Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 11, 2020 4:53 PM
Title: Re: What are The Benefits of Sila?
Content:
It's from that BDK anthology from Japan, The Teaching of Buddha, found in hotel rooms all over Asia. 

The book's contents are all referenced at the end, but it's been done very poorly. In the present case, there are 5 unnumbered paragraphs on page 192 and 3 references at the end, but no indication of which reference is to which paragraph. The first two references use an unintelligible numbering system and the third is to a Mahāyāna sūtra:

1 SN 1-6-59
15 AN
20 Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra


.


./download/file.php?id=5650&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 11, 2020 12:57 PM
Title: Re: lay person want to eat simple like monk help
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 11, 2020 4:00 AM
Title: Re: The Buddhaguṇas
Content:
Mastery of the jhānas is a necessary condition for supernormal power, but not a sufficient condition. If it were a sufficient condition, then Sāriputta's prowess in the jhānas would have allowed him to do everything that Mahāmoggallāna could do.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 10, 2020 10:12 PM
Title: Re: Killing a yakkha not parajika offence
Content:
The weightiness of the three is legal but not necessarily kammic. For example, fomenting a schism in the saṅgha is legally a saṅghādisesa but kammically it's one of the five anantariyaka kammas and therefore more kammically more weighty than almost any pārājika offences.

Or building yourself a hut that's a few inches too large is a saṅghādisesa and therefore legally entails a heavier penalty than an unsuccessful attempt to murder someone, which would be only thullaccaya.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 10, 2020 12:25 PM
Title: Re: Morning routine
Content:
Sure. And from these descriptions you can infer what sort of tasks monks were expected to perform in a typical day.

But if you're looking for a Sutta or a Vinaya text that prescribes a daily routine like, say, the one used on a Goenka meditation course, then you won't find any such thing. In practice each monastery establishes its own in-house regulations about what things are to be done at what time. These regulations will vary greatly according to what kind of monastery it is.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 10, 2020 11:15 AM
Title: Re: Jain asceticism is way too hardcore
Content:
I don't think so. Trichotillomania is irrational, but what the Jains do is quite logically consistent with their wrong view. If you hold that liberation requires all past karmas to be burned up, then it makes perfect sense to inflict extreme pain on yourself so that the said karmas (or at least the akusala ones among them) get burned up more quickly.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 10:24 PM
Title: Re: Killing a yakkha not parajika offence
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 8:24 PM
Title: Re: Mano-sancetanakarahara
Content:
Bear in mind that 'attractive' and 'unattractive' here have to do with all five sense doors, not just the eye. 

So when you go to a restaurant and the waiter comes with the menu, would you just say to him: "Forget the menu; just bring me a plate of food. Anything will do" ? 

Or would you open the menu and make a selection according to which dish has the most appeal to you?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 8:11 PM
Title: Re: Killing a yakkha not parajika offence
Content:
The deliberate killing of a yakkha, like the deliberate killing of any living being, has the potential to cause a bad rebirth. But this is not something that can be inferred from the fact that it's called a "grave offence."

The names of the different classes of Vinaya offence are legal ones and don't in themselves convey any information about kammic weightiness. "Grave offence" is a name given either to (1) an attempt to commit a pārājika or a saṅghādisesa offence that failed (e.g., starting to steal something but then changing your mind mid-act) or (2) a completed action that resembles a certain pārājika or saṅghādisesa offence but which was not judged serious enough to qualify for the full offence.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 8:00 PM
Title: Re: Mano-sancetanakarahara
Content:
Food is not attractive when considered in terms of its origin and its destination once we've swallowed it; even before we swallow it it's not attractive when considered as merely elements. But thanks to the three perversions we are blind to this. Because of saññāvipallāsa we perceive it as beautiful; because of cittavipallāsa we cognize it as beautiful; because of diṭṭhivipallāsā we adopt the view that it's beautiful.

https://suttacentral.net/an4.49/en/sujato


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 6:48 PM
Title: Re: Mano-sancetanakarahara
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 4:47 PM
Title: Re: Morning routine
Content:
I don't know, but I suspect that the first and last watches, unlike the 4-hour middle watch, would increase and decrease in length according to the hours of daylight in each season. So in India this would mean they would vary from three and a half to four and a half hours. See this old thread on Discourse Central:

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/three-watches-of-the-night/6944


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 12:24 PM
Title: Re: Morning routine
Content:
Then the Sammohavinodanī (Vibh-a. 345), states that the middle watch of the night (a bhikkhu’s sleeping time) amounts to one sixth of the day and night (rattindivassa chaṭṭhakoṭṭhāsasaṅkhāta) and so would presumably be four hours.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 11:13 AM
Title: Re: Jhana
Content:
My post had no aim but that of clarifying a translation over which zzzzzz was puzzled. In fulfilment of this aim no more words were needed than those which I wrote. 

I wish you the speediest of recoveries from your disappointment.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 9, 2020 12:55 AM
Title: Re: mano loke piyarūpaṃ sātarūpaṃ
Content:
Then it would seem to more of a calque (and a rather thoughtless one) than a translation of the sense.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 8, 2020 11:31 PM
Title: Re: mano loke piyarūpaṃ sātarūpaṃ
Content:
No. Adding -rūpa to a word has a similar effect to adding -dhamma. The commentaries gloss the suffix with -jātika: "being", "having", "naturally", "belonging to the class/type [named in the first part of the compound]". Hence:

"Agreeable by nature and pleasant by nature."


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 8, 2020 3:02 PM
Title: Re: Jain asceticism is way too hardcore
Content:
As to why Jains in particular do it, I don't know. If you google "Jainism plucking hair" you'll find the Jains themselves giving quite a few different explanations, not to mention some Jain reformists demanding that the practice be ended. Interestingly the latter want it ended not for the obvious reason that it hurts like hell, but because they hold that each strand of hair is a one-facultied living being and so plucking it out is contrary to ahiṃsā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 8, 2020 12:21 PM
Title: Re: Syntax of "maraṇa dhammo"
Content:
The word maraṇaṃ in maraṇaṃ anatīto is certainly accusative.

By the way, if you're female the forms will end in -dhammā and anatītā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 8, 2020 8:11 AM
Title: Re: Jain asceticism is way too hardcore
Content:
I think if I were a Jain, the ascetic practice of luñcana alone would persuade me to remain a householder for life.

 

A Jain woman tearing out her hair before her ordination as a nun...
.


Warning: not for the sensitive!


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 8, 2020 3:33 AM
Title: Re: Syntax of "maraṇa dhammo"
Content:
The meaning is basically the same, but with one emphasizing "being of such a nature" and the other "not yet being free".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu May 7, 2020 1:19 PM
Title: Re: Help Finding an Agama
Content:
I don't know of any translation of the Chinese parallel, but Ernst Waldschmidt has a German translation of the Nivṛtasūtra, a parallel sūtra from the Sanskrit fragments of the Saṃyukta Āgama.

https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/tripathi1962

The link is to scanned pages from Fünfundzwanzig Sūtras des Nidānasaṃyukta (Berlin, 1962), but if you don't read German, just click on the site's OCR option and then copy and paste into Google translate. It's eight pages in all, for Waldschmidt's a German philologist of the old school, and so half of each page consists of footnotes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu May 7, 2020 8:44 AM
Title: Re: Got my copy
Content:
The Pali reading seems the more probable one to me. Firstly, the spirit of the phrase, "you yourselves do not have pure wisdom... etc." is not the Buddha's characteristic way of speaking to those who haven't yet converted; secondly, for the letter of the phrase there is no parallel even when he's speaking to those who have converted; and thirdly because the Pali kaṅkhanīyeva pana vo ṭhāne vicikicchā uppannā does have parallels in the SN's Pāṭaliya and Kutūhalasālā Suttas and two guilds of Theravādin reciters (i.e., the saṃyutta-bhāṇakas and aṅguttara-bhāṇakas) are less likely to have got it wrong than just a single guild of Sarvāstivādin madhyama-bhāṇakas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 9:37 PM
Title: Re: 4th method is understanding our own mind?
Content:
It's acquisition depends on the fourth jhāna but it's done after emergence from jhāna, not while in it. It's accurate when the skill is mastered, but not while one is still developing it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 12:26 PM
Title: Re: killing bugs
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 8:02 AM
Title: Re: Is traveling to a certain country to visit a few of its monasteries the wisest choice?
Content:
There are quite a number of monks who log in and post from time to time, but I think Ven. Pesala is the only one to do so with any regularity.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 7:52 AM
Title: Re: Eckhart Tolle. Your opinion?
Content:
Indeed. That Eckhart fellow is always doing things. If one's looking for a guru who's skilled at doing nothing, I should think that the Croatian Braco (Josip Grbavac) would be the best option.

.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 12:36 AM
Title: Re: Is traveling to a certain country to visit a few of its monasteries the wisest choice?
Content:
Unfortunately all but one of the monks I trained with and used to recommend based on personal experience are now deceased. The one who's still living, Ajahn Sanit Buddhavaṃso, is now very frail and inactive.

Though I've never met him myself, Sayadaw U Tejaniya seems very promising. 

https://ashintejaniya.org/

Otherwise, it would probably be better to ask a younger monk who's better acquainted than I am with the rising generation of Theravadin teachers. My days of roving about visiting teachers are long passed, so I'm pretty out of the loop.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed May 6, 2020 12:01 AM
Title: Re: Is traveling to a certain country to visit a few of its monasteries the wisest choice?
Content:
With me it's been almost entirely a word-of-mouth thing. That is, I would go to stay with this monk or that monk after hearing him recommended or praised by some other monk whose judgment I respected.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue May 5, 2020 6:35 PM
Title: Re: Is it possible to have a private not pad?
Content:
I don't know. Perhaps the draft-saving function was bestowed upon DWM by some celestial Bodhisattva.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue May 5, 2020 5:40 PM
Title: Re: Is it possible to have a private not pad?
Content:
It's possible to use the private message function for this. Although DW (in contrast with DWM) doesn't allow drafts to be saved, it's possible to save your notes simply by posting them to yourself.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue May 5, 2020 2:57 PM
Title: Re: Jhana
Content:
"Placing the mind" and "keeping it connected" are how Ven. Sujāto translates the jhāna factors of vitakka and vicāra. Here's a link to his blog where he explains the thinking behind his rendering of the first term:

https://sujato.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/why-vitakka-doesnt-mean-thinking-in-jhana/


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue May 5, 2020 2:43 PM
Title: Re: Abhidhamma Resources
Content:
Dr. Ana Perez-Chisti:

Causation, Correlation and Liberation in Abhidhamma - An Analysis of Paṭṭhāna Nyāya

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OQDWP2PwblMzpHP14NHsYmUf5iPRrySW


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 4, 2020 8:31 PM
Title: Re: Why doesn't a human be united as a global citizen?
Content:
The OP started two identical threads. Since replies had been posted to both of them I merged the threads rather than deleting one of them. The unforeseen effect of this merger was to erase all the votes that had been cast up to that point. So, if you wish your vote to "count" (whatever that might mean here) then please click again on your preferred option.

Members wishing to have a political rather than Dhamma-related discussion of the OP's question are invited to do so on https://dharmawheel.org/search.php?search_id=active_topics


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 4, 2020 1:08 PM
Title: Re: Why doesn't a human be united as a global citizen?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 4, 2020 10:00 AM
Title: Re: 4th method is understanding our own mind?
Content:
No, the last method is the one that does require jhāna.

The other three methods correspond to the inferential ones used in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading of a modern mentalist and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_linguistics profiling of a modern criminologist.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 4, 2020 8:25 AM
Title: Re: Soul theories and the Dhamma
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon May 4, 2020 3:03 AM
Title: Re: Soul theories and the Dhamma
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 3, 2020 2:02 PM
Title: Re: Ganthadhura and Vipassanadhura?
Content:
This is the same passage posted by Ven. Pesala, along with with Burlingame's translation. As you can see, the translation's a bit out of date.

"Bhante, imasmiṃ sāsane kati dhurānī" ti?
“Reverend Sir, how many Duties are there in this religion?”

Ganthadhuraṃ, vipassanādhuranti dveyeva dhurāni bhikkhū’’ti
“Two Duties only, monk: the Duty of Study and the Duty of Contemplation.”

"Katamaṃ pana, bhante, ganthadhuraṃ, katamaṃ vipassanādhuran" ti?
“Reverend Sir, what is meant by the Duty of Study, and what is meant by the Duty of Contemplation?”

"Attano paññānurūpena ekaṃ vā dve vā nikāye sakalaṃ vā pana tepiṭakaṃ buddhavacanaṃ uggaṇhitvā tassa dhāraṇaṃ, kathanaṃ, vācananti idaṃ ganthadhuraṃ nāma."
“The Duty of Study necessitates gaining a knowledge of the Word of the Buddha in a manner conformable to one’s understanding, the mastery of one or two Nikāyas, or indeed of the whole Tipiṭaka, bearing it in mind, reciting it, teaching it.”

"Sallahukavuttino pana pantasenāsanābhiratassa attabhāve khayavayaṃ paṭṭhapetvā sātaccakiriyavasena vipassanaṃ vaḍḍhetvā arahattaggahaṇanti idaṃ vipassanādhuraṃ nāmā" ti.
“On the other hand the Duty of Contemplation, which leads to Arahatship, involves frugal living, satisfaction with a remote lodging, fixing firmly in one’s mind the idea of decay and death, and the development of Spiritual Insight by persistent effort.”


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 3, 2020 1:49 PM
Title: Re: Ganthadhura and Vipassanadhura?
Content:
They're mentioned in four Dhammapada Commentary stories in all...

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhist-Legends/01-01.htm

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhist-Legends/01-06.htm

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhist-Legends/01-14.htm

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhist-Legends/24-01.htm


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 3, 2020 1:05 PM
Title: Re: In terms of visa, is Sri Lanka the easiest country to ordain and stay?
Content:
No. I've lived here a total of 25 years, which is two and half times longer than the regulations allow, but they haven't booted me out yet.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 3, 2020 1:03 PM
Title: Re: In terms of visa, is Sri Lanka the easiest country to ordain and stay?
Content:
I don't know which case you might be referring to, but having his visa application refused after living in Thailand ten years doesn't necessarily mean that the monk was of bad behaviour. It may just mean that Thais found him annoying. In practice this is the sort of thing that's most likely to happen to a monk who's very mentally rigid and self-opinionated and not willing to conform to the Thai way of doing things. For example, a monk who's very intent on following the rules only as they're given in the Vinaya Piṭaka might refuse to shave his hair and beard once a fortnight or once a month (the common Thai practice) because the Vinaya only requires them to be shaved once every two months. His full beard and substantial head of hair will attract attention wherever he goes and sooner or later the district head monk will get to hear about the farang hippy monk. He'll then be summoned and ordered to shave more often. If he doesn't comply, a report will be sent to the National Office of Buddhism and when he applies for his 11th year visa extension he'll be told that sadly the regulations don't allow foreign monks any further extensions after ten years.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun May 3, 2020 11:30 AM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
I don't know what the range of fatal grumpiness would be. The usual example is some lovelorn deva brooding resentfully over the fact that the celestial nymph he's besotted with is more interested in some other deva.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 10:59 PM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
I don't recall ever reading about devas sleeping. Maybe they don't; they could be the happy equivalent of the never-sleeping and never-blinking damned souls in Sartre's No Exit.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 10:19 PM
Title: Re: In terms of visa, is Sri Lanka the easiest country to ordain and stay?
Content:
If a monk is over 50 then it's very easy for him to get a permanent retirement visa in Thailand. If he's under 50 then any kind of permanent visa here would be a virtual impossibility. He would just have to keep applying for an extension once a year. In theory he would have to leave after ten years (or after five years if he comes from another Asian Buddhist country), but in practice this regulation is rarely enforced. The Thai authorities just use it as a pretext from time to time to get rid of a monk who's incurred their disapproval in some way.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 9:54 PM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
The info is from the commentaries. They don't specify exactly what would happen if a deva did attempt to eat human food, but since the Buddha didn't want them eating it, presumably it would be something undesirable. Perhaps the indigestible food gives the deva dyspepsia and this makes him grumpy – one of the four causes of death for devas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 9:05 PM
Title: Re: Memorization and the Oral Tradition
Content:
Some footage from the Tipitaka Examination of 2016-2017, held at the Sixth Buddhist Council Cave, Yangon

.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 7:21 PM
Title: Re: Sakadagamin and ekabiji
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 6:56 PM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
The commentator doesn't say that devas don't know not to eat it, nor that they might be tempted to eat it. He merely says that they wouldn't be able to digest it if they did eat it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 6:05 PM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
But since the spine isn't the alimentary canal, being subject to backaches is hardly incompatible with having a stomach whose enzymes can catalyze the breakdown of celestial ojā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 5:40 PM
Title: Re: What is the best time to practice meditation in the morning?
Content:
It's best to get up as early as possible, but not so early that you spend the rest of the day walking about like a zombie. Having got up, the best time is after a cup of tea and a shower, but before breakfast.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 5:36 PM
Title: Re: Sakadagamin and ekabiji
Content:
The suttas don't say "reborn only once". They say that the sakadāgāmin returns only once to "this world". Which world would this be? The Puggalapaññatti Commentary understands it to mean the world in which he happened to attain once-returnership, which may be either the human world or the deva world.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 2:52 PM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:
How can it be said to "fit" when it generates the interpretive puzzlement that you expressed in your opening post?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 12:14 PM
Title: Re: Hi! im newbie, really interested on Bikkhuni existence.
Content:
Hi Mika,

Welcome to Dhamma Wheel.

 

Regarding the thread title, do you mean that you're interested in how bhikkhunīs live? Or in the question of whether bhikkhunīs exist?

