🚀 go-pugleaf

X-Orig-MsgId: <386CC455.234FE707@bu.edu>



Sphere wrote: <<Dependent origination is, in brief, the function "when
this that".  I am simply performing a substitution for "this" in the
same way you would make any other substitution for "this."
Lexographically this would appear to entail "when when... this...that
that that" with an infinite regression of whens to thiss to thats. I'm
just saying that the lexographics does not represent (conventional)
reality.  What happens is that the thiss and thats get muddled up with
each other because the thiss are also thats, and we can hop across this
muddle to the final that without needing to follow existence to it's
bottom.  (This explanation is, of course, highly telographic, and even
wrong.)>>

Mahasanti: <<Then that would implied as simple arising. Agreed?>>

Sphere: <<I have no clue as to what you mean by "simple arising".>>

Mahasanti can answer for himself, but here is my answer.

You say: <<the thiss and thats get muddled up with each other because
the thiss are also thats, and we can hop across this muddle to the final
that without needing to follow existence to it's bottom>>, Sphere.

To talk about "the final that" is to defeat Dependent Arisal and to
stand it on its head, for Dependent Arisal implies that there is no
"final that". In Buddhism there is no possibility of getting to any
"final that". That would be the Brahmanical/Hinduist All-is-One
theology. That is probably what Mahasanti means by "simple arising", or
what I would call "unique arising".

The Buddha says that the beginning of faring-on (samsara) cannot be
known. Later Buddhist speculation (as in Nagarjuna) turns that into: the
beginning and end of faring-on cannot be known. That is in time. If we
were to take a transversal segment of time without extension, we would
have a snapshot of the world, and such a snapshot of the world, if ever
possible, could not be known to the full. Within it, the this's and the
that's would go on forever and would pass human understanding, human
"information-processing power". There would be no "final that", just an
indefinite extension from the this's to the that's, recursively, without
end.

You add: "without needing to follow existence to it's bottom." In
Buddhism, the emphasis is on existence, as against the
Brahmanical-Platonic-Aristotelian emphasis on essence. And the bottom of
existence would be the fore-mentioned "final that". It would be the
world as a whole, in time and space. It would be metaphyscial -- totally
beyond human cognition.

Another interpretation would be to limit oneself to experience -- to
leave out the metaphysical "final that" that you talk about -- in which
case the bottom of existence would be the world and oneself as received
in sensation in each instant, without any effort to encompass all of the
world in extension, but limiting oneself to what is *actually* received
in sensation (which of course means that much, even the majority, of
possible input is left out, as bats hear sound and rattlesnakes see
light that we don't). That is raw sensation as cognised in pure
consciousness, without any interpretation whatsoever.

This state does not mentate "one" "many", "this", "that", but simply
cognises raw sensation. As the Buddha says: "In the seen there will be
just the seen". In it, not even Dependent Arisal is mentated.

Tang Huyen