yes bill..butting in..how come you live in thailand..where is your "former life"...was that an illusion, whilst you were living it?..merle
Bill!, Of course, the labels we use to name things/phenomena are meaningless by themselves, but they point to a truth. A relative truth (such as 'self'), but a truth none-the-less. To just say everything is "illusory" means very little and does even less as a teaching guide. This is what Buddha was getting at. He never denied a self as just being illusory - I'm very much real and so are the people I love - but he recognised that it is a self created by conditions (if there are no conditions, then how come you didn't wake up as a Chinese man this morning? How did you come to live in Thailand?) and that these conditions influence our thoughts/actions leading to further conditions etc etc. A simple contemplation of your life thus far would quickly bear witness to this Law. Oh, I forgot! "your" and "life" are concepts, and therefore illusory, so.... what was your point again? ; ) Mike Sent from Yahoo! Mail for iPhone ________________________________ From: Bill! <[email protected]>; To: <[email protected]>; Subject: [Zen] Cause-and-Effect Sent: Sat, Mar 30, 2013 6:58:10 AM Mike, Since this is such an important concept, to me anyway, I've embedded my responses in your post below: [Mike] Bill!, You old fox! I know where you're coming from, but don't jump too far ahead of yourself by being too quick to judge the relative from the standpoint of the absolute. The Dharma (as in the Law of nature) can be basically stripped down to cause and effect [Bill!] All concepts including Dharma, Law of Nature and Cause-and-Effect are products of our human intellect and are illusory. [Mike] Tell me one thing that isn't caused by a previous condition. [Bill!] Nothing is caused by a previous condition because there has been no other nor previous condition. The dualisitic terms 'other' and 'previous' are describing illusory qualities. [Mike] Remember that Buddha was pointing out that the (inner) world we create for ourselves is based on our thoughts and actions - which come from how we perceive phenomena. [Bill!] Agreed... Only when we manifest Buddha Nature does our equanimity extinguish cause and effect and hence karma. [Bill!] Agreed... But cause and effect in the world of the conditioned is very much a Law that explains our happiness or misery (and what to do about them). [Bill!] Agreed...as you say 'in the world of the conditioned' which I maintain is 'the world of forms' or 'the world of illusion'. We each create this world with our intellect. We create the forms with our human intellect, and that's no big deal as long as we don't forget that the forms are empty. It's when we create content for the forms (thoughts, judgement, classifications, associations, etc...) and we become attached to this illusory content we ourselves have created that we lose grounding in Buddha Nature. The concept of cause-and-effect an example of such human-created content and is illusory. ...Bill!