Best wishes,
Dhammanando


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 11:49 AM
Title: Re: Sakadagamin and ekabiji
Content:
Because ekaṃyeva mānusakaṃ bhavaṃ ("just one more human existence") and sakideva imaṃ lokaṃ ("just once to this world") are terms that differ not only in phrasing but also in meaning.

"What is the difference between a once-returner and a one-seeder? For a one-seeder there is at most one rebirth-linking (paṭisandhi); for a once-returner there is at most two. This is the difference between them."
(Pugg-a. 198)

An ekabīji, if he attains no higher fruit in this life, is guaranteed arahatta in his next life, which will be in the human realm.

A sakadāgāmin, if he attains no higher fruit in this life, is reborn as a deva. If he attains no higher fruit in that life, he is guaranteed arahatta in the life after that, which will be in the human realm. If one attains sakadāgāmitā as a deva, then it's the other way round: deva &gt; human &gt; deva.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 8:38 AM
Title: Re: Throwing away food in water with no bacteria in it
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 3:24 AM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
Sorry, but in all this world with its devas, māras and brahmās, I know of no link that could prove persuasive to you.

Still, I have told you where you might go if you wish to investigate the matter yourself. Just take a flight to Yangon, show up at the Tipiṭaka Nikāya Monastery with a few volumes of the Tipiṭaka in your backpack, and read out random lines to the monks and see if they can complete them.

Oh, and another thing that you might wish to try is the Dhammanando method for memorising the Dhammapada and Dīgha Nikāya. Not necessarily for memorising these particular texts, but for any lengthy text that's dear to your heart. Perhaps a Cathy Newman script. You will then know for yourself just how proficient the human memory can be and will be glad to abandon your present rather impoverished conception of this.

I outlined the method in the thread linked below.

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=32978&start=15


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 2:24 AM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
Well, if you personally doubt it I guess that settles the matter.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 2:02 AM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
You are over-generalising. In the case of bhāṇakas this is actually something that varies from one monk to another. There are some monks for whom https://dhammapadaedmw.blogspot.com/2013/09/dhammpada-241.html strictly applies and whose repertoire will soon be lost if they don't make a regular practice of rehearsing everything they've memorised. Obviously this sets a limit on how much new material they can learn, since there are only so many hours in the day. But then there are other monks who memorise something once and it stays with them for ever, no matter how much more material they memorise later.

Which class a monk falls into seems to depends largely on how much of a role mnemonics played in his schooling, and especially in his primary school education. For example, most Western monks hardly had to memorise anything at school except maybe the times table, some sappy passages from Romeo and Juliet and a few French irregular verbs, and there are hardly any of us who can retain memorised material without regular repetition of it. By contrast, a Thai monk educated in a state primary school will have spent about half of each day in rote-learning, while a Burmese in a monastery school will have done virtually nothing else.

Another factor is whether a monk knows Pali and understands the meaning of what he's memorised. In Thailand most city monks do and most forest monks don't. I've noticed that in the forest monasteries I've stayed at the pāṭimokkha-reciters would make a point of practising their recital nearly every day, while monks in city monasteries only did so on the day before an uposatha day when it was their turn to be the reciter.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat May 2, 2020 1:06 AM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
If they were relevantly qualified scientists, I doubt they'd consider the monks' achievement all that remarkable once they'd been provided with a description of the highly unusual and specialised training they'd undergone. Or at least it would be nowhere near as remarkable as the achievements of mnemonists like Yanjaa, Gregor von Feinaigle, Wang Feng, Shas Pollak, Astrid Plessl, Gunther Karsten, etc.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 11:39 PM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
Well, I've met three of the Tipiṭaka sayadaws when they came to visit Thailand. However, as they seldom travel abroad ordinarily one would need to go to Myanmar and visit one of the monasteries that specialize in training bhāṇakas. For example, the Tipiṭaka Nikāya and Sunlungu monasteries in Yangon, or the Dhammānanda Monastery in Mingun.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 11:05 PM
Title: Re: AI: What is a sentient being?
Content:
There are contexts where the word satta can be (and is) properly applied to arahants and buddhas, in conformity with worldly linguistic conventions. One example would be the thought, "May all living beings be happy! (sabbe sattā sukhitā hontu)".

Another, I think, would be this thread, where the concern is merely to describe what distinguishes that which is a satta from that which is not, and where the general or public understanding of satta seems to be assumed. In contexts like these two, an arahant will be reckoned a satta until khandha-parinibbāna.

Then there is another more dhammically inhouse usage of satta (as in the sutta cited by Doodoot) where the term has ceased to be applicable to an arahant.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 9:13 PM
Title: Re: AI: What is a sentient being?
Content:
This seems to give rise to the same problem as the English translation "sentient being". In effect it leaves one class of saṃsāric being out of account: those Brahmā gods that go by the name "unconscious/impercipient beings" asañña-satta (Skt. asaṃjñi-sattva). The translation would imply either that an unconscious being is not in fact a being, or that it is a being but, despite its name, it's not in fact unconscious.

I suspect this may the reason some recent translators of Tibetan texts have taken to using "samsaric being" or "transmigrating being" in place of "sentient being". Translators of Pali texts abandoned the term many decades ago, in favour of "living beings", "creatures" or just "beings", but I notice that Ven. Sujāto has now brought it back again.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 8:44 PM
Title: Re: Sakadagamin and ekabiji
Content:
It depends what we're using as our yardstick. The difference between the two of them is very much less than the difference between either of them and a worldling.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 6:43 PM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
36 pages would be just one page longer than the Mahamakut Press romanised Pali edition of the Bhikkhupāṭimokkha, a text that tens of thousands of monks know by heart.

But for number-crunching purposes it might be better to do our counting by the syllable rather than the page, since different editions of the Tipiṭaka vary in their number of pages and different pages vary in their quantity of text. And so...

Pāṭimokkha, : 16,647 syllables.

Pali Tipiṭaka (Burmese Sixth Council edition): 9,565,764 syllables.

9,565,764 ÷ 16,647 ≈ 575

So, going by syllable count memorising the Tipiṭaka is the equivalent of memorising the Pāṭimokkha 575 times.

Typical length of time to memorise the Pāṭimokkha...

Western monks: 8-12 weeks
Thai and Sri Lankan monks: 6-8 weeks
Burmese monks: 2-4 weeks

Time it would take to memorise the Tipiṭaka if one proceeded at the same rate as above...

Western monks: 88 to 133 years
Thai and Sri Lankan: 66 to 88 years
Burmese: 22 to 44 years

And so it's no surprise that Myanmar's the only Theravādin country with tipiṭakadharas. Nor any surprise that ca 20 years is in fact the minimum length of time that it takes the most proficient Burmese monks to complete the task – a task that all of them commence in early childhood.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 12:14 PM
Title: Re: AI: What is a sentient being?
Content:
I think that to distinguish a robot that's a saṃsāric being from an extremely cleverly programmed but non-saṃsāric robot might not be possible by any scientific means. It would take some kind of yogic gnosis, e.g., mastery of the fourth jhāna and then development of the second of the three knowledges.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri May 1, 2020 11:03 AM
Title: Re: AI: What is a sentient being?
Content:
The entity must be heir to a past saṃsāric continuum in which ignorance and craving were not extinguished.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 30, 2020 8:51 PM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:
Yes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:29 PM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:
Yes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 29, 2020 6:34 PM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:
https://suttacentral.net/mn65/en/sujato


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 28, 2020 11:47 PM
Title: Re: theravada attitude towards yogacara and madhyamaka
Content:
The Dīpavaṃsa and the Kathāvatthu Commentary say that the Mahiṃsāsakas seceded from the Theravādins during the second century after the parinibbāna. Then later (the sources don't say how much later) the Dhammaguttiyas (Dharmaguptakas) and Sabbatthivādins (Sarvāstivādins) split from the Mahiṃsāsakas.

https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.8719/page/n15/mode/2up
(see pages 2-5


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 28, 2020 10:09 PM
Title: Re: theravada attitude towards yogacara and madhyamaka
Content:
The Theravāda, though concentrated in the South and Sri Lanka, was certainly present in the North, going by the name 'Vibhajyavāda'.

The fact that Mahayana polemics are not directed principally against the Vibhajyavāda/Theravāda is not because they knew nothing about it, but because their polemical assault on mainstream Indian Buddhism appears to have been prioritized in proportion to the size of each school. And so the mammoth-sized Sarvāstivāda came first, followed by the two largest of the Pudgalavādin schools, and with the medium-sized Vibhajyavāda/Theravāda coming perhaps in fourth or fifth place.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 28, 2020 10:03 PM
Title: Re: theravada attitude towards yogacara and madhyamaka
Content:
If Nāgārjuna had been a Sarvāstivādin – even a dissident Sarvāstivādin – he would presumably have been familiar with Devaśarman's Abhidharmavijñānakāyapādaśāstra, the fifth book of the Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma Piṭaka. One of the principal aims of this text, taking up most of the first two chapters, is to defend the Sarvāstivādin conception of dharmas against criticisms of it coming from a school called the Vibhajyavāda. 

Is it just a coincidence that Vibhajyavāda is the Sanskrit form of Vibhajjavāda, the name by which the Theravāda usually referred to itself in those days?

Unlikely, for the particular Vibhajyavādin whom Devaśarman is concerned to refute is none other than Moggalliputtatissa, the Theravādin debater at the Council of Patna. And so though it may be true (for all I know) that Nāgārjuna had never studied the Pali Abhidhamma, if had been a Sarvāstivādin it's unlikely that he would have been unfamiliar with the Pali Abhidhamma's conception of dhammas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijnanakaya


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 28, 2020 2:14 PM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 7:20 PM
Title: Re: Why only lying is included as wrong speech in five precepts?
Content:
I meant that you were committing (or at least your claim rested upon) an elementary logical fallacy. 

The fact that a person of frivolous speech will not be believed doesn't allow us to infer that a person who is disbelieved must be of frivolous speech. He might be disbelieved for some other reason altogether. Perhaps he's reputed to be an habitual liar. Perhaps the person he's talking to is of a highly suspicious nature. Perhaps he's got a nervous disorder that makes him seem shifty... etc.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 6:26 PM
Title: Re: Why only lying is included as wrong speech in five precepts?
Content:
It's not unreasonable. 

What would be unreasonable would be to argue:

Those given over to frivolous speech are disbelieved.
Fred is disbelieved.
Therefore Fred is given over to frivolous speech.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 6:14 PM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
No.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 5:40 PM
Title: Re: Why only lying is included as wrong speech in five precepts?
Content:
None of the ten akusala kammapatha are ever "okay". But that doesn't mean that when two women come to a temple on uposatha days, take the eight precepts and then launch into a discussion of the Abduction of Sitā (the Pali commentators' standard example of frivolous speech) they'll be breaking the precepts they've just taken. It would of course be preferable if they found something better to talk about.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 5:22 PM
Title: Re: The Buddhaguṇas
Content:
Some of the ten Tathāgata powers are exclusive to Buddhas, while others can be attained (albeit to a lesser degree) by the more adept disciples.

The Paṭisambhidāmagga is the go-to text for the systematic treatment of this subject. Its mātikā lists a total of seventy-three kinds of understanding (including the Tathāgata powers) and states that the first sixty-seven are held in common with disciples and the last six are not:

Knowledge Shared by Disciples
(ñāṇāni sāvakasādhāraṇāni)

1. sotāvadhāne paññā sutamaye ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of applying the ear is knowledge of what consists in the heard (learnt).

2. sutvāna saṃvare paññā sīlamaye ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of restraint after hearing (learning) is knowledge of what consists in virtue.

3. saṃvaritvā samādahane paññā samādhibhāvanāmaye ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of concentrating after restraining is knowledge of what consists in the development of concentration.

4. paccayapariggahe paññā dhammaṭṭhitiñāṇaṃ
Understanding of embracing conditions is knowledge of the causal relationship of ideas.

5. atītānāgatapaccuppannānaṃ dhammānaṃ saṅkhipitvā vavatthāne paññā sammasane ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining past, future and present ideas, after generalization, is knowledge of comprehension.

6. paccuppannānaṃ dhammānaṃ vipariṇāmānupassane paññā udayabbayānupassane ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of contemplating presently-arisen ideas' change is knowledge of contemplation of rise and fall.

7. ārammaṇaṃ paṭisaṅkhā bhaṅgānupassane paññā vipassane ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of contemplating dissolution after reflecting on an object is knowledge of insight.

8. bhayatupaṭṭhāne paññā ādīnave ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of appearance as terror is knowledge of danger.

9. muñcitukamyatāpaṭisaṅkhāsantiṭṭhanā paññā saṅkhārupekkhāsu ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of desire for deliverance, of reflexion, and of composure, is knowledge of the kinds of equanimity about formations.

10. bahiddhā vuṭṭhānavivaṭṭane paññā gotrabhuñāṇaṃ
Understanding of emergence and turning away from the external is change-of-lineage knowledge.

11. dubhato vuṭṭhānavivaṭṭane paññā magge ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of emergence and turning away from both [the external and internal] is knowledge of the path.

12. payogappaṭippassaddhi paññā phale ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of tranquillization of the tasks is knowledge of fruition.

13. chinnavaṭumānupassane paññā vimuttiñāṇaṃ
Understanding of contemplating what is cut off is knowledge of deliverance.

14. tadā samudāgate dhamme passane paññā paccavekkhaṇe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of insight into ideas then arrived at is knowledge of reviewing.

15. ajjhattavavatthāne paññā vatthunānatte ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining internally is knowledge of difference in the physical basis.

16. bahiddhāvavatthāne paññā gocaranānatte ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining externally is knowledge of difference in the domains [of the physical bases].

17. cariyāvavatthāne paññā cariyānānatte ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining behaviour is knowledge of difference in behaviour [of consciousness].

18. catudhammavavatthāne paññā bhūminānatte ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining four ideas is knowledge of difference in plane.

19. navadhammavavatthāne paññā dhammanānatte ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of defining nine ideas is knowledge of difference in idea.

20. abhiññāpaññā ñātaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as abandoning is knowledge in the sense of giving up.

21. pariññāpaññā tīraṇaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as direct knowledge is knowledge of the meaning of what-is-known.

22. pahāne paññā pariccāgaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as full understanding is knowledge of the meaning of judgment (investigation).

23. bhāvanāpaññā ekarasaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as developing is knowledge in the sense of single function (taste).

24. sacchikiriyāpaññā phassanaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as realizing is knowledge in the sense of sounding.

25. atthanānatte paññā atthapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in meaning is knowledge of discrimination of meaning.

26. dhammanānatte paññā dhammapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in ideas is knowledge of discrimination of ideas.

27. niruttinānatte paññā niruttipaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in language is knowledge of discrimination of language.

28. paṭibhānanānatte paññā paṭibhānapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in perspicuity is knowledge of discrimination of perspicuity.

29. vihāranānatte paññā vihāraṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in abiding is knowledge of the meaning of abiding.

30. samāpattinānatte paññā samāpattaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in attainment is knowledge of the meaning of attainment.

31. vihārasamāpattinānatte paññā vihārasamāpattaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference in abiding and attainment is knowledge of the meaning of abiding and attainment.

32. avikkhepaparisuddhattā āsavasamucchede paññā ānantarikasamādhimhi ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of cutting off of cankers due to pureness of non-distraction is knowledge of concentration with immediate [result].

33. dassanādhipateyyaṃ santo ca vihārādhigamo paṇītādhimuttatā paññā araṇavihāre ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as predominance of seeing, and as achievement of a peaceful abiding, and as resoluteness on the sublime goal, is knowledge of abiding without conflict.

34. dvīhi balehi samannāgatattā tayo ca saṅkhārānaṃ paṭippassaddhiyā soḷasahi ñāṇacariyāhi navahi samādhicariyāhi vasibhāvatā paññā nirodhasamāpattiyā ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as mastery owing to possession of two powers, to the tranquillization of three formations, to sixteen kinds of behaviour of knowledge, and to nine kinds of behaviour of concentration, is knowledge of the attainment of cessation.

35. sampajānassa pavattapariyādāne paññā parinibbāne ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the termination of occurrence in one who is fully aware is knowledge of extinguishment.

36. sabbadhammānaṃ sammā samucchede nirodhe ca anupaṭṭhānatā paññā samasīsaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the complete cutting off of all ideas, of their cessation, and of their non-reappearance, is knowledge of the meaning of same-headed-ness.

37. puthunānattatejapariyādāne paññā sallekhaṭṭhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of separation, of difference and unity, and of termination of fires, is knowledge of effacement.

38. asallīnattapahitattapaggahaṭṭhe paññā vīriyārambhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of exertion in those possessed of bestirring and endeavour is knowledge of the application of energy.

39. nānādhammappakāsanatā paññā atthasandassane ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of explaining different ideas is knowledge of demonstrating meanings.

40. sabbadhammānaṃ ekasaṅgahatānānattekattapaṭivedhe paññā dassanavisuddhiñāṇaṃ
Understanding of penetrating the includability of all ideas as one, and of their difference and unity, is knowledge of purity in seeing.

41. viditattā paññā khantiñāṇaṃ
Understanding due to what is recognized is knowledge as choice.

42. phuṭṭhattā paññā pariyogāhaṇe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding due to what is touched is knowledge of fathoming.

43. samodahane paññā padesavihāre ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of combination is knowledge of abiding in [the reviewing of ideas as] parts.

44. adhipatattā paññā saññāvivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding due to what is given predominance is knowledge of turning away through perception.

45. nānatte paññā cetovivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of difference is knowledge of turning away by the will.

46. adhiṭṭhāne paññā cittavivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of establishing is knowledge of the turning away of cognizance.

