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 FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, 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.)
