Ooops, I left out a quote I was going to include: "It is true that the Upanishads lay emphasis upon the ultimate reality of Ātman, but this Ātman is not identical with the personal ego. It is rather impersonal or superpersonal. It is identical with the absolute Brahman, and the egos are but the distortions and pale expressions of this supreme Principle. Nowhere in the texts of the Pali Tripitaka do we come across a passage which can plausibly be interpreted as a criticism of this supreme Principle. ... The Buddha's affirmation of a Background behind the phenomenal world as something unmade, uncreated, and uncompounded is not logically incompatible with the affirmation of the absolute Brahman in the Upanishads. ... His persistent refusal to enter into a logical dissertation on the nature of nirvana and the survival of the enlightened saint in positive and categorical terms has left room dissension and dispute even among his own followers. The reason for this non-committal attitude might be the realization of the inadequacy and imbecility of human language to give a vivid and unambiguous portraiture of the supreme Truth. The Buddha was obviously fed up with the welter of speculations with which the enviroment was surcharged and which only caused confusion of thought and bewilderment in ethical and religious conduct."
--Excerpted from The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. 1, by Satkari Mookerjee, M.A., PH.D. http://buddha-dharma.net/contributions/buddhism%26vedanta.html http://buddha-dharma.net/contributions/buddhism%26vedanta.html And this is the correct URL for the Buddha quote: http://www.clear-vision.org/Schools/Students/Ages-17-18/Nature-of-Reality/Nirvana.aspx http://www.clear-vision.org/Schools/Students/Ages-17-18/Nature-of-Reality/Nirvana.aspx ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote: Seraphita wrote: (snip) > Re "In Buddhism, the “self” is the ego (the “I”) – a conceptual construct > that is quite > unreal. In Advaita, the Self is the only “truly Real” and is the basis of > all concepts.": > So what you're saying is that Buddhists and Vedantists have been talking at > cross- > purposes for centuries when they speak of the s/Self: how comical is that? Seems to me anyone who is familiar with both traditions understands that they each deny "true reality" to the self (lower-case) but differ as to whether there is a Self (capitalized). However, it's awfully tempting to equate Nirvana with the Self (Atman/Brahman). From the Udana, attributed to the Buddha: "There is, monks, that plane where there is neither extension, nor motion, nor the plane of infinite ether.... nor that of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, neither this world nor another, neither the moon nor the sun. Here, monks, I say that there is no coming or going or remaining or deceasing or uprising, for this is itself without support, without continuance in samsara, without mental object - this is itself the end of suffering. "There is, monks, an unborn, not become, unmade, uncompounded, and were it not, monks, for this unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, no escape could be shown here for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded. But because there is, monks, an unborn, not become, unmade, uncompounded, therefore an escape can be shown, for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded." http://buddha-dharma.net/contributions/buddhism%26vedanta.html http://buddha-dharma.net/contributions/buddhism%26vedanta.html Also interesting are the apparent parallels between the descriptions of Brahman/the Uncompounded and the descriptions of God in classical theism (e.g., Aquinas). Of course, the map is not the territory, but the territory seems to have given rise to remarkably similar conceptual maps in this regard. Finally, according to Maharishi, Maya is "that which is not"--but the illusion involved is not that Maya is not real, but rather that it isn't Brahman. (Fire when ready, empty. You da man here.)