47. suññate paññā ñāṇavivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of voidness is knowledge of the turning away of knowledge.

48. vosagge paññā vimokkhavivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of relinquishment is knowledge of turning away by liberation.

49. tathaṭṭhe paññā saccavivaṭṭe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of suchness is knowledge of turning away in the actualities.

50. kāyampi cittampi ekavavatthānatā sukhasaññañca lahusaññañca adhiṭṭhānavasena ijjhanaṭṭhe paññā iddhividhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of succeeding by defining body and cognizance as one and by steadying easy perception and quick perception is knowledge of the kinds of success (supernormal powers).

51. vitakkavipphāravasena nānattekattasaddanimittānaṃ pariyogāhaṇe paññā sotadhātuvisuddhiñāṇaṃ
Understanding of fathoming sound signs in their difference and unity is knowledge of purification of the ear principle.

52. tiṇṇannaṃ cittānaṃ vipphārattā indriyānaṃ pasādavasena nānattekattaviññāṇacariyā pariyogāhaṇe paññā cetopariyañāṇaṃ
Understanding of fathoming behaviour of consciousness in its difference and unity by means of confidence [and non-confidence] in the [six] faculties due to intervention by three types of cognizances is knowledge of penetration of wills (hearts).

53. paccayappavattānaṃ dhammānaṃ nānattekattakammavipphāravasena pariyogāhaṇe paññā pubbenivāsānussatiñāṇaṃ
Understanding of fathoming ideas conditionally-arisen through intervention of difference and unity in action is knowledge of recollection of past life.

54. obhāsavasena nānattekattarūpanimittānaṃ dassanaṭṭhe paññā dibbacakkhuñāṇaṃ
Understanding of seeing the meaning as signs of visible objects in their difference and unity by means of illumination is knowledge of the divine eye.

55. catusaṭṭhiyā ākārehi tiṇṇannaṃ indriyānaṃ vasībhāvatā paññā āsavānaṃ khaye ñāṇaṃ
Understanding as mastery of three faculties in sixty-four aspects is knowledge of exhaustion of cankers.

56. pariññaṭṭhe paññā dukkhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of full-understanding is knowledge of suffering.

57. pahānaṭṭhe paññā samudaye ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of abandoning is knowledge of origin.

58. sacchikiriyaṭṭhe paññā nirodhe ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of realizing is knowledge of cessation.

59. bhāvanaṭṭhe paññā magge ñāṇaṃ
Understanding of the meaning of developing is knowledge of the path.

60. dukkhe ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of suffering.

61. dukkhasamudaye ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of the origin of suffering.

62. dukkhanirodhe ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of the cessation of suffering.

63. dukkhanirodhagāminiyā paṭipadāya ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of the way leading to the cessation of suffering.

64. atthapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of discrimination of meaning.

65. dhammapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of discrimination of ideas.

66. niruttipaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of discrimination of language.

67. paṭibhānapaṭisambhide ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of discrimination of perspicuity.

Knowledge not Shared by Disciples
(ñāṇāni asādhāraṇāni sāvakehi)

68. indriyaparopariyatte ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of penetration of others' faculties

69. sattānaṃ āsayānusaye ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of beings' biasses and underlying tendencies

70. yamakapāṭihīre ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of the Twin Metamorphosis (Marvel)

71. mahākaruṇāsamāpattiyā ñāṇaṃ
Knowledge of the Great Compassion

72. sabbaññutañāṇaṃ
Omniscient Knowledge

73. anāvaraṇañāṇaṃ
Unobstructed Knowledge


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 26, 2020 4:09 PM
Title: Re: Why only lying is included as wrong speech in five precepts?
Content:
They're not included in those. I think you may be confusing the aṭṭha (or aṭṭhaṅga or uposatha) sīla with the ājīvaṭṭhamakasīla.

Eight precepts

1. abstention from killing
2. abstention from stealing
3. abstention from unchastity
4. abstention from false speech
5. abstention from intoxicants
6. abstention from taking food at the wrong time
7. abstention from dancing, music shows, etc.
8. abstention from high or large beds

Precepts with right livelihood as the eighth

1. abstention from killing
2. abstention from stealing
3. abstention from sexual misconduct
4. abstention from false speech
5. abstention from divisive speech
6. abstention from harsh speech
7. abstention from frivolous speech
8. right livelihood


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 11:08 PM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
With the exception of Burmese vinayadharas and tipiṭakadharas, I think it's rather uncommon nowadays for monks to memorize the nuns' pātimokkha. As for the rest of the texts, most monks would probably know them all by the time they got to about five rains, though in the case of the cattāro bhāṇavārā monks outside of Sri Lanka would be more likely to memorize their own national arrangements of paritta chants.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 8:06 PM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
The Vinaya Piṭaka stipulates that a bhikkhu must (among other things) be "learned" (bahussuta) before he can be released from the obligation to live in dependence on a teacher. 

The Vinaya Atthakathā gives as the minimal standard for being bahussuta memorization of:

• dve mātikā - the two Pātimokkhas (i.e. for monks and nuns).

• cattāro bhāṇavārā - the four Rounds for Recital (a collection of parittas).

• tisso anumodanā - three kinds of chant for rejoicing in someone's merit, comprising those used at mealtimes (saṅghabhatte anumodanā), on auspicious occasions (maṅgalesu anumodanā) and on inauspicious occasions (amaṅgalesu anumodanā).

• dhammasāvanatthāya suttanta - At least one sutta that can be used as the basis for giving a sermon. The suggested examples are the Andhakavinda, the Mahārāhulovāda and the Ambaṭṭha.

• The liturgies (kammavācā) used for various kinds of formal act, like uposatha, confession, pavāraṇā, kaṭhina, etc.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 6:09 PM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:
Yes, you would be doing the right thing. Expressing yourself in this way is exactly what the Buddha advises people to do if they wish to safeguard the truth and if the matter is not one on which they have direct knowledge.

See the Caṅkī Sutta. 

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.095x.than.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 3:15 PM
Title: Re: How did historical Buddha looked like?
Content:
It couldn't happen like that. The groups of bhāṇakas were rather like the crafts guilds of mediaeval Europe. Let's suppose you were, say, a majjhimabhāṇaka. You would have been subjected to stringent testing before you even got admitted to the group and your continued membership of it was contingent on your regular attendance at sessions with other majjhimabhāṇakas to ensure that standards were maintained. If you neglected this or didn't maintain a faultless recitation then you'd be kicked out of the guild.

The Majjhima Nikāya is divided into recitation portions and at each session one of these would be selected and recited using the same four methods first described in the Vinaya Piṭaka and still in use today by Hindu Veda-reciters:

Padaṃ - less accomplished and more accomplished reciters recite in unison, beginning and ending together.
Anupadaṃ - the most accomplished reciter begins a line, the less accomplished join in, and they end together.
Anvakkharaṃ - the most accomplished reciter recites the beginning syllable of a line together with the less accomplished. The latter then has to complete the line by himself.
Anubyañjanaṃ - a group of the more accomplished reciters recite one line, and the less accomplished reciters then recite the next line by themselves.

In short, oral preservation was thorough and systematic, with nothing haphazard or left to chance.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 11:56 AM
Title: Re: Eating time
Content:
The taking of the three extra precepts on Uposatha days or during meditation retreats is to promote the development of the three https://suttacentral.net/an3.16/en/sujato. And so the sixth precept assists with moderation in eating, the seventh with guarding of the sense-faculties, and the eighth with devotion to wakefulness.

For bhikkhus limiting the time of eating has the additional purpose of ensuring that we don't cause needless bother to householders by going into the village for alms at all hours of the day and night.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 10:15 AM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
Does it? 

If I was the dandelion in this picture I expect I'd be making petitionary prayers to Ceres, Flora, Freyja and Sif for cow 56 to be slaughtered as quickly as possible.

 

.


./download/file.php?id=5608&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 8:58 AM
Title: Re: The European Pagan Connection
Content:
I think so. Though not so much Māra in heaven (Lord of the Paranimittavasavattī realm) but more Māra down on earth forever making a nuisance of himself.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:18 AM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
But who has claimed this? All I'm claiming is that the advocated extension is not an obligatory one and should not be proposed as such.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:46 AM
Title: Re: Taking 2 refuge
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:07 AM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
yathā ahaṃ tathā ete,
yathā ete tathā ahaṃ,
attānaṃ upamaṃ katvā,
na haneyya na ghātaye.

“Reflecting: ‘As I am, so are they;
As they are, so am I,’
Having taken oneself as the criterion,
One should not kill or cause others to kill.”
(Nālakasutta, Sn 705; cf. Dhp. 130)

The expression na ghātaye is defined as giving someone an order to kill. No Theravāda text extends its scope to include the kind of imagined causal relationships on which secular arguments (or those in the Lankavatara and other spurious Mahayana sūtras) are based.

And so what you call the Buddha's approval of taking the animal's perspective was taught in connection with killing by one's own hand or giving another an order to kill. The context is not one of grocery shopping.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 11:33 PM
Title: Re: Kamma of disseminating wrong dhamma
Content:
So one could imagine one monk expounding the matter according to the text in black and another according to the text in blue.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 11:26 PM
Title: Re: Kamma of disseminating wrong dhamma
Content:
Not necessarily, for what they offer might be different but not mutually contradictory. For example, an exposition of the first precept using the Abhidhamma method will look rather different to one using the Sutta method.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 11:14 PM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
Hey, stop equivocating, you slippery eel. What was stated to be out of order was your attempt to quash discussion of what the Buddha said, and what he meant, on the subjects of vegetarianism and meat-eating.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 10:38 PM
Title: Re: Kamma of disseminating wrong dhamma
Content:
Yes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 10:17 PM
Title: Re: Taking 2 refuge
Content:
I think it's an extremely improbable scenario, but if it happened then we'd be arahant disciples.

Just like there are anāgāmins in the Pure Abodes who attain anāgāmitā during the dispensation of one Buddha and then arahatta during the dark period or during the dispensation of the next Buddha or even during the dark period after the next Buddha. Their attaining it during one of the dark periods doesn't mean that they get called paccekabuddhas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 9:58 PM
Title: Re: the great vegetarian debate
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:19 PM
Title: Re: who don't want to be known as a good person
Content:
Coincidentally, only this morning I posted something to Sutta Central on a rather similar matter. So I'll be lazy and just post a link:

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/question-about-snitching-and-right-speech/15846


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:02 PM
Title: Re: Taking 2 refuge
Content:
In the fully-developed conception of paccekabodhi it isn't reckoned as happening "outside of Buddhism" because the path of the pacceka-bodhisatta requires that he meet at least one sammāsambuddha and be taught by him.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:52 PM
Title: Re: Kamma of disseminating wrong dhamma
Content:
I guess you're alluding to the fact that some MSS include 'sickness' in suttas defining the first noble truth and some don't.

If I myself were ever in any doubt as to what belongs and what doesn't belong in each of the four ariyasaccas, my way of allaying the doubt would be to consult those two hermeneutical masterpieces, the Nettipakaraṇa and Peṭakopadesa.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:46 PM
Title: Re: Agamas divergence from Pali Canon, still practiced?
Content:
No, I didn't mean that. Nor do I see how this could be inferable from anything I said in reply to Sati1. Since I stated that there ARE Mahayanists who make a point of studying the Āgamas, how could I possibly have meant that the said Āgamas are of interest only to Theravādins?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 2:36 PM
Title: Re: who don't want to be known as a good person
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:58 PM
Title: Re: Questions about monk's robes & things
Content:
A forest monk whose robes are dyed with jakfruit chips wouldn't wear any of them when sleeping because semen leaves a permanent stain when it comes into contact with this kind of dye. Instead he would wear his rains bathing cloth which is dyed with red clay. For a monk with chemically dyed robes this isn't an issue and he probably will sleep in his normal lower robe.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:49 PM
Title: Re: Questions about monk's robes & things
Content:
Most town and village monks don't observe the Vinaya rules that limit the number of robes and so they would just put on a spare lower robe. A Vinaya-observant monk, when washing the lower robe, would wear his rains bathing cloth (that's something I didn't mention in my last post). With the upper and outer robes it's not really an issue as these don't need to be worn inside the monastery except during ceremonies. So monks would just schedule the washing so that they can be sure the upper and outer robes will have dried before they need to wear them.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 12:51 PM
Title: Re: Did Hakamaya Noriaki ever write his proposed article demonstrating that Yogacara is not Buddhism?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 12:21 PM
Title: Re: Questions about monk's robes & things
Content:
There's no consensus on this. Some monks (e.g., Ajahn Thanissaro) insist on wearing no extra clothes beyond those made allowable in the Vinaya. Others (in fact most) apply the great standards to argue for the allowability of extra clothes in cold climes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 9:45 AM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
Eh? What the Buddha intended in his pronouncements on the subject of meat-eating and vegetarianism has nothing to do with a topic about vegetarianism on a Buddhist forum??


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 8:17 AM
Title: Re: Taking 2 refuge
Content:
I don't see how this would follow from what I wrote. There might, for all I know, be all sorts of people who say that paccekabuddhas are entirely impossible.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:19 AM
Title: Re: Taking 2 refuge
Content:
It's puzzling why a Dhammapada-onlyist would be worrying his head about paccekabuddhas of all things!

But for your information, proponents of classical Theravāda would not say that. Rather, they would say: "There were paccekabuddhas, there will be paccekabuddhas, and there may be paccekabuddhas right now in any cakkavāḷa that's presently in the dark period between the disappearance of one buddhasāsanā and the arising of the next one."

In short, all that's denied is the possibility of paccekabodhi in any given cakkavāḷa at a time when that cakkavāḷa's buddhasāsanā is still intact.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 4:03 AM
Title: Re: The European Pagan Connection
Content:
With the Old Norse...

Sāma and Sabala - Garmr and the Fenris-wolf
Yama - underworld goddess Hel
Pāricchattaka tree - Yggdrasil
Varuṇa - Óðinn
Pajāpati - Týr

And many others I've forgotten. For Norse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Turville-Petre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Dum%C3%A9zil are the guys to read.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 24, 2020 3:30 AM
Title: Re: Kamma of disseminating wrong dhamma
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 20, 2020 8:34 AM
Title: Re: Will most people really go to the three lower dimensions? (animal womb, hell, ghost realm)?
Content:
It makes sense to me, for elsewhere the suttas say that any of the ten unwholesome kammic courses (akusala kammapatha) can be a cause for rebirth in the lower realms. If that's the case, then I think the wide prevalence of just two of the ten —frivolous speech and wrong view— would more than suffice to bring about the outcome that your sutta describes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 20, 2020 2:41 AM
Title: Re: What is this chant?
Content:
But I see they've mistranslated it. Either the Pali should be changed to namassāma or the French to Je me prosterne...

http://vivekarama.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PUJA-version-moine-et-nonne.pdf


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:43 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
If one made that one's criterion then all utterances would necessarily be non-polemical and non-derogatory.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 19, 2020 2:18 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
Sigh. I was trying to express the point in a jargon-free manner. What I meant of course was the polemical claim that non-Mahayanists understand only the path that leads to the khīṇāsava-ñāṇa of a Buddha's arahant disciple, but not that which leads to the sabbaññuta-ñāṇa of a sammāsambuddha.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:09 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
I don't the matter is quite as simple as you represent it. As I see it, there are two uses of śrāvakayāna that are offensive and two that are not:


1. Inoffensive when used merely as a term for the path that leads to arahantship.

2. Inoffensive (at least in intent) when modern Mahayanists use it in order to avoid using the 'H' word.

3. Offensive when applied to a non-Mahayana Buddhist school to assert the Mahayana polemical claim that non-Mahayanists understand only #1 and know nothing about the path to buddhahood. Historically this seems to have been the main purpose for which the name was coined.

4. When applied to the Theravada, the term's use is offensive on the grounds of presumption. The school has never referred to itself as "the disciples' vehicle" (indeed the very word sāvakayāna is not to be found in any Pali canonical or commentarial text), and so giving it a name its followers don't recognize is as impertinent as calling an Inuit an "Eskimo" or a Pgaz K'Nyaw a "Karen".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:55 PM
Title: Re: what is problem with yogacara school ?
Content:
Thanks for the correction. I was repeating what I had been told by a Shingon monk, which was to the effect that all the six schools of Nara were either extinct (like the Sanron-shū‎/Mādhyamaka) or more or less moribund.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 17, 2020 11:40 AM
Title: Re: what is problem with yogacara school ?
Content:
Almost entirely the latter. It does still survive in Japan as the Hossō sect but like with most of Japan's old-but-very-tiny sects the survival is only nominal, with its priests occupied with caretaking tourist temples, not with the study and exposition of Yogācārin texts or the practice of Yogācārin methods.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 17, 2020 1:53 AM
Title: Re: Intention
Content:
I prefer to make this my last post in this thread.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 17, 2020 12:44 AM
Title: Re: Did the Buddha teach we have choice? (aka The Great Free Will v Determinism Debate)
Content:
So forget the afterthought. But the earlier post still stands.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 17, 2020 12:18 AM
Title: Re: Intention
Content:
One would be acting with the thought of harming. The unwholesome kamma would probably be exacerbated by one's wrong views that the victim was doing something bad and that shooting him is doing something good.

I've left unanswered those where I don't think enough detail has been given.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 11:47 PM
Title: Re: Liberation only within the Dhamma
Content:
It's not reckoned as happening outside, for every Paccekabuddha needs to have been first "triggered" by a Sammāsambuddha in a former life.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 11:38 PM
Title: Re: Liberation only within the Dhamma
Content:
Cūḷasīhanādasutta, MN 11: Other samaṇas and brāhmaṇas might teach full comprehension of the first three kinds of upādāna, but not the fourth.

