Buddhism strengthens ties to church

[Contarini]

That is one confused dude!!!

Can you name specific problems with these multiple identities, or do you just have an aesthetic preference for simplicity?

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Thanks, I did not know this. It looks like it’s from *The Abolition of Man *, one of his books which I’ve never read.

Here’s an excerpt from a chapter titled The Way:

columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition2.htm

"This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. "

Interesting :tiphat:

Yes, Lewis really isn’t talking about the Tao in the Taoist sense. He’s using it in a much more Confucian sense (in fact, his use of it is explicitly indebted to Confucius’s Analects), although he wasn’t really that interested in the specifics of Confucianism either. He just found it a handy term!

Edwin

 

[RPaulC]

As far as I know, there is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition (Nyingma, I believe) that does talk about a True Self. This tradition argues that the reason the Buddha taught “no self” was because India at the time was dominated by religious teachers who were obsessed about answering the question "Who or what is my ‘self’? Asking such a question is not a bad thing to do, but in India at the time, the search for the answer to that question was leading people to speculate all day and argue that their speculation was the absolute truth. The Buddha realized that seeking answers to some questions (like “Is my self big?” “Is my self small?” “Is my self eternal?” “Is my self non-eternal?”) did not directly eliminate dukkha, because even if one begins to believe that “My self is eternal”, that mere belief doesn’t directly dissolve dukkha. Only the actual realization of Truth dissolves dukkha. And when Truth is realized, the word “self” is seen as incapable of describing what Truth is all about.

So this particular Tibetan School has no fear of using the phrase “True Self”, because, ultimately, the phrase “True Self” itself is incapable of describing with Truth is all about.

No self, or True Self – no word can fully capture Real Truth.

Greetings all

I think it’s fair to say that “anatta” in early Buddhism refers to the ultimate absence of an ego/personality. It’s a refutation of any unchanging, “personal,” atman. Whereas in the higher reaches of the Mahayana, and also among many contemporary Theravadins, there’s a certain acceptance of atman/brahman, in the guise of the eternal “dharmakaya,” the “tathagathagarbha,” or simply the “citta” (which is sometimes translated as “Mind”).

The Book of Serenity (a Zen koan collection) puts it this way:

“The sage has no self, but there is nothing that is not his self.”

The most interesting point at which Catholics and Buddhists meet is, to my mind, in D.T. Suzuki’s reading of Meister Eckhart.

But that’s possibly a whole other discussion.

Kind regards

Paul

(in Melbourne)

 

[RPaulC]

ps. I 'm not sure I’ve come across any reference to a “True Self” in Dzogchen/Nyingma literature, though one might find the capitalised “Self” throughout much of Zen (for e.g. in Shibayama Roshi’s Mumonkan).