I think the Yogācārins will agree that there is no elephant. But it is however very very difficult to make concrete statements about the Buddha's understanding of the existence of an objective/outside reality. As far as my understanding goes, these positions do belong to later strands of Buddhism, e...

How is a female Buddhist supposed to intend to keep the first precept, given the possibility that she could become pregnant in a rape, and keeping such a pregnancy (and/or keeping the child) would most likely ruin her life and her chances to earn a livelihood? If she doesn't have the fundamentalist...

In my eyes a highly interesting question and worth to rise. Supposed a 16 year old girl, coming from a financially/emotionally weak family without the members being able to support her in the process of raising the child, get's raped, can totally see how carrying out the child would ruin her life. N...

chownah: First of all I can only talk about the concept of Ālayavijñāna, since I have not done any serious reading on Bhavāṅgacitta and my only way to relate to this concept of the Theravādins is by referring to secondary literature. But also my understanding of Ālayavijñāna is also limited at best ...

I think you must be referring to Bhavāṅgacitta (有分識). I think we are still having trouble to understand what purpose exactly this Bhavāṅgacitta served and whether it can really be seen as analogous to Ālayavijñāna or not. Within current scientific discourse Bhavāṅgacitta is speculated to be a foreru...

Actually they are Mahāyāna-sources who do say that Theravāda supports Ālayavijñāna in the form of Bhavāṅgacitta. Quite prominently by Vasubandhu for example. I wonder whether there are refutations/responses to these claims from the Theravādins side? I didn't find anything yet, but I also didn't look...

One note on the root: According to Mayrhofer the root in old indo-aryan language for rambha 'pillar' is rabh, labh being a later variant (with a slight change in semantic meaning, but not a dramatic one). Prefix ā should not change too much here, maybe emphasizing the 'support'-aspect. Generally spe...

Mhhmmm. I think there are still aspects of the bhavaṅgacitta that need to be understood properly and I reach the limits of my mental capability when I try to make the abhidhammic model work for me. Maybe there is something that I fundamentally got wrong, and certainly my understanding of pāli abhidh...

This basicly means that, according to Oberlies some dialect, splitting from the same root-language at an earlier stage, later developed into Pāli. Isn't it even simpler and more elegant to simply note that some Prākrits (like Pāli) preserved different elements of their common Indo-European heritage...

I have to excuse myself I am not an abhidhamma-scholar even though I would like to learn more about it. In what way does the Patthana provide solutions to the problems pointed out by Waldron? I am by the way not very found of american scholarship simply out of the reason of the sometimes low quality...

My other find in the library yesterday was Gethin, Rupert. 'Bhavaṅga and Rebirth According to the Abhidhamma.' in The Buddhist Forum . Vol III. T. Skorupski and U. Pagel (eds.), London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, pp. 11–35. Gethin works through the details of bhav...

A little bit more recently William Waldron devoted a whole chapter of his book "The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the context of Indian Buddhist Thought" on the bhavaṅga-citta in theravāda-abdhidhamma. I found it very worth reading.

Yep not later than early to mid fourth century B.C. , with the common view among indologists that he must have lived somewhere between 7th and 5th century, give and take 200 years in both directions. Dating of Pāṇini certainly is still to be debated, but since he described the language of the Brahma...

I'm glad you agree. Moreover, as Oberlies writes, Pali does not descend from Vedic. This he's not saying. as he puts it is "[Pāli]not a direct continuation of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit; rather it descends from a dialect (or a number of dialects) which was (/were), despite many similarities, different f...

Indeed fantastic, since Sanskrit didn't yet exist at that time: https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=28943 Regarding Oberlies: Yes I agree that there might has not been a direct progression from the vedic language to Pāli, certainly there are dialects in between. What matters on the pra...