Sekhasutta, SN 48:53: No other samaṇa teaches so true a Dhamma.

Kosambiyasutta, MN 48: No other samaṇa or brāhmaṇa possessed of a view such as I possess.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 10:31 PM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
You've misunderstood what I wrote. My point wasn't that he was formerly acclaimed an arahant but now isn't. It's the other way round. He wasn't formerly acclaimed an arahant but now is.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:24 PM
Title: Re: Did the Buddha teach we have choice? (aka The Great Free Will v Determinism Debate)
Content:
An afterthought...

It occurs to me that there's a more elementary problem in beanyan's argument: rejection of free will would not necessarily be entailed by Makkhali's view, at least as we know it from the suttas. To hold that the actions beings perform are soteriologically irrelevant because everybody is liberated after they've reincarnated enough times doesn't amount to taking any particular stand on the free will question. That is, it would be equally compatible with a determinist, a voluntarist or a compatibilist understanding of willed actions.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 4:23 PM
Title: Re: Did the Buddha teach we have choice? (aka The Great Free Will v Determinism Debate)
Content:
To argue, "Someone of Makkhali's view would reject free will, therefore someone who rejects free will would be of Makkhali's view" is to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. (P → Q,Q) → P

There are countless views besides Makkhali's which, if held, would logically entail the rejection of free will.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:30 PM
Title: Re: Full Awakening via Mindfulness of Death Or Corpse
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:05 PM
Title: Re: What is Pajanati?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:51 AM
Title: Re: Asubha
Content:
Buddhaghosa's warning finds much anecdotal support from stories emanating from the Ajahn Mun tradition, where asubha is much emphasised. In the typical story the monk ends up going haywire and having sexual fantasies about the female corpse he keeps staring at.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:31 AM
Title: Re: Buddhism, Bhagavad Gīta, Mahābhārata, witch-burning etc.
Content:
Off-topic posts removed.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 16, 2020 1:02 AM
Title: Re: Buddhism, Bhagavad Gīta, Mahābhārata, witch-burning etc.
Content:
By all means report any post you see that you believe violates the TOS.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:42 PM
Title: Re: Doubt about buddha's dhamma propagation
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 6:06 PM
Title: Re: Doubt about buddha's dhamma propagation
Content:
Perhaps when the Buddha scanned the universe he divined that all the humans with the greatest potential for enlightenment happened to be living in Magadha and Kosala, while Rome and Athens were inhabited by persons with little accumulation of paññā pāramī who had all been dung beetles in their former life. 

Now that would account for it! As would any of half a dozen or so other speculations that I might dream up if I put my mind to it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 5:03 PM
Title: Re: Mundane vs supermundane jhana
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 12:19 PM
Title: Re: Buddhism, Bhagavad Gīta, Mahābhārata, witch-burning etc.
Content:
Then do so if you wish to make such allegations.

Now back to the Bhagavad Gīta...


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 8:57 AM
Title: Re: Is Cannabis oil available in pharmcy in Thailand?
Content:
I've often seen it in the medical stores of Thai monasteries, which means it's probably quite readily available – the sort of thing that you could buy at Boots.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 8:50 AM
Title: Re: Questions from Student
Content:
I believe the private messaging function becomes operative after a new member has sent three or four posts, so you're nearly there.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 15, 2020 2:51 AM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
Cyclical? Did the Buddha ever say: "With death as condition arises ignorance"?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 9:16 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
As this is the General Theravada rather than the Connected Paths Forum, I've moved to a new thread a sub-thread that seemed to have at best a highly tenuous connection with Theravada teaching.

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=36821


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 7:11 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
When I first came here in 1985 it was still common to hear upper-class Thais educated at Prince Royal's College refer to the bhikkhusaṅgha as "the Buddhist church" and sāmaṇeras as "deacons" (terms used by Henry Clarke Warren in his 1896 Buddhism in Translations). Even to this day the hospital for Buddhist monks in Bangkok is called...

.



Priest Hospital.jpg (63.19 KiB) Viewed 3823 times


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 12:42 PM
Title: Re: Translation of ma189 parallel to mn117
Content:
"Not parallel" because they're different.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 12:20 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
Are you referring to Arthid Sheravanichkul's paper in that book?

If so, then "historically" here just means "in Siam for a short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries".

What Sheravanichkul reports happening is that some upper-class Siamese were educated at international schools by foreign teachers using English language textbooks. And so they learned their Buddhism from reading the likes of Rhys Davids, E.J. Thomas, Max Muller, etc. And from these writers they learned that there were two types of Buddhism, the Hīnayāna and the Mahāyāna and that the Buddhism of Siam was of the former type. And so they came to make this usage their own.

In Burma and Sri Lanka there was apparently a parallel trend among Buddhists who were educated at British colonial schools. Indeed in Sri Lanka the use of "Hīnayāna" seems to have continued for quite a long time among the native Buddhist intelligentsia. I recall in Iceland I used to know a very old Sinhalese lady who had been educated at a posh girls' school in Kandy. She had then lived most of her life abroad, working for the UN, and become cut off from her Sinhalese and Buddhist roots. At our first meeting she struggled to recall the "facts" about Buddhism that had been instilled in her as a girl, at one point asking:

"Reverend, do please remind me ... I'm always getting the two mixed up ... are we Sinhalese Buddhists the Hīnayāna or are we the Mahāyāna?"


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 7:09 AM
Title: Re: Veram
Content:
There's no connection.

Veramaṇī is from viramati; vera from *vīrayati (a verb found only in grammars).

Ironically it's vera, not veramaṇī, that's related to 'virtue'.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:40 AM
Title: Re: Asubha
Content:
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.119.than.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:08 AM
Title: Re: Programming is wrong livelihood?
Content:
The common translations of tiracchāna as "debased", "animal" or "bestial" are excessively negative. If it wasn't such an unfortunate double entendre, the literal translation "horizontal arts" would capture the sense best. The basic idea is that these are arts/skills of a kind that don't lead upwards, i.e., to jhāna, dispassion, cessation, nibbāna. For this reason they're improper for a samaṇa to be occupying himself with, being distractions from the pursuit of jhāna, etc. They are not improper for a householders, whose lives are either not devoted to the same ends as a samaṇa or are at least are not devoted to them with the same intensity.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 9:06 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
If that's what it was, then the texts would have defined it so. They didn't.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:12 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
Nobody is disputing that. But the meaning of mundane and supramundane right view isn't a matter of opinion. The texts give both terms clear definitions and only the latter has to do with insight-related topics like dependent arising.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:26 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:17 PM
Title: Re: numerology of EBT sutta numbering
Content:
Maybe. The problem is that afaik we don't know how old that numbering system is either. In the Abhidhamma Piṭaka we meet also with a system of numbering paragraphs by the letters of the Pali alphabet. Did this come later? Or might it be a relic of an older numbering system that was once used for the Suttas too?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:11 PM
Title: Re: My concerns and doubts about Buddhism and Buddhists
Content:
If they're so inclined they could do as I do. If not, there isn't really any general suggestion I can make, for different people will be satisfied with different things.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 6:49 PM
Title: Re: Programming is wrong livelihood?
Content:
By analogy with butchery it would be wrong livelihood in the case of the owner of the company and those employees who are required to kill the mice or to give the order for them to be killed. It wouldn't be wrong livelihood for those employed in unrelated activities.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 6:36 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
is in the Suttas called "right view affected by taints, partaking of merit, ripening in the acquisitions" or "right view as a wholesome kammic course".

In the Abhidhamma's Dhammasaṅgaṇī it's called "accomplishment/success in view", diṭṭhisampadā.

In the Abhidhamma's Vibhaṅga it's called "knowledge of ownership of kamma", kammassakatañāṇa.

In the commentaries it's called "mundane right view", lokiyā sammādiṭṭhi.

None of these four terms is applied to understanding dependent arising.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:47 PM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
I don't think you will find very much. None of the three was at all given to self-advertisement.

The late U Dhammānanda is highly regarded among Pali scholars in Thailand for his having introduced the Burmese pariyatti system here, but isn't much known outside of Pali study circles. The late Phra George is now probably little known outside of Austria, where, after disrobing, he spent his last ten years or so running a meditation centre in Vienna. Ajahn Sanit is hardly known outside the sub-district of Lamphun where his monastery is located.


./download/file.php?id=5590&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 3:12 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
A meritorious kamma belonging to the sense sphere can be carried out by a consciousness associated with knowledge (ñāṇasampayutta citta) or a consciousness dissociated from knowledge (ñāṇavippayutta citta). What differentiates them is whether or not the mental factor of non-delusion (amoha cetasika, = paññā) is present or absent. When this factor is present, then the giving of a gift, for example, will be done with the understanding that the act is kusala. To understand an act as kusala is to understand that it's nature is to ripen as sukha. One giving a gift with this understanding can be said to possess mundane right view, for all of the ten propositions that constitute mundane right view ("There is what is given, etc.") are just variant expressions of a single principle: ownership of kamma.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:48 PM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
No, not a mental breakdown, but first motor neuronal problems and then loss of consciousness until his death several years later.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:15 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
Presumably they are posters who don't look upon the texts I mentioned as valid sources. I'm not sure whether their views could be shown mistaken on the basis of the first four Nikāyas alone.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:03 PM
Title: Re: My concerns and doubts about Buddhism and Buddhists
Content:
The actually lived religion would be my criterion too, but I would base my judgment on a religion's virtuosos, not its manyfolk.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:34 PM
Title: Re: Programming is wrong livelihood?
Content:
The translation is fine. As the full list of low arts that are improper livelihoods includes the practice of medicine, it's obvious that it's not intended to refer to householders' ways of making their living. For example, we don't find the Buddha suggesting to Jīvaka the physician that he ought to find some other way of earning his daily bread.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:14 PM
Title: Re: Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gīta and the Mahābhārata
Content:
You are confusing dāna ('giving', from the root dā, to give) with dhana ('wealth', from the root dhā, to divide). 

Neither of the two has any connection with sādhana, which the ancient Sanskrit grammarians derived from the root sādh, to succeed.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:56 AM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
To me too. 

Though to be fair I should add that even in the Ajahn Mun tradition explosive ajahns are the exception, not the norm. Much more common are quiet and retiring fellows like Ajahns Khao, Thate and Waen.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:48 AM
Title: Re: Clinging aggregates and what is that self view
Content:
https://suttacentral.net/mn76/en/horner


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:37 AM
Title: Re: Clinging aggregates and what is that self view
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:07 AM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2020 6:28 AM
Title: Re: numerology of EBT sutta numbering
Content:
Given that the Hindu-Arabic decimal system wasn't invented until early in the Common Era, it's unlikely that the sutta-reciters would have thought of "a hundred and eleven" as comprising three ones, any more than they would have thought of the number as comprising a C, an X and an I (as it would have been in Rome).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 12, 2020 9:40 PM
Title: Re: My concerns and doubts about Buddhism and Buddhists
Content:
Why should it? As the Dhamma is more easily admired than practised, surely the odd thing would be if there were no discrepancy.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 12, 2020 9:01 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 12, 2020 8:43 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
Readers of Dhamma Wheel who haven't given any gifts in the present life, or who have given gifts but have never held mundane right view, will get to encounter the voice of another owing to dānamaya puñña made in a former life when they did hold mundane right view.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 12, 2020 7:52 PM
Title: Re: Transcendental Right View without first having Mundane Right View?
Content:
The short answer is that a mental continuum in which mundane right view has never arisen will be one in which the two conditions for the arising of supramundane right view ("the voice of another" and "proper attention") are absent. And so it will not be possible.

A more detailed answer based on the Peṭakopadesa and Nettippakaraṇa, and Dhammapāla's commentary to the latter...

1. Supramundane right view arises dependent on two conditions, one external, the other internal.

2. The external cause is parato ghosa, "the voice of another", meaning some kind of encounter with a correct exposition of the Dhamma, or rather of those elements of the Dhamma that are specifically concerned with generating supramundane right view.

3. The internal cause is yoniso manasikāra, proper attention.

4. An encounter with "the voice of another" is dependent on a past cause: dānamaya puñña, merit consisting in the giving of gifts.

5. The arising of "proper attention" is dependent on two causes, one present and one past.

6. The present cause is cintāmayā paññā, understanding consisting in thinking.

7. The past cause is sīlamaya puñña, merit consisting in moral habits.

8. The past merit referred to in #4 and #7 is not just any kind of dānamaya or sīlamaya puñña. Rather, it is dānamaya and sīlamaya puñña generated by a ñāṇasampayutta mahākusalacitta, a great wholesome consciousness associated with insight.

9. Any meritorious act proceeding from a great wholesome consciousness associated with insight will be accompanied by mundane right view.

Conversely...

1. A being in whom mundane right view is habitually absent, or wrong view habitually present, may perform both meritorious and demeritorious deeds, but the former will not be generated by great wholesome consciousnesses associated with insight.

2. Not being generated by wholesome consciousnesses associated with insight, the merit will not be of the kind required to give rise to an encounter with the "voice of another" or the arising of "proper attention".

Etc., etc.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 12, 2020 7:10 PM
Title: Re: Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gīta and the Mahābhārata
Content:
The figure usually given by neo-pagans and loony feminists is nine million victims for the whole of Europe. This wiki entry gives an account of the figure's dodgy history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_interpretations_of_the_Early_Modern_witch_trials


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 11, 2020 6:47 PM
Title: Re: Celibacy is the one thing that cannot be dropped. Change my mind.
Content:
The Buddha seems to have taken a different view, for in the Vinaya a Buddhist householder who wants to ordain can do so at once, while a renunciate ascetic in an outside teaching is required to first undergo a period of probation. This seems to indicate that right view was deemed a primary concern and a disposition to celibacy a secondary one.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 11, 2020 8:47 AM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
The two monks who've influenced and inspired me the most are most certainly innocent of the charge. I don't mind at all.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 11, 2020 1:29 AM
Title: Re: Buddhist Paradoxes I Still don't understand
Content:
When asked, Ajahn Chah denied that he was an arahant and said that he still had a lot more work to do. So I was told by my former preceptor, Ajahn Khemadhammo.

As I recall, the arahantship accusation started to be levelled against him almost immediately after his death in 1992. By about 1994 it had become a fait accompli that Ajahn Chah had been an arahant when alive, despite his own protestation to the contrary. I don't know why. Perhaps it was a case of devoted disciples thinking: "the true Messiah always denies his own divinity".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 11, 2020 12:21 AM
Title: Re: basic doubt but important
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:28 PM
Title: Re: Dhamma for difficult times - resources
Content:
The English monk Ven. Bodhidhamma, a Mahasi-trained teacher and founder of the Satipanya Buddhist Retreat Centre, is giving daily talks on his youtube channel. The live talks seem to get deleted as soon as they're over, so to catch them it's a good idea to subscribe so as to be notified.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9VUwz45IDTMak1Qk-pMCVw/featured


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 1:14 PM
Title: Re: Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gīta and the Mahābhārata
Content:
I did read it when I was a teenager. Not having re-read it since then, I'm afraid my memory of it is much too rusty for me to give an informed answer to your first two questions. As for the third, there are lots of English translations and some are available online. I've no idea which one is considered the best by those qualified to judge the matter. No_Mind or Binocular might know.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 1:06 PM
Title: Re: Information about Abhidhamma
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:25 AM
Title: Re: Was Buddhaghosa an Ajivikan?
Content:
No. The expressions "doesn't obtain" (na upalabbhati) or "isn't to be found" (na vijjati) are Indian ways of saying "does not exist".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:07 AM
Title: Re: Was Buddhaghosa an Ajivikan?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:19 AM
Title: Re: Was Buddhaghosa an Ajivikan?
Content:
If Buddhaghosa had held the view that you attribute to him in the first part of your post, then it would have been illogical of him to also hold that a living being is liberated after X number of births. Rather, he would have held that "living being" is just a meaningless noise with no referent of any sort and so even the option of describing liberation with reference to impersonal processes in a mental continuum would have been unavailable to him.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:34 AM
Title: Re: Was Buddhaghosa an Ajivikan?
Content:
When Buddhaghosa is quoting the ancients' refutations of Makkhalī's views, then he will also quote the views themselves. Otherwise no.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 3:49 AM
Title: Re: Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gīta and the Mahābhārata
Content:
According to Vaishnavite sources the Bhagavad Gīta has existed since the very beginning of the recreation of the universe after the last mahāpralaya. It was first taught to Sūrya, the sun god, two million years ago, and most recently to Arjuna 5,000 years ago. 

For Vaishnavites of a fundamentalist persuasion (e.g., the ISKCON folks) these figures are to be taken literally and the bhakti texts that report them would count as evidence. For historians they would be unsupported faith claims.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:41 AM
Title: Re: Arguments
Content:
I see.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:13 AM
Title: Re: Arguments
Content:
The Mahayanists in Indian Buddhism were in no position to tyrannize anyone. Their status was rather like that of the charismatic movement in modern Christianity, in the sense that they were a movement that had no independent existence (at least not until a very late period) but rather arose within several mainstream Buddhist schools and came to be frowned at but tolerated in some (e.g., the Sarvāstivāda) and rigorously suppressed in others (e.g., the Mahāvihāra Theravāda). But even in those schools which tolerated them the Mahāyānists were a small minority and in no position to go throwing their weight around.

As for the "wiping out" of schools by the Mahayana, I take it you mean the fact that the Sarvāstivāda and Dharmaguptaka schools eventually became wholly Mahāyāna in their doctrinal allegiance. But this is a state of affairs that arose outside of India and dates from a far later time than that which is under consideration here (i.e., in connection with the avyākata questions). That being so, it would make no sense at all to appeal to the Mahāyāna hegemony in East Asia or Tibet as a way of accounting for the avyākata questions being the common property of all Indian Buddhist schools.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 1:22 AM
Title: Re: Arahants
Content:
The full account of the debate is here...

https://suttacentral.net/kv1.2/en/aung-rhysdavids


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 1:06 AM
Title: Re: the great vegetarian debate
Content:
That's probably because you live in a country where most of the snakes are non-venomous.

Now before I address the rest of your points, I should like to ask if you would mind clarifying the purpose of your post. Is it your contention that, (1) I am misrepresenting the Theravādin teaching on kamma, sīla and ahiṃsā, or (2) that the Theravāda is misrepresenting the Buddha's teaching on these matters, or (3) that the Buddha himself was in error and perhaps should have taught these things differently?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Apr 10, 2020 12:28 AM
Title: Re: Arguments
Content:
When I stated that the Indian schools preserved identical lists of questions, this observation wasn't intended to refer only to what can be gleaned from presently extant canonical texts. To take one example, we know that exposition of the avyākata questions, and the polemical invoking of these, was a major concern among the four or five Pudgalavādin schools. We know this despite the fact that no Pudgalavādin recension of the Tripiṭaka has survived. We know it both from the surviving Pudgalavādin śāstras and from the arguments attributed to the Pudgalavādins in the polemical texts of their opponents.

So again, how would this have come about? Did heavy-handed Pudgalavādin abbots borrow the list from heavy-handed Sarvāstivādin abbots? Did they both borrow it from heavy-handed Theravādin abbots? And what about the Sautrāntikas? Those guys had no use even for Abhidharma texts, let alone Mahāyāna ones. So how did their heavy-handed abbots come by the list?

And again, why didn't the heavy-handed abbots of each school just make up their distinctive lists?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 9, 2020 3:34 PM
Title: Re: Arguments
Content:
Your claim is that the avyākata questions were invented "centuries after the Buddha". So that would mean they date from a time when Indian Buddhism had split into a couple of dozen competing schools. How odd, then, that they should all end up with an identical list of questions not to be answered! Not just the mainstream schools, but even the Mahayanists. How do you suppose that happened? Did the heavy-handed abbots all copy each other's list of questions? Didn't even one heavy-handed abbot have the imagination to come up with a list of his own?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Apr 9, 2020 12:41 AM
Title: Re: Coronavirus
Content:
A useful tip if she's called upon to conduct a Coronavirus wedding.

.


./download/file.php?id=5586&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 8, 2020 3:09 PM
Title: Re: the great vegetarian debate
Content:
It's a case of 'may' rather than 'does'. In both Buddhist kamma theory and Vinaya case adjudication the relationship between one's anticipation of the likely outcomes of an action and the intention that prompts the action doesn't involve the kind of inevitability that some simple-minded vegetarian Buddhists insist on assigning to it. Why? Because though agents may have foreknowledge of a plurality of likely outcomes of their actions they are held to intend only one of these and it is this, and this alone, that determines the action's moral tone.

For example, when a vegetarian drives to the supermarket to buy some frozen peas, if it's a hot summer's day it might occur to her that if she goes ahead with her decision it will most likely result in a host of bugs coming to their death on her car windscreen. If she's a scrupulous Jain this thought will stop her in her tracks. If she's a Buddhist it won't (or at least it needn't). The vegetarian Buddhist, if she understands kamma doctrine correctly, knows that by proceeding as planned she will not be breaking the first precept if any bugs do get splattered, for her intention is to go and buy frozen peas, not to splatter bugs. 

The Vinaya is quite explicit on this: when bhikkhus sweep the leaves on a forest path they know that their sweeping, however carefully done, will be sure to kill an insect or two. But provided their intention is merely to sweep the path and not to kill insects they will not be required to confess a breach of the training rule against killing animals.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Apr 8, 2020 5:17 AM
Title: Re: the great vegetarian debate
Content:
Sure. And that knowledge may lead the more sensitive and thoughtful among them to adopt a vegetarian diet on the basis of the sort of arguments proposed by secular advocates of vegetarianism. But they go too far when they try to argue that this is something required by Buddhist sīla or that one would be performing unwholesome kamma by not following their example.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 7, 2020 11:39 PM
Title: Re: Lockdown Stress
Content:
https://suttacentral.net/mn20/en/horner


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Apr 7, 2020 10:26 PM
Title: Re: Papanca
Content:
Nor do the Pali commentaries every gloss it this way.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 6, 2020 10:45 PM
Title: Re: What Dhamma Book are you reading right now?
Content:
Thanks a lot for the link. I haven't actually read volume 2. Though I've had it for quite a while I was putting off tackling it until I could get hold of volume 1.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 6, 2020 10:38 PM
Title: Re: What is Nāga world and Supanna world? where are they loacted?
Content:
http://www.aimwell.org/DPPN/garula.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 6, 2020 7:05 PM
Title: Re: What Dhamma Book are you reading right now?
Content:
I recall you saying recently that you're a Hindu brahmin by birth. Do you read Hindi? If so, then you can get Bhikkhu Jagadish Kashyap's 6-volume Hindi translation from archive.org

Just search the site for "Paṭṭhāna" and then select the versions that have been scanned well.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Pa%E1%B9%AD%E1%B9%ADh%C4%81na


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Apr 6, 2020 6:56 PM
Title: Re: What Dhamma Book are you reading right now?
Content:
Do you happen to know if there's a digital copy of the full text of Nārada's Guide? I know the second volume is available from archive.org but I haven't been able to find the first volume anywhere.

https://archive.org/details/ConditionalRelGuideToCRPIIVol2/mode/2up


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 5, 2020 9:03 PM
Title: Re: the great vegetarian debate
Content:
I don't understand your point. Pascal, Samvara and I were talking about being self-deceived regarding one's gastronomic intentions. Playing dumb about them is something else altogether. Indeed the two things are virtually the opposite of each other. A person playing dumb aims to deceive others. A self-deceived person isn't playing dumb; he is dumb - at least with regard to whatever it is he is self-deceived about.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 5, 2020 8:44 PM
Title: Re: Abhidhamma Resources
Content:
Pyi Phyo Kyaw's doctoral thesis:

Conditional Relations in Burmese Buddhism

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83947018.pdf


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 5, 2020 8:43 PM
Title: Re: Abhidhamma Resources
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 5, 2020 12:06 PM
Title: Re: Samanera precepts render invalid for bhikkhu ?
Content:
The Khandhakas are the Vinaya texts containing all the rules that fall outside the 227 that get recited in the fortnightly uposatha meetings. In the Pali Vinaya they comprise the Mahāvagga and Cūḷavagga.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Apr 5, 2020 11:02 AM
Title: Re: What happened to the 84000 temples built by King Asoka?
Content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_the_Indian_subcontinent


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 4, 2020 9:23 PM
Title: Re: Samanera precepts render invalid for bhikkhu ?
Content:
Whatever set of sīla is undertaken later will wholly abrogate and supersede any set of sīla that was undertaken earlier and without any need for the older set to be formally renounced

For example, if a five-precept-keeper takes the eight precepts, then the third-precept obligation to avoid sex with unsuitable partners will be replaced by an obligation to refrain from all sex. If an eight-precept-keeper takes the five precepts, then he'll be free again to have sex with suitable partners, eat after midday, sleep on high beds, etc., even though he never formally renounced his undertaking to abstain from these things.

Similarly, when a sāmaṇera takes higher ordination, his 10 precept commitment will be abrogated and superseded by his obligation to train by the rules in the Pāṭimokkha and the Khandhakas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 4, 2020 7:52 PM
Title: Re: Is fishing breaking the precept?
Content:
Unless you are prepared to argue that it's only meat-eaters, and not vegetarians, who can be self-deceived about the intentions that underlie their food purchases, then bringing up the possibility of such self-deception is blatantly a red herring. The fact that a vegetarian can be just as self-deceived as a meat-eater (as a matter of fact, I think vegetarians are MORE likely to be self-deceived in this matter ... but that's an argument for another day) means that the possible self-deception on both sides cancel each other out, making it an irrelevant consideration.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Apr 4, 2020 4:27 PM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
Arahants can be said to be subject to the law of kamma in the sense that they may still experience the vipāka of wholesome and unwholesome kammas they performed before attaining arahatta.

Arahants can be said to be free from the law of kamma in the sense that any actions they perform after arahatta generate neither wholesome nor unwholesome kamma.

An arahant who killed someone by accident would be innocent of any Vinaya offence. If it happened that the state prosecuted and punished him, the relationship between the accidental killing and the punishment would not be an example of a kamma and its vipāka. In other words, not every result of an action is called a vipāka; a vipāka is a very particular kind of result. 

Suppose, for example, that the state's punishing of the arahant causes him some bodily pain. It might be that this pain is an akusala vipāka, but it would not be the akusala vipāka of the accidental killing (being accidental, the killing wouldn't have been a kammic action at all, not even if a non-arahant had performed it). It would have to be the vipāka of some presently-unripened (and unknown) ill deed done before arahatta was attained.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 31, 2020 9:22 PM
Title: Re: Diṭṭhaṃ sutaṃ mutaṃ viññātaṃ pattaṃ pariyesitaṃ anuvicaritaṃ manasā...
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 31, 2020 8:28 PM
Title: Re: Dry Insight and Stream-Entry
Content:
Those suttas (e.g., AN 9.12) in which the sotāpanna and sakadāgāmin are said to be "fulfillers with respect to moral habit" (sīlesu paripūrakārī), but not "fulfillers with respect to concentration" (samādhismiṃ paripūrakārī), in contrast with the anāgāmin and arahant who are fulfillers with respect to both.

Also, all the narratives of people meeting the Buddha for the first time and attaining sotāpatti not while meditating but either while listening to a Dhamma talk or while thinking afterwards about the content of the talk.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 31, 2020 4:37 PM
Title: Re: Information about Abhidhamma
Content:
There's no belief about the origins of any Buddhist text that is entirely uncontested. "Uncontestedness" can be truthfully asserted only when we confine ourselves to some limited sphere of opinion. For example, your view regarding the lateness of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka will probably be uncontested by professors of Buddhist studies in secular universities. The contrary view (i.e., that the Abhidhamma was taught by the Buddha in elaborated form to the deva Santussita and in condensed form to Ven. Sāriputta), will be uncontested in all the Abhidhamma schools and in most of the monasteries of Myanmar and Thailand.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 30, 2020 10:08 PM
Title: Re: The Great Vegetarian Debate
Content:
They're hillbillies who eat whatever greens, roots and berries the village women can forage in the nearby woods, and whatever animals or birds the village men can shoot with their homemade muskets. The latter on a typical day will be mostly squirrels and pheasants, but occasionally they'll get lucky and come home with a wild pig or a muntjac.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 30, 2020 6:14 PM
Title: Re: The Great Vegetarian Debate
Content:
This seems empirically false to me.

I've called myself a Buddhist for forty years and this morning I consumed grilled muntjac ribs without the slightest difficulty.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 30, 2020 5:25 PM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
The duration of the punishment may be short or long or indefinite, depending on how the offender conducts himself. Ajahn Thanissaro deals with it in Buddhist Monastic Code book II ch 20.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 30, 2020 7:08 AM
Title: Re: How is the coronavirus affecting your Dhamma practice?
Content:
Nearly two pages of off-topic posts removed. Do please pay attention to the thread title.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 10:56 PM
Title: Re: Canki Sutta: What is meant by conviction?
Content:
Yes, I take your point.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 7:57 PM
Title: Re: Canki Sutta: What is meant by conviction?
Content:
If you wish. But the sound "buddho" didn't affect any of the other guests at the wedding feast. Why only Sela? Reportedly the gut feeling was the consequence (via natural decisive support condition) of Sela's having built a mansion for Padumuttara Buddha in a former life.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:41 PM
Title: Re: Dhamma for difficult times - resources
Content:
Four talks on the Ratana Sutta by Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi.

.


.


.


.


Accompanying handout:


 ./download/file.php?id=5570
(48.88 KiB) Downloaded 55 times


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:04 PM
Title: Re: Canki Sutta: What is meant by conviction?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 2:27 PM
Title: Re: Yamaka Sutta ideas - please help
Content:
Several phrases are used in polemical texts...

Na sundaraṃ – "inelegant". Used when what is said is not actually wrong but has been clumsily or misleadingly expressed.

Na yujjati or na yuttaṃ - "Not tenable." Used when what is said is wrong.

Chaḍḍanīyaṃ – "To be discarded [like rubbish]." Used when what is said is wrong and you want to be mildly rude.

Saṅkārayakkhavācā - "The words of a rubbish heap demon!" Used when what is said is wrong and you want to be very rude.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 27, 2020 8:28 AM
Title: Re: Canki Sutta: What is meant by conviction?
Content:
Your question assumes that the decision to visit is always a reasoned one. The traditional Buddhist assumption, on the other hand, is that merely getting to hear about the Buddha or his teaching is due to the ripening of some past wholesome kamma, while being moved to go and pay him a visit or to learn more about his teaching would be attributed to other past life conditions (chiefly what the Abhidhamma calls 'natural decisive support condition'). And so the brahmin Sela, for example, feels moved to go and visit the Buddha merely after hearing the word 'buddho' mentioned at a wedding feast.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 25, 2020 11:06 PM
Title: Re: Is Nature Self Aware?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 25, 2020 6:48 PM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
The chapter of monks residing on the donated land, and (if the law requires it) whichever secular authorities have jurisdiction in the matter.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:42 PM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
What do you mean?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 25, 2020 10:10 AM
Title: Re: Four Bases of Meritorious Qualities
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 25, 2020 8:49 AM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
Of the thirteen rules, although #5 can be broken even by an arahant, and #6 and #7 can be broken with only lightly akusala intention, the remaining ten all seem to involve very weighty akusala.

That being so, I would guess that a bhikkhu who commits one will likely be hindered by strong remorse if he hasn't yet confessed, undergone the mānatta penance and been rehabilitated.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 24, 2020 6:23 PM
Title: Re: "Venerable Buddhaghosa was a Hindu!"
Content:
No.

"Heretical in the eyes of Hindus" =/= "An heretical school of Hinduism".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 24, 2020 8:47 AM
Title: Re: "Venerable Buddhaghosa was a Hindu!"
Content:
The Cārvākas were hardcore materialists like Ajita of the Hairy Blanket and as such had nothing to say about karma, except to deny its efficacy. 

Your phrase "Cārvākan school of Hinduism" is a contradiction in terms. The Hindus classed the Cārvākas as nāstikas, along with Buddhists, Jains, Ājīvikas and Ajñanas. In fact the Cārvākas were regarded as the very worst sort of nāstikas, for whereas the other four were content to merely deny the authority of the Vedas, the Cārvākas rejected matters of the spirit tout court.

I suspect what you mean, however, is the Sāṃkhyā school of Hinduism.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 23, 2020 7:01 PM
Title: Re: Rapture during Breath Meditation
Content:
It's found in three suttas in the Majjhima Nikāya

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn39

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn77

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn119


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:38 AM
Title: Re: "Venerable Buddhaghosa was a Hindu!"
Content:
I think you might be confusing Buddhaghosa with the Chinese translator Xuanzang. It's reported of the latter that he was once challenged to a debate by a brahmin. The terms of the debate was that whoever lost would both convert and become the other's slave for life. It's said that Xuanzang treated his slave well.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 23, 2020 7:16 AM
Title: Re: "Venerable Buddhaghosa was a Hindu!"
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 22, 2020 8:59 PM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:
Not my problem, for I don't even believe in the possibility of an arahant testing kit and I think anyone who bothers to acquaint himself with what the texts predicate of arahants would come to the same conclusion. The most that could be done would be to disprove that so-and-so is an arahant, but even that could only be done if the claimant were to give himself away by either expressing some view that an arahant couldn't hold or indulging in some behaviour that the texts say is impossible for an arahant.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 22, 2020 4:33 PM
Title: Re: "Venerable Buddhaghosa was a Hindu!"
Content:
1. Find a sutta passage that is at odds with the view of one or another of Hinduism's six darśanas and see how Buddhaghosa interprets it.

2. If he attempts to harmonize the sutta passage with the said darśana, then we can conclude that he was a Hindu.

3. If he upholds the incompatibility of the two, then we can conclude that he was not an adherent of that darśana. He might, however, have been a Hindu belonging to one of the other five.

4. Repeat 1-3 with sutta passages that are at odds with the other five darśanas. If we find (as we surely will) that the commentator consistently interprets each passage in a way that upholds its incompatibility with the darśana in question, then we may rightly conclude that he was not a Hindu.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 22, 2020 3:30 PM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:
You are putting the cart before the horse.

A correct understanding of how arahants behave should be based on how the texts describe their behaviour, not on fancies plucked out of thin air.

Armed with this understanding you will then be in a position to pose informed questions. I mean questions similar in character to those which King Milinda asked Nāgasena: "Given that the suttas predicate quality x of the Buddha, how come the Buddha was capable of doing action y? Isn't action y at odds with quality x?" 

Then, armed with answers to these questions, you'll finally be in a position to construct an arahant-testing kit that's grounded in what the texts actually say about arahants rather than your own ungrounded and fanciful figments.

