts on the streamentry reddit (which i can wholeheartedly recommend for anyone interested in exploring meditation deeply) about it.

>> No.19941733

>>19941712
Yes, I think inducing samadhi, the state of meditative absorption, is the predominant function of these various techniques. For this reason, I do not think it's advisable to praise the Lotus posture over other techniques such as lying, walking, standing, or sitting on a chair so long as one remains alert with mindfulness. I think what's most important is natural breathing, which is inextricably tied to one's state of mind, while being mindful, which involves moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness in order to pacify the "monkey mind".
However, this leads to the issue of authenticity versus degeneration of traditions when moving from one region to another. I think one can still be a genuine Buddhist without sitting in Lotus, but a lot of Soto Zen Buddhists like Nishijima and Brad Warner would vehemently disagree. I will have to look into other Mahayana traditions outside of Soto.

>> No.19941744

>>19941712
>Also dont bother with this "There is nothing to discover, nothing to be known" crowd.
Do you disagree with Mahayana metaphysics?