male_robin wrote:tiltbillings wrote:
Well, one "wakes up to" freedom from, which is an utter transformation. The arahant is one who is nibbana-ized, which is not an issue of negation or affirmation, and this can be be supported by the suttas, as this thread shows. Otherwise, if we are "waking up to" something, we can reasonably ask: "So, where is nibbana when there are no arahants?" -- a question that suggests nibbana is a self-existent thing that exists independently of awakened individuals, a thing we "awaken to."
Do lobha, dosa, and moha exist in the sense that tangible, concrete objects exist?
In terms of the Buddha’s teachings of awakening, this is, as is my question of
where is nibbana?, a wrongly put question in that it assumes some
thing is of importance in the framework of the Buddha’s teachings.
Recall that from the perspective of the Buddha’s teachings in the Pali, the ‘All’ {
SN IV 15}
is composed entirely of phassa, contact between sense base and sense object. We can only directly know phenomena within this ‘world of experience’, so from the Theravadin perspective, we cannot know whether there really exists a ‘brain’ or a ‘body’ apart from moments of intellectual consciousness, of seeing (the image of a brain), and so on. The discourses of the Pali describe an individual world of experience as composed of various mental and physical factors, nama and rupa. These two are not the separate, independent worlds that Rene Descartes envisioned.
"…the Buddha spoke of the human person as a psychophysical personality (namarupa). Yet the psychic and the physical were never discussed in isolation, nor were they viewed as self-subsistent entities. For him, there was neither a ‘material-stuff’ nor a ‘mental-stuff’, because both are results of reductive analyses that go beyond experience."53
The physical and mental aspects of human experience are continually arising together, intimately dependent on one another.
- 53 Kalupahana 1976: 73, refers to D.15{II,62}, where the Buddha speaks of both
physicality and mentality mutually dependent forms of contact (phassa).
Physicality is described as contact with resistance (pat.ighasamphassa),
mentality as contact with concepts (adhivacanasamphassa).
STRONG ROOTS by Jake Davis, page 190-1.
http://www.bcbsdharma.org/wp-content/up ... gRoots.pdf
The issue here, in terms of the Buddha's teachings, is what is experienced, not some
thing that is beyond what can be directly experienced.
I can not say where Nibbana is when there are no arahants, anymore than I can say where dosa goes when metta or khanti are cultivated and maintained. Nibbana seems to be an intangible state of being, so spatial (where) and temporal (when) concepts would not seem to apply. Nibbana is everywhere and nowhere.
The problem here is that you are positing nibbana as being some
thing, which then does, in fact, open up the questions based upon the idea of existence, of
being as opposed to
non-being, and the whole catastrophe that goes right along with the idea of existence of some
thing, rather than conditioned co-produced experience, which is what the Buddha taught.
My understanding is that Samma Sambuddhas and Paccekabuddhas attain Unbinding without Dhamma Instruction. Where do they get it?
From God? There is no
thing -- "it" -- to get.
iirc, Lobha, Dosa, and Moha are given in the Suttas as the three root afflictions. It makes sense that they would be absent in the Unbinding, or the unbound state. The adjective asankhata suggests that Unbinding is unconditioned; free from all sankharas, not just afflictions. If all conditioned states are inconstant; then that might imply that Unbinding is constant. That could be taken to mean that Unbinding is atemporal and aspatial.
Asankhata and nibbana are defined in exactly the same way. I would say you are pushing the definitions beyond what these definitions, as I have shown above, clearly say and into a realm of some
thing.