But if you can't even be bothered to ascertain what sort of behaviour the texts attribute to the Buddha and his arahant disciples, then by all means continue with your needle-haired yakkha talk.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 22, 2020 1:31 PM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 22, 2020 8:42 AM
Title: Re: Shared karma
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 20, 2020 9:31 PM
Title: Re: The ethics of being indifferent about whether one harms others
Content:
I would say that to ask such a question is to miss the point. The divine abidings are abstract Platonic meditations to be optimally developed by a socially uninvolved quietistic hermit living in a cave or under a tree, and for the sake of becoming a super-yogi (and thence an arahant), not a super-philanthropist or a super-boy-scout. If you don't agree, I invite you to re-read the first and last lines of the Metta Sutta to refresh your memory on how the whole thing is framed.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 20, 2020 8:33 PM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:
Your Lourdes comment was a counter to my point that only a minority of religious people occupy themselves with evidentiary apologetics. But it was an irrelevant counter since the Lourdes pilgrimage wasn't intended to serve any such purpose.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 20, 2020 1:39 AM
Title: Re: The ethics of being indifferent about whether one harms others
Content:
I doubt anyone has ever claimed that such a monk would be blameless. What might be claimed (and rightly so) is that a monk who neglected to save somebody's life wouldn't on that account be held guilty of the third pārājika offence (homicide). But we're talking here about a purely legal judgment: since the third pārājika rule prohibits killing but doesn't impose any positive obligation to save lives, it's impossible to transgress it by doing nothing. But the absence of such an obligation under the terms of this training rule doesn't mean that no blame would attach to a monk who could easily have saved someone but neglected to do so. Being merely not guilty of a particular pārājika doesn't equate with all-round blamelessness. For example, if a monk embarks on a criminal career of mugging old ladies and stealing schoolchildren's dinner money, he could avoid committing the second pārājika simply by never extracting more than five māsakas from each of his victims. But though this precaution will prevent his being held guilty of pārājika, I don't suppose many Buddhists will call him blameless!


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 18, 2020 3:07 PM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:
There's really no "if" about it. A fideistic approach to the Dhamma is the Buddhist norm; it's how the vast majority of Buddhists go about things. In certain Mahayana schools fideism's the only game in town, but even in the Theravada a critical or skeptical approach to the Dhamma is the exception. The suttas frankly acknowledge this and don't privilege one approach over the other.

As to why the Buddha would bother to state his credentials, the first thing to note is that most of the time he doesn't. That is, in the great majority of suttas he simply teaches the Dhamma to some enquirer and says nothing at all about himself. On those occasions when he does do so (e.g. before teaching the five ascetics in the Deer Park), it seems to be with the aim of getting the listeners into an appropriately receptive frame of mind.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 18, 2020 5:39 AM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
I don't think it's worth worrying about, for the task is the same regardless of what one is capable or incapable of achieving in the present life.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 17, 2020 1:18 PM
Title: Re: Where does the Universal Well-Being chant come from?
Content:
This is from the Abhiṇhapaccavekkhitabbaṭhāna Sutta, AN 5.57, et al.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 17, 2020 10:47 AM
Title: Re: Rebirth admission would collapse modern science
Content:
It seems quite unremarkable to me. In most religions apologetics is something that only a tiny minority of enthusiasts concern themselves with, while apologetics involving scientific testing interests only a minority of a minority. And so the fact that very few Buddhists can be bothered, say, to pursue Ian Stevenson's brand of research (or even to read the man), or to engage in hypnosis aimed at past-life regression, or to master the rebirth "proofs" of Dharmakīrti (if they're of a Tibetan persuasion) is no more remarkable than the fact that few Christians can be bothered to take part in experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of healing prayer. Religious people, by and large, have other fish to fry.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 17, 2020 9:38 AM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
Since the ubhatobyañjanaka is included in Vinaya's short list of persons absolutely disqualified from ordaining, it would seem that long before the Milindapañha this was seen as a deeply problematic condition, even though no explanation was offered as to why this was so.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 17, 2020 2:40 AM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
In the commentaries it would be explained with reference to the idea that both jhānic and ariyan attainment depend on possession of a triple-rooted life-continuum (tihetuka bhavaṅga), i.e., one with the full complement of three wholesome roots. Certain congenital abnormalities, including the two in question, were viewed as symptomatic of the rebirth-linking consciousness (and thus of the subsequent bhavaṅga) being at best double-rooted, i.e. of lacking the wholesome root of non-delusion.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Mar 16, 2020 8:19 PM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
A couple of quibbles...

Firstly, the aspirations of Pure Land Buddhists are usually directed toward the Happy Land (Sukhāvatī) rather than Happy Farting (Sukhavāti).
 

Secondly, I believe among Japanese Amidist priests, those of Shinran's Jōdo Shin school greatly outnumber those of Hōnen's Jōdo school. Of the two, it's only the priests in the latter minority school who can be said to be "striving for birth in Sukhāvatī" (i.e. by mantra recitations, petitionary prayers etc.). Those of the Jodo Shinshū believe there's nothing to strive for: their birth in Sukhāvatī is assured and so their religious life consists in saying thank you to Amida, not in asking him for anything.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 15, 2020 3:17 PM
Title: Re: Coronavirus?
Content:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 14, 2020 6:20 PM
Title: Re: Are some deva (deities) not opapatika?
Content:
Terrestrial devas are catuyonika, that is, they can be born in any of the four ways. Celestial devas from the Heaven of the Four Great Kings upwards are all opapātika.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 14, 2020 12:36 AM
Title: Re: fire, poison & sword
Content:
The seventh benefit of mettā cetovimutti is obtained only during those moments when the yogi is actually in this samāpatti, not when he has emerged from it. See Nāgasena's discussion of a related question in the Milindapañha's https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mil5.4.6.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 13, 2020 8:17 PM
Title: Re: 8FP
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 13, 2020 5:34 PM
Title: Re: What are the karma which cause inablity to attain 4 stages of enlightment in this very life?
Content:
According to the Milindapañha, being any one of the following...

1. an animal.
2. a ghost.
3. a holder of wrong view.
4. a deceiver.
5. a matricide.
6. a patricide 
7. an arahant-killer.
8. a fomentor of schism.
9. an injurer of the Buddha.
10. one in communion with the monastic saṅgha by theft (i.e., who falsely pretends to be ordained)
11. one who committed apostasy while formerly ordained.
12. a violator of nuns.
13. a transgressor of one of the thirteen saṅghādisesa rules who hasn't yet undergone the required penance and rehabilitation.
14. a eunuch.
15. an hermaphrodite.
16. a human child less than seven years of age.

will prevent one from arriving at Ariyan penetration.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mil6.3.8


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 13, 2020 10:08 AM
Title: Re: What needs to be done so that Theravada is never called Hinayana
Content:
I already do. For me it's been clear for decades that whereas mainstream Indian Buddhism (the Buddhism of the "eighteen" Schools) is one religion divided into competing traditions of interpretation, the Mahayana is something else altogether.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Mar 8, 2020 6:39 PM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 5:42 PM
Title: Re: Without right view can one attain right concentration ?
Content:
It can be experienced by a jhāna attainer before stream-entry but it would be productive of taints (āsava) and liable to ripen in rebirth, and so wouldn't yet be reckoned an Ariyan path factor. In kammic terms, it would be a bright kamma leading to a bright result, not a neither-bright-nor-dark kamma leading to neither a bright result nor a dark result.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 3:45 PM
Title: Re: Without right view can one attain right concentration ?
Content:
No. Sorry, it's just my hasty typing. The word 'Ariyan' shouldn't be there. 

The wrong views abandoned by substitution of opposites are of the coarse diṭṭhigata kind, like the 62 of the Brahmajālasutta. But one needn't have yet arrived at stream-entry to have abandoned these wrong views at the level of "the heard" sutamaya and "the thought" cintāmaya.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 3:43 PM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
Right.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 3:38 PM
Title: Re: Without right view can one attain right concentration ?
Content:
Your question seems to assume that this passage is a definitive teaching and one that describes all the sufficient as well as all the necessary conditions for sammā-samādhi. But it isn't.

To discount the importance of right view in this matter is as if someone were to quote the https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/sn12.23 and then ask: "Why doubt that everybody who suffers will be sure to attain nibbāna?" Or were to quote the https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/an10.1 and then ask: "Why doubt that everybody possessed of sīla will be sure to attain nibbāna?"


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 3:14 PM
Title: Re: Without right view can one attain right concentration ?
Content:
All jhānic attainment involves abandoning by suppression, but for one without right view none of the higher kinds of abandoning are possible.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 2:15 PM
Title: Re: Without right view can one attain right concentration ?
Content:
No. The texts apply several names to the four jhānas or eight samāpattis when developed in the absence of right view, but "right concentration" isn't one them. The usual ones are a "pleasant abiding in the here-and-now" and "abandonment by suppression".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 11:59 AM
Title: Re: Sarvastivada is still exist?
Content:
In the Theravāda the cardinal doctrine of the Sarvāstivāda (that dharmas persist through the three periods of time) is considered to have been successfully refuted at the Third Council.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/kv1.6

Even the Tibetan followers of the Sarvāstivāda regard its central tenets as only provisionally true, hence its traditional classification as the lowest of the four tenet systems.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Mar 7, 2020 10:52 AM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
As for the temporal issue, I suspect the ambiguous locative of the first and third lines was used advisedly, for some of the relations that follow, like consciousness and nāmarūpa, may be simultaneous, while others, like birth and death, cannot be so.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 6, 2020 10:17 PM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
The locative absolute wouldn't imply that it is or that it isn't. The use of such a clause is every bit as ambiguous as a "When..." clause is in English. That is, it may express either subsequence or simultaneity, either 'if' or 'when', and either a causal relation or a non-causal one.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 6, 2020 9:56 PM
Title: Re: What Dhamma Book are you reading right now?
Content:
A comparative study of the Pali, Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan versions of the Sāmaññaphalasutta...

Graeme MacQueen, https://archive.org/details/astudyofthesramanyaphalasutragraememacqueen/mode/2up


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 6, 2020 9:50 PM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
I take much the same view as Mike. It simply wouldn't cross my mind to use two thises for different referents, except in cases where they're things I can point to with my fingers (but even then I'd still be more likely to use this and that).

Looking at the translations at Sutta Central, I notice that the translators into European languages (except Ñāṇavīra) are unanimous in using "this, that".

English – this ... that
German – dieses ... jenes
Dutch – het een ... het ander
Norwegian – det ene ... det andre
Russian – того ... это
Czech – toto ... ono
French – ceci ... cela
Spanish – esto ... aquello
Portuguese – isso ... aquilo
Italian – questo ... quello

But the Asian translators seem to be divided:

This ... this

Burmese – ဤ ... ဤ [but then in parentheses they add avijjā after the first 'this' and saṅkhāra after the second]
Japanese – これ ... これ
Thai – สิ่งนี้ ... สิ่งนี้
Sinhala – මෙය ... මෙය

This ... that

Indonesian – ini ... itu
Vietnamese – cái này ... cái kia
Chinese – 這個 ... 那個


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Mar 6, 2020 12:33 AM
Title: Re: Aorist Rules
Content:
Adding an a- is quite common, but not when the verbal root begins with a vowel.

In all there are three ways of forming the aorist. See the attached file for Duroiselle's account.


 ./download/file.php?id=5541
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Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Mar 5, 2020 11:41 PM
Title: Re: Aorist Rules
Content:
You could in theory, but in practice this is only ever done with the verb atthi.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Mar 5, 2020 12:59 AM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
This differs from the rendering in the Mahachula translation of the Tipiṭaka only in that the latter uses koh on the first and third lines and jeung on the second and fourth.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 4, 2020 6:06 PM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:
Possibly. To judge from the translations at Sutta Central, Sinhala translators do seem to favour using two "thises" (මෙය ... මෙය).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Mar 4, 2020 11:32 AM
Title: Re: Idaṃ this and Idaṃ that
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 3, 2020 2:05 PM
Title: Re: SN 22.95 Phena Sutta is not about emptiness (sunnata)
Content:
Except in all the places where it isn't.

Admittedly the noun suññatā is more often auspicious than inauspicious in the suttas, particularly in samāpatti-related contexts. But with the adjective suñña it's actually the other way round.

Whether suñña is auspicious or inauspicious in any given context has to be determined by asking: "Empty of what?" 

For example, there's no auspiciousness indicated when outside systems are described as "empty of ascetics" (suññā samaṇehi, MN 11), or when Mogharāja is told to "look upon the world as empty" (suññato lokaṃ avekkhassu, Snp. 4.16) or when bhikkhus are advised to view the aggregates "as impermanent, as suffering, as a disease, as a tumour, as a barb, as a calamity, as an affliction, as alien, as disintegrating, as empty, as not self" (aniccato dukkhato rogato gaṇḍato sallato aghato ābādhato parato palokato suññato anattato, MN 64).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 3, 2020 10:59 AM
Title: Re: What suttas support the orthodox Theravada position that matter exists and all is not imaginary or mind only?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Mar 3, 2020 9:29 AM
Title: Re: A short talk for laypeople by Ajahn Nyanamoli
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Feb 28, 2020 11:43 PM
Title: Re: Going forth without enlightenment?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Feb 28, 2020 7:03 PM
Title: Re: Elements definition
Content:
For the English translation see paragraphs 384-389 of the attached file.


 ./download/file.php?id=5531
(423.69 KiB) Downloaded 37 times


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 26, 2020 6:28 PM
Title: Re: Referring to the Buddha non-reverentially
Content:
Which part? "Our man" or "nominalist"?

And by "non-reverential" do you mean "not expressing reverence" or "expressing irreverence"?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 25, 2020 2:59 PM
Title: Re: Monks/nuns and the Internet
Content:
I'm still using the same rather un-smart 15-year-old Nokia. Mainly as a meditation timer and alarm clock since it doesn't have any sim card in it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 25, 2020 2:36 PM
Title: Re: 10 great question to prove arhantship
Content:
See the Maḥāpañhāsutta (aka Paṭhamapañhāsutta). The Kumārapañhā cited by Samvara is an abbreviated version of this.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/an10.27


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Feb 17, 2020 3:16 PM
Title: Re: Kamma bhava & upapatti bhava
Content:
Do you mean bhava or bhāva? 

(I know 'bhava' is what you wrote, but since you neglected the diacritics when writing 'rūpa' as 'rupa' it's open to doubt whether you meant bhava or bhāva).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:27 PM
Title: Re: Why don't we re-collect on Brahama?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:26 PM
Title: Re: Buddhist Cryptids and Deities
Content:
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/an11.11


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 10:22 PM
Title: Re: Are monks allowed to read books in their kuti?
Content:
I live in northern Thailand, but not in any fixed location. I never go to Bangkok, but if you come to the north then it should be possible to meet up. Just send me a message if/when you reach Chiang Mai.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 7:36 PM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
You've omitted the part about this occurring with the breakup of the body at death.

Or do you mean to say that you accept the possibility of rebirth into the arūpa realms but not into rūpāvacara or kāmāvacara ones?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 6:20 PM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
"A rose by any other name..."

The sutta name for it is saṃvattanikaṃ viññāṇaṃ, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi and I.B. Horner as "evolving consciousness", by Thanissaro as "leading-on consciousness", by Sujāto as "consciousness headed that way". See the Āneñjasappāyasutta, MN 106.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.106.than.html

Edit:
And viññāṇasota in the Sampasādanīyasutta, DN 28.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 5:51 PM
Title: Re: Buddhist Cryptids and Deities
Content:
The Traibhūmikathā ("Treatise on the Three Worlds") is a medieval Thai text based on the Pali commentaries that will probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know about devas, asuras, petas, etc.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eGQK1diD-MG-HJA2w2V-QqHVsMJEEBcv


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 4:43 PM
Title: Re: Jhana
Content:
It depends whether you're talking about his head or his heart.

I'd say he's a Theravādin by ordination and largely (though not wholly) classical Theravādin in view, but with a strong emotional attraction to certain features of the Mahāyāna, in particular the bodhisatva ideal and East Asian devotional rituals.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 15, 2020 4:08 PM
Title: Re: Are monks allowed to read books in their kuti?
Content:
Wat Rampoeng Tapotaram. I know the wat and its abbot. It's a Mahasi-style meditation centre. In all such centres no reading is permitted during periods of intensive practice, e.g., during the centre's 26-day introductory course. During these periods virtually all one's waking hours will be spent doing alternate walking and sitting meditation. Outside of periods of intensive practice you'll be free to read whatever you like, though of course it will be best during your formative period to just stick to Dhamma and Vinaya texts.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Feb 14, 2020 2:05 AM
Title: Re: Diabetic problem in ordination
Content:
Not necessarily. 

To be usable by bhikkhus they do of course need to have been offered to the saṅgha, but not necessarily to the particular bhikkhu who consumes them. In Asian monastic practice they would more often have been offered to the monastery as a whole because it's widely known by laypeople that a gift to the saṅgha is more meritorious than a gift to an individual. Having been offered, they're then placed in the monastery's store to be distributed by whoever's acting as the monastery's "distributor of trifles" (appamattakavissajjaka).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:03 PM
Title: Re: Diabetic problem in ordination
Content:
Yes, there's no Vinaya objection to diabetics ordaining. The Thai sangha has lots of them. You would just have to look either for a wat where the monks take two or three meals in the morning or for one with a laissez faire policy, where monks take their food to their kuti after returning from almsround and are then free to take as many meals as they want between dawn and noon. 

In effect this would rule out forest wats in the Ajahn Mun or Ajahn Chah traditions, but would be no problem in any town or village wat and in those forest wats where the dhutaṅga observances are not made obligatory.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:44 PM
Title: Re: Is the use of the word "puthujjana" denigrating?
Content:
Puthujjana exists as a loanword in modern Thai, pronounced butuchon. 

Outside of technical discussions of Buddhist doctrine, the word functions almost exactly like "son of Adam" (or "daughter of Eve") in English. That is, it basically means "human" or "person", but in a way that stresses one's own or another's fallibility, moral frailty or turpitude. 

The conventions governing the words' use are rather similar in both languages:

1st person: used self-deprecatingly. ("My inner Adam got the better of me"; "I'd love to ordain, but I'm too much of a butuchon").

2nd person: rarely used at all, except when it's a human addressed by some other class of being (e.g., the djinns in the Arabian Nights address men as "sons of Adam"; a Thai monk telling the Bāhiya story might have Bāhiya's brother – a deva – address him as butuchon)

3rd person: used wryly or jocularly when speaking of the faults of others (especially if they involve drunkenness, gluttony or sexual peccadilloes).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 13, 2020 3:16 PM
Title: Re: Why not take refuge in Nibbana?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 12, 2020 9:02 PM
Title: Re: Extirpating viruses ?
Content:
"Sentient beings", "samsaric beings" or "transmigrating beings" are commonly used by translators of Tibetan Mahayana texts to translate སེམས་ཆེན་ / sems can (lit. "with a mind"), which is the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit satva or sattva.

Most Pali translators render the cognate satta as "creatures", "living beings" or just "beings". If they add "sentient" it would probably be to make it clear that plants and suchlike aren't included in the term, though it's not really a good way of going about it. The impercipient beings, for example, are certainly sattas / samsāric beings, but they live out their lives wholly insentient.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 12, 2020 8:24 PM
Title: Re: Is the use of the word "puthujjana" denigrating?
Content:
No. The expression in its literal sense ("[logs] cut to a standard size", as opposed to those that are cut according to a customer's specifications) dates from the 1880s, and in its figurative sense ("average", "mediocre") from the 1920s. Since the mill in "run-of-the-mill" is a motorized lumber mill, it can't serve as a literal translation of any idiom that predates the invention of the steam-powered circular saw in the early part of the Industrial Revolution.

Whether it's defensible as dynamic-equivalent translation would hinge on whether the idiom is a living or a dead metaphor. I guess where Thanissaro comes from it's probably a dead metaphor (i.e., those who encounter it don't immediately think of lumber mills or other kinds of motorized factory), but in some parts of the English-speaking world it's still a living one.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 12, 2020 7:30 PM
Title: Re: Inclusiveness and equality ?
Content:
I too find the notion of "the best kind of impartiality" a little puzzling. The expression doesn't occur anywhere else in the Tipiṭaka and no commentary gives any elaboration of it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 12, 2020 9:51 AM
Title: Re: Why do people like Dancing?
Content:
Just reporting the views of others. I'm nowhere near woke enough to be able to see how hateful hokey-cokey dancing is.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 12, 2020 3:20 AM
Title: Re: Why do people like Dancing?
Content:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3883838/Doing-the-Hokey-Cokey-could-be-hate-crime.html


Some Glasgow Rangers supporters being hateful:

.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:07 PM
Title: Re: How I become a monk in Ajaan Suchart Monastery?
Content:
If you went to live there Tan Suchart would (I expect) be the teacher (ācāriya) with whom you have dependence and who would give you your training in Vinaya, monastic etiquette, meditation etc. But he wouldn't be the preceptor (upajjhaya) who oversees your bhikkhu ordination ceremony. In Thailand it's very often the case that a bhikkhu's upajjhaya is a rather nominal figure with whom he has very little to do once he's been ordained.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 9, 2020 9:45 PM
Title: Re: jhana vs silent illumination or other zen methods
Content:
That the Bodhisatta's two teachers were of Sāṃkhya affiliation isn't reported in any Buddhist texts composed before the Common Era, nor in any Theravadin texts at all. Nothing that is said about their views in the suttas would support this classification of them. The mere fact that Āḷāra and Uddaka had two different conceptions of the summum bonum militates against the idea that they were both adherents of a single school.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 9, 2020 6:14 PM
Title: Re: Bare awareness is temporary?
Content:
"You read", "you can", "experience".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 9, 2020 10:00 AM
Title: Re: what is the pali text for this chanting clip?
Content:
It's from a merit dedication chant, but in the last half line the verb should be (and in Thai chanting books is) in the imperative mood: phusantu.

bhavagg'upādāya, avīci heṭṭhato,
etth'antare sattā, kāy'ūpapannā,
rūpī arūpī ca, asaññī saññino,
dukkhā pamuccantu, phusantu nibbutiṁ.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Feb 9, 2020 2:45 AM
Title: Re: what is the pali text for this chanting clip?
Content:
The link doesn't work. It just takes me to the login page of weibo.com


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 11:35 PM
Title: Re: How I become a monk in Ajaan Suchart Monastery?
Content:
I've joined the three Ajaan Suchart-related threads into one. Please don't start any more.
– Moderator


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 2:33 PM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 9:03 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 8:28 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
I doubt your late teacher would. Goenkaji knew the Vinaya rules well and required bhikkhus who took his meditation courses to observe them to the last dot and comma.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 2:26 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
Your quarrel here is with Ven. Paññobhāsa, not me. I've already voiced my scepticism about his opinion.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Feb 8, 2020 12:48 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Feb 7, 2020 7:39 AM
Title: Re: Who can post?
Content:
My pleasure.

Yes, I'm a bhikkhu.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 9:12 PM
Title: Re: Change of username
Content:
Send a message to one of the two admins:

https://dhammawheel.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=53

https://dhammawheel.com/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 8:56 PM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
For me at the moment that would be a very big "if".

I'm quite positive that in the Vinaya Piṭaka there's no direct statement to the effect that a monk must disrobe if he loses his testicles after ordaining. That being so, Paññobhāsa's view will probably be either (1) his own inference from something or other in the Vinaya Piṭaka; (2) something stated in the commentaries; or (3) some Burmese Buddhist folk belief with no textual support. 

At present I'm leaning most strongly towards #3.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 8:37 PM
Title: Re: Becoming a monk
Content:
It will be best to find out and get it fixed if possible. Otherwise your opportunities will be very limited.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 8:13 PM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
No. It merely means that unlike with the case of animals, the Buddha didn't give any reason for the absolute prohibition against ordaining eunuchs.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 2:33 PM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
The prohibition on ordaining eunuchs is not one of the rulings that's preceded by a reasoned discourse on why the ruling is being made. This is most often the case with rulings given in the Khandhakas, the section of the Vinaya Piṭaka that covers procedural matters. For example, in the case of those persons who are absolutely prohibited to be ordained, it's only the ruling on animals that's accompanied by a reason: animals are incapable of growth in the Dhammavinaya.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 2:23 PM
Title: Re: Becoming a monk
Content:
Is this expected to be a permanent malady or is it something that might be remedied by exercise and/or medical treatment?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 10:20 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
No, the Vinaya treats missing fingers as a less weighty concern than missing testicles. Fingerless men aren't supposed to be ordained, but if they are then the ordination is allowed to stand. But if a eunuch gets ordained he has to disrobe.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 9:02 AM
Title: Re: Pannobhasa on LGBT
Content:
The Vinaya doesn't allow the ordination of napuṃsakas (men born without testicles) or opakkamikas (men who've lost their testicles), but this is the first time I've heard it claimed that a bhikkhu would have to disrobe if he were to lose his testicles after getting ordained.

I've just posted a query about it to Sutta Central.

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/the-meaning-of-pa-aka-in-light-of-the-vedic-and-jain-scriptures/12894/38


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Feb 6, 2020 8:23 AM
Title: Re: Becoming a monk
Content:
Could you expand on what sort of person you're talking about?

Suppose it was someone who had difficulty sitting on the floor because of, say, old age and being long-accustomed to sitting in chairs, or because of arthritis or some such thing, then the Vinaya wouldn't prohibit his being ordained. On the other hand, it would be quite difficult (though not insuperably difficult) for him to find a monastery that would accept him.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 5, 2020 6:57 PM
Title: Re: Who can post?
Content:
If you click on the main page link below you will see all the various forums. Just click on whichever one seems appropriate for the topic you wish to post about.

https://dhammawheel.com/


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Feb 5, 2020 11:22 AM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
How can I claim that my parents and I are different persons? Are you seriously asking that?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2020 7:46 PM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
Are you asking about a being who dies on the other side of the universe and then gets reborn as me? If so, then my answer would be the same as Nāgasena's: neither "same person" nor "different person" fits the case.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2020 6:54 PM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
You're missing the point. King Milinda's question has nothing to do with one's relationship with one's parents. Parents aren't even mentioned. It has to do with whether identity can be predicated of a person in this life and in the next life: are they the same or different? Nāgasena rejects both possibilities.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2020 5:23 PM
Title: Re: the great rebirth debate
Content:
If you're asking whether this might be a tenable interpretation of Nāgasena's simile, the answer is no. This should be evident from the question to which the simile forms part of the answer: when someone is reborn, is he the same person or a different person from the one who passed away?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2020 10:43 AM
Title: Re: source of the story
Content:
It sounds like a misremembered account of Ghosaka as related in the Dhammapada Atthakathā.

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhist-Legends/02-01.htm


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2020 10:27 AM
Title: Re: "The Buddha and his Dhamma" by Ambedkar
Content:
Ambedkar's book shares much the same defects as Paul Carus's Gospel of the Buddha and as such doesn't really deserve to be taken seriously as a work of scholarship. Like Carus, Ambedkar is completely undiscriminating as to sources, e.g., placing very late and heavily romanticised Buddha biographies like the Mahāvastu and Lalitavistara on the same footing as the suttas. Also like Carus, he exercises a great deal of poetic license. If Ambedkar thinks that the Buddha ought to have said or done such and such, then he'll have him say it and do it even if there's no textual support at all.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 31, 2020 7:09 PM
Title: Re: Pall Petters/tattoo
Content:
Or even Buginese...

.


./download/file.php?id=5519&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 31, 2020 7:07 PM
Title: Re: Pall Petters/tattoo
Content:
Or Sora Sompeng...

.


./download/file.php?id=5518&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 31, 2020 7:06 PM
Title: Re: Pall Petters/tattoo
Content:
You can get the Pali names for the terms that interest you from Nyanatiloka's Buddhist Dictionary.

https://www.budsas.org/ebud/bud-dict/dic_idx.htm

Then you can use the Aksharamukha tool to convert the words from romanized Pali into any of eighty different Asian scripts.

https://aksharamukha.appspot.com/converter

Just paste the word in the column on the left and click "auto-detect". Then use the drop-down menu on the right to select which script you want to convert it to.

For example, Devanagari...

.


./download/file.php?id=5517&mode=view


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 28, 2020 5:44 AM
Title: Re: dhammo have rakkhati dammacāriṃ
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 28, 2020 3:32 AM
Title: Re: How to forgive when the other person continues to harm?
Content:
When you say "forgiveness" are you talking about the mental attitude of not harbouring resentment towards those who've wronged you? Or do you mean it in the more transactional sense of formally granting a pardon to such people?

I sense that most posters are assuming the former meaning to be the intended one. But if it's the latter then I think the answer would be that forgiveness is something that it's appropriate to grant to those who recognize their wrongdoing as such and are contrite about it. (In the case of bhikkhus it's not only appropriate but obligatory). It's not, however, something to be practised at all where these conditions don't obtain. If the person doesn't recognize his wrongdoing as such, then one's granting of forgiveness will be perceived by him as a presumptuous act rather than a kindly one. Or if he knows that he's done wrong but doesn't care (as seems to be the case in your example), then he's not yet deserving of forgiveness.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 27, 2020 1:35 AM
Title: Re: SN Goenka - Theravada Dhammaduta extraordinaire
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:27 AM
Title: Re: SN Goenka - Theravada Dhammaduta extraordinaire
Content:
Which is precisely what I do take it to mean. I even take the term to include the offshoot known as U Ba Khin-style vipassanā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:49 AM
Title: Re: SN Goenka - Theravada Dhammaduta extraordinaire
Content:
Similarly, one may reasonably expect that if the Buddha of the Pali suttas were to encounter what nowadays goes by the name “Buddhism”, he would praise whatever in it merits praise and reject whatever in it merits rejection.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Jan 25, 2020 6:59 PM
Title: Re: Hiyyamāne ??
Content:
Jahati, from √ha. 

The verb's passive form is hīyati and present participle hīyamāna. But in verse hīy- sometimes changes to hiyy- to fit the metre.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:44 PM
Title: Re: What is Vibh 83?
Content:
Yes and yes.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:15 AM
Title: Re: Pali Dictionaries
Content:
For Mac-users there's the Easy Unicode keyboard layout.

http://www.palitext.com/subpages/EasyUnicode5.zip

Just download and open the zip file, place the keyboard in the keyboard folder of your system library and then open keyboard preferences and select it. Use the option key to type diacritics, thus:

option a = ā
option i = ī
option u = ū
option g or k = ṅ
option t = ṭ
option d = ḍ
option n = ṇ
option c or j = ñ
option l = ḷ
option m = ṃ

Sanskrit

option r = ṛ
option h = ḥ
option s = ś
option x = ṣ


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Jan 22, 2020 8:58 AM
Title: Re: What is Vibh 83?
Content:
So, the opposite term that you asked about refers (at least in this context) to rūpa that is not grasped by craving or false view. Elsewhere, however, the grasped/not-grasped description refers to whether the rūpa is generated by kamma or generated by the other three causes of rūpa: mind, temperature or nutriment.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:03 AM
Title: Re: What is Vibh 83?
Content:
It's page 83 of the Pali Text Society's romanized Pali edition of the Vibhaṅga, the second book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka.

Pali text
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/pi/vb3

U Ṭhittila's English translation
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/vb3


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 10, 2020 1:19 AM
Title: Re: Is there restriction on consumption of water for monks?
Content:
Indeed. You could take an 80,000 gallon portable water tank to the temple and your sīla will still remain intact


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 9, 2020 7:09 PM
Title: Re: Is there restriction on consumption of water for monks?
Content:
Because no circumstance arose that necessitated this.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2020 11:35 PM
Title: Re: What is the reason sexual abstinence ranking number 1 ?
Content:
Within any particular class of offence there's no reason to think that the order in which the rules are listed is meant to reflect the kammic weightiness of transgressing them. 

In the saṅghādisesas, for example, masturbation is listed before initiating a schism in the sangha, despite the latter being an anantariyaka-kamma. In the nissaggiya-pācittiyas, keeping an extra robe for more than ten days is listed before accepting money or causing a gift that was intended for the sangha to be given to oneself. In the pācittiyas, digging the earth is listed before intentionally killing an animal or beating up a fellow bhikkhu.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2020 10:13 AM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
Though Pali is the best of the four to learn, it's valuable to supplement this with either Sinhalese, Thai or Burmese. Doing so gives one access to much more comprehensive Pali dictionaries than are available in English. It's also much easier to read the commentaries in these modern languages than it is in Pali. When reading commentarial Pali every sentence seems like a jigsaw puzzle that needs solving, but when these are translated into modern languages all of the heavy lifting (e.g., unravelling long compound words and trying to figure out the syntax) has been done for you by the translators.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2020 10:02 AM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
Yes, they're translated into Ratchasap (= Skt rājaśabda), the form of Thai spoken in the royal court, presumably on the grounds of the Buddha being born a prince. And so anything connected with the Buddha – the parts of his body, his possessions, his actions, etc. – are described using Ratchasap words rather than regular Thai ones. For example, the Buddha doesn't just "see" (เห็น); rather, he "disposes his holy eye to see" (ทรงพระเนตรเห็น).

In Thai schools Ratchasap isn't taught until the third year of high school. Before Thaksin became prime minister and hugely increased education funding, many of the poorer rural Thais were only educated up to the third or fourth grade of primary school, in effect making the Thai Tipiṭaka an inaccessible text for them.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2020 8:28 AM
Title: Re: BBC article on ex-monk
Content:
I've never been there but I know that it's the monastery of Ajahn Ganha, a Dhammayutt forest monk but one with a close connection to Ajahn Chah.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Jan 7, 2020 1:01 AM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
I said "extremely few", not "no one". The reasons that come to mind are, firstly, that a great many English-speaking Buddhists are not interested in reading ancient Buddhist texts of any sort. They prefer to just read and listen to modern teachers. Secondly, of those who do read ancient texts, some deliberately avoid the commentaries because they've picked up a prejudice against them from some modern source that they trust. Of those who haven't picked up such a prejudice, some might dip their toes in, usually by reading the Visuddhimagga, but then find much that they either don't understand, or find boring or disagree with.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 8:47 PM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
If you mean "catch up" in the sense of publishing English translations of those Pali texts that have up to now only been translated into Asian languages, then going by present trends I don't think there are any grounds for thinking that English will ever catch up. By "present trends" I mean chiefly mean the policies of publishing outfits like the Pali Text Society, Wisdom Publications, Shambala Press, etc. None of these are interested in commissioning translations of as-yet-untranslated Pali commentaries etc., for the simple reason that extremely few people outside of academia are interested in reading them. As for those within academia, if they're doing Theravada or early Buddhist studies, they will normally be expected to learn Pali and so won't need translations.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 8:21 PM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
I don't know. It's not available on the Mahapali or Bhumibalo Bhikkhu websites and I don't know what others might be likely to host a copy.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 7:43 PM
Title: Re: The Pali word "vo" ???
Content:
Yes. Sati is the locative singular form.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 5:11 PM
Title: Re: The Pali word "vo" ???
Content:
Another example, from the Mahā-assapurasutta, MN 39:

Samaṇā samaṇāti vo, bhikkhave, jano sañjānāti. Tumhe ca pana ke tumhe ti puṭṭhā samānā samaṇāmhā ti paṭijānātha; tesaṃ vo, bhikkhave, evaṃ samaññānaṃ sataṃ evaṃ paṭiññānaṃ sataṃ ye dhammā samaṇakaraṇā ca brāhmaṇakaraṇā ca te dhamme samādāya vattissāma, evaṃ no ayaṃ amhākaṃ samaññā ca saccā bhavissati paṭiññā ca bhūtā. Yesañca mayaṃ cīvarapiṇḍapātasenāsanagilānappaccayabhesajjaparikkhāraṃ paribhuñjāma, tesaṃ te kārā amhesu mahapphalā bhavissanti mahānisaṃsā, amhākañcevāyaṃ pabbajjā avañjhā bhavissati saphalā saudrayā ti.


“‘Recluses, recluses,’ so the people know you, monks, and you, on being asked: ‘Who are you?’ should acknowledge: ‘We are recluses.’ Such being your designations, monks, such being your vocations, thus you should train yourselves, monks: ‘We will go forward undertaking those things that are to be done by recluses, that are to be done by brahmans; thus will this designation of ours become true and the vocation real; and the gifts of those things we make use of: robe-material, almsfood, lodgings, medicine for the sick, will come to be of great fruit, of great advantage to us; and this our going forth will come to be not barren but fruitful and growing.’
(I.B. Horner tr.)


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 11:14 AM
Title: Re: Do you know any good quotes to tell to a control freak?
Content:
You could quote Dhammapada 11-12 and tell them they're mistaking the non-essential for the essential.

Mind you, if it's an Ajahn Chah tradition monastery it probably won't do you any good. With the tradition's ever-increasing emphasis on regimentation, mistaking the non-essential for the essential now seems to be hardwired into everyone.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Jan 6, 2020 8:49 AM
Title: Re: Why I'm an Epicurean and not a Buddhist
Content:
With what do you propose to replace it?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 10:20 PM
Title: Re: The Pali word "vo" ???
Content:
The vo here isn't actually an enclitic. It's an indeclinable particle added for emphasis.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 10:23 AM
Title: Re: Monks are allowed to keep pets?
Content:
I would say that Buddharakkhita's words are expressive of a view that sides with dispassion. But since the texts don't recognize the possibility of psittacine stream-entry, presumably it would fall some way short of the ariyan right view.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 8:41 AM
Title: Re: S.N. Goenka says: only use one kind of meditation...why?
Content:
The commentaries take this verse as a description of how the minds of arahants (and only arahants) naturally are. 

Is this what Goenka teaches too? Or is he teaching that non-arahants should endeavour to maintain their minds in this state? If so, then it would render the whole verse redundant for it would in effect reduce it to one of the lower blessings, namely, khanti, which was already covered in an earlier verse.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 8:23 AM
Title: Re: Was Bahiya an Arahant when he met Buddha?
Content:
Kṛtyagñāna (Pali: kiccañāṇa) is the knowledge of the task that accompanies each of the four truths, i.e., that dukkha is to be known, craving abandoned, cessation realized and the path developed. How could one possibly know the tasks if one didn't know the truths that they pertain to?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 5:01 AM
Title: Re: Monks are allowed to keep pets?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 1:40 AM
Title: Re: Monks are allowed to keep pets?
Content:
In the Vinaya there's no explicit allowance, nor any prohibition. But there are passing mentions of monks keeping pets and without the Buddha objecting to it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Jan 5, 2020 12:21 AM
Title: Re: Monks are allowed to keep pets?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Jan 4, 2020 9:59 PM
Title: Re: Tipitaka translation in Buddhist countries
Content:
In Thailand there are Thai translations of the whole of the Tipiṭaka and all the Atthakathās. There's also a translation of the Tipiṭaka into Kham Meuang, the dialect of the North. Only a small selection of Ṭīkās have been translated, mainly those to the Vinaya and Abhidhamma.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Jan 4, 2020 9:49 PM
Title: Re: Why I'm an Epicurean and not a Buddhist
Content:
Only when the term's being used in its popular or slanderous sense, which is usually written with a lower-case e.

When it's written in the upper-case, I think only a human, and maybe a sense-sphere deva, could be one. My cat, for example, shows every indication of being a hedonist, but no sign of being an atomic materialist, a seeker of aponia and ataraxia, or a believer in the doctrine that free will is made possible by certain atoms occasionally moving in a random and irregular fashion.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Jan 4, 2020 8:31 PM
Title: Re: What does "'burning up' its own support" mean?
Content:
I'm not really sure.

If sannissayaḍāharasā is translated as "burning up its own support", as Bhikkhu Bodhi does, then I've no idea what it could mean. That is, I don't know what it could be that both supports rāga and gets burned up by rāga.

My own inclination would be to translate sannissaya according to the way it's used in the Niddesa, the only canonical text where the term appears. In that case it would be "one's own support". That would be in line with all those suttas where it's oneself that is burned up by one's lust.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 3, 2020 12:01 PM
Title: Re: Sotapanna is not a fixed state!!
Content:
Only if doing such things would cause the re-arising of embodiment view, doubt, misapprehension of habitual and vowed observances and other abandoned fetters. This is certainly not a possibility that the Abhidhamma would countenance.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 3, 2020 11:40 AM
Title: Re: Looking for a text
Content:
Yes, though I don't recall this being mentioned in the Dhammapada commentary. It is mentioned in the Saṃyutta commentary to the Uttiyasutta and the Dīgha commentary to the Mahāparinibbānasutta.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Jan 3, 2020 12:14 AM
Title: Re: Isn't mindfulness absurd?
Content:
I moved the post here as it was off topic in the Goenka thread.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 11:19 PM
Title: Re: Looking for a text
Content:
Anybody can perceive amanussas if the amanussas are willing to be perceived, that is, if they choose to reveal themselves to the human sense organs. But those with the requisite iddhi can perceive them whether or not they wish to be perceived.

On his own admission Ven. Sāriputta didn't even have the power to see a paṃsupisācaka. But not being blind or deaf, he had the capacity to see and hear amanussas that wished to be seen or heard by him.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 10:41 PM
Title: Re: Regarding the term, 'Yathābhūtañāṇadassanam'
Content:
I'm not aware of any contexts where yathābhūta could be substituted for paccuppanna, or vice versa. Nor do the commentaries ever gloss either term with the other.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 10:26 PM
Title: Re: Looking for a text
Content:
Yes, you're right. Moggallāna was the reporter of the episode.

I notice that the version of the story given at Suttacentral (that of Ven. Kiribathgoda Gnanananda) contains a mistranslation which makes it appear that she was the mother of both Sāriputta and Moggallāna in their former lives.

https://suttacentral.net/pv14/en/kiribathgoda

For the correct translation (Peter Masefield's - with the full commentary too) see:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HCSzPSDxESwFYNymjgBgdF9xzUSH-74z


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 8:23 PM
Title: Re: Looking for a text
Content:
Not in the pāḷī, atthakathā or ṭīkā. I can't of course guarantee that such a story is not to be found in some less official source in the Theravādin cultural milieu, e.g., a Burmese apocryphal Jātaka text or something like that.

Justindesilva mentioned the Petavatthu, but the only relevant story there (or rather in its commentary) consists in Moggallāna helping out a female peta (not a hell being) who had formerly been Sāriputta's mother.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 7:47 PM
Title: Re: Abhidhamma Resources
Content:
Ven. Pilasse Chandaratana's doctoral thesis:

"Divergent Doctrinal Interpretations on the Nature of Mind and Matter in Theravāda Abhidhamma: A study mainly based on the Pāli and Siṃhala Buddhist exegetical literature"

To obtain the paper go to the link below, fill in your name and email address and confirm that you're not a robot. A download link will then be posted to you.

https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/182309/1/FullText.pdf


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 5:26 PM
Title: Re: Looking for a text
Content:
No, the story comes from various apocryphal Chinese sources. It's not found in the Pali, though it shows clear influence from the https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/ja540.

For a discussion of it see chapter 2 of Kenneth Kuan Sheng Ch'en's Chinese Transformation of Buddhism, https://drive.google.com/open?id=16i0LTRWimXS_wWKfkHSpAKZ-IuDesVxP


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 5:37 AM
Title: Re: What is Dathu (eliments) Manasikara?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Jan 2, 2020 2:37 AM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:
Do you have a source for these criteria?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Jan 1, 2020 11:18 PM
Title: Re: Regarding the term, 'Yathābhūtañāṇadassanam'
Content:
Bhū, from which we get the verb bhavati.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Jan 1, 2020 9:40 PM
Title: Re: S.N. Goenka says: only use one kind of meditation...why?
Content:
As Goenka claimed that vibrations are all that exist, I would guess that he was probably following his teacher, U Ba Khin, who used this word as an eccentric translation of the Pali word dhātu. So, if one accepts this as a defensible translation, then one could say that Goenka's vibration theory is supported by the suttas. In practice of course, nobody outside of U Ba Khinist and Goenkaist circles would be likely to accept this rendering of the word. I mean it doesn't fall even within the (somewhat broader) semantic range of its Sanskrit cognate.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2019 4:23 PM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:
I don't think the point can be made with the third precept, for in this case the wronged party (e.g., a cuckolded husband) isn't wronged in a way that's quite analogous to being killed, robbed or lied to.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2019 2:23 PM
Title: Re: Why animals, birds and insect do not become Ghosts after death?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2019 11:35 AM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:
Perhaps for the same reason that wasting your own money isn't included in the second precept, or trying to talk yourself into believing a falsehood isn't included in the fourth precept.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2019 10:13 AM
Title: Re: Fire/Lotus buds on Buddha statues
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 31, 2019 1:49 AM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:
No. To revert to my earlier example of acts and things to be avoided, as taught in the Sabbāsavasutta — killing oneself expecting that one will thereby cease to exist would be like going to a place frequented by fierce elephants (bulls, dogs, etc.) and expecting to be safe. Or like going into a cesspit or sewer and expecting not to stink. Or like associating with bad friends and expecting not to be badly influenced or to acquire a bad name. They're all imprudent things to do, but doing them doesn't violate any moral precept.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2019 6:05 PM
Title: Re: S.N. Goenka says: only use one kind of meditation...why?
Content:
Over the years I've heard four reasons given.

The first is that the use of multiple methods means superficiality in each of the methods. Goenka uses the simile of digging a well: hitting water (or oil) is more likely if you dig one well deeply rather than lots of shallow wells.

The second is based on Goenka's rather New Agey vibes theory. Each meditation method supposedly produces certain kinds of vibrations peculiar to itself. Non-Goenkaite methods will generate vibrations that impede progress in Goenkaite meditation. (This preoccupation with vibrations is also the reason Goenkaites are advised not to even sit in meditation groups with people who are practising other methods, let alone learn from them).

The third is a stronger version of the second: not only will doing other methods impede your progress, it's also alleged to be dangerous for the practitioner's mental health.

The fourth reason has to do with devas. The reason the Goenka vipassanā method has been successfully transmitted unbroken for the past 2500 years is that there are Ariyan devas who watch over it and protect those who practise it. If significant numbers of practitioners start mixing the method with others, then it will become impure and the devas will withdraw their protection.

Of these four, the first two are from Goenka himself; the other two are what I've heard from assistant teachers and may or may not be what Goenka teaches.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2019 2:53 PM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2019 1:45 PM
Title: Re: Free PTS eBooks
Content:
Anumodanā!


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2019 1:41 PM
Title: Re: Tip of the nose
Content:
See this thread on the meaning of parimukhaṃ.

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5636


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2019 1:34 PM
Title: Re: Why the Buddha never forbade suicide ?
Content:
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn2


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 29, 2019 1:08 AM
Title: Re: In remembrance of Bhikkhu Samahita
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:16 PM
Title: Re: In remembrance of Bhikkhu Samahita
Content:
That someone dies by their own hand doesn't allow us to make any particular determination as to what their destination is likely to be. Like anyone else, if they've performed a weighty kamma at some time in their life, then the destination will be determined by that. If not, then it might be determined by death-proximate kamma. If not, then by habitual kamma. If not, then by reserve kamma.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 28, 2019 6:42 PM
Title: Re: In remembrance of Bhikkhu Samahita
Content:
https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=23927&start=195#p343438

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=25231&start=140#p366282


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 28, 2019 6:23 PM
Title: Re: How do I distinguish verb conjugations?
Content:
You can know it from its form in the present tense third person singular, which is the form given in all Pali dictionaries. For most practical purposes the seven can be reduced to five groups:

1st, 2nd and 3rd conjugations: ending -ati.

4th conjugation: ending -uṇāti or -oti.

5th conjugation: ending -āti.

6th conjugation: ending -oti

7th conjugation: ending -eti or -ayati

For purposes of inflection and recognition, if you see a verb ending in -ati it's unnecessary to know if it's 1st, 2nd or 3rd conjugation. Likewise if you see a verb ending in -oti it's unnecessary to know if it's 4th or 6th conjugation. Being able to distinguish the aforementioned only becomes necessary when one is attempting to derive a verb's appropriate form from its root, in which case one will need to look it up in treatises on verbal roots like the Saddanīti Dhātumālā or the Dhātuppadīpikā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 28, 2019 5:48 PM
Title: Re: Paying taxes and second precept
Content:
I would say not, for transgression of the second precept is bodily misconduct (kāyaduccarita) and as such requires some action of the body. It can't be transgressed by a purely mental action, let alone a mental omission.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 27, 2019 6:49 PM
Title: Re: More effort in 2020
Content:
Best wishes for a single-minded new year. But do please drop by when you have the time and inclination; your contributions aren't in the least insipid.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 4:44 PM
Title: Re: Manchester UK like-minded associate quest!
Content:
If you are looking for like-minded people to rent with, some of the centres will probably have notice boards where you could put up an ad for this purpose.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 4:41 PM
Title: Re: Symbolic meaning of Buddha's mother and step-mother
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 3:53 PM
Title: Re: Lack of progress
Content:
The second part has now been posted.

https://politicallyincorrectdharma.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-ive-almost-stopped-meditating-part_15.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 8:41 AM
Title: Re: Rishi, Seers, Lersi
Content:
There are men here who call themselves ṛṣīs and dress up in the way that ṛṣīs are traditionally depicted in Thai art. But I couldn't say how much of it is genuine. My impression from a distance is there's quite an air of charlatanry and phoniness about the whole ṛṣī scene. I mean I've never heard of any of them living simple lives in forests or mountain caves like the ṛṣīs of old. All the ones I hear about are living comfortably in urban apartments and making an easy dollar by fortune-telling and other low arts.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 1:27 AM
Title: Re: Rishi, Seers, Lersi
Content:
The word ṛṣī takes the form isi in Pali. In the suttas it gets applied to various sorts of persons. Perhaps the closest to what you're describing would be the isi Asita in the Nālakasutta:

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/snp3.11

But the term is also applied to the paccekabuddhas in the Isigili Sutta and elsewhere to arahants or just sages in general.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 26, 2019 1:08 AM
Title: Re: Symbolic meaning of Buddha's mother and step-mother
Content:
She gave birth only to the Bodhisatta, who frustrated the prophecy by going forth.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 25, 2019 11:53 PM
Title: Re: user on this forum with buddhanussati (itipiso...) in signature
Content:
It's from the the chanting book of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia, but I don't know who the translator is. As it contains the politically incorrect and gender non-inclusive word "men" I guess it's probably not Ven. Sujāto's.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 25, 2019 11:00 PM
Title: Re: Symbolic meaning of Buddha's mother and step-mother
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 25, 2019 12:22 PM
Title: Re: Symbolic meaning of Buddha's mother and step-mother
Content:
I don't think any explanation is given for Mahāmāyā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 24, 2019 8:12 PM
Title: Re: what is upasama-anu-s-sati?
Content:
Can you expand on that? I don't understand what you're trying to say.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 24, 2019 1:28 AM
Title: Re: Why is anattā translated as [no self]?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 24, 2019 1:00 AM
Title: Re: Fire/Lotus buds on Buddha statues
Content:
Just search google images for Gandhara (or Mathura) + Buddha.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 23, 2019 10:57 PM
Title: Re: what is upasama-anu-s-sati?
Content:
This argument seems to assume that the practice of the recollection of peace would be analogous to, say, recollection of dāna or recollection of sīla, in which one would need to have given some gifts or observed some sīla in order to have something to recollect. 

It seems more likely to me that it would be analogous to the recollection of death – a practice that doesn't entail being able to remember any past deaths, but rather bringing to mind the inevitability of one's future death. Or to the recollection of the Buddha or the Saṅgha, which don't require one to be a Buddha or a noble disciple, but merely to know about and have faith in the special qualities of these.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 23, 2019 10:43 PM
Title: Re: Fire/Lotus buds on Buddha statues
Content:
It's not that the flame is meant to look like a turban, but rather that artistic representation of the uṣniṣa was in the earliest days of Buddha images turban-like but later took on other forms. But the variant forms continued to be referred to as uṣniṣas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 23, 2019 6:23 PM
Title: Re: Fire/Lotus buds on Buddha statues
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 22, 2019 8:45 PM
Title: Re: The meaning of "abhi" ?
Content:
Well, I'm simply astonished to hear this. 

But if it's Anālayo, then I guess I'll have to back-pedal on my "no scholar worth his salt..." remark.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 22, 2019 8:37 PM
Title: Re: Buddha did not teach12 dependent arising links
Content:
In the context of dependent arisal the suttas define avijjā as non-knowledge of the four truths:

"And what, bhikkhus, is ignorance? Not knowing suffering, not knowing the origin of suffering, not knowing the cessation of suffering, not knowing the way leading to the cessation of suffering. This is called ignorance."

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/sn12.2

So while there may be room for discussion about the nature of this "not knowing", there's none with regard to what it is that's not known.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 21, 2019 5:00 PM
Title: Re: Buddha did not teach12 dependent arising links
Content:
I reject them. I think that compared with the orthodox view (I mean the view deemed orthodox by all Indian Buddhist schools) that the twelvefold dependent arisal was what the Buddha himself taught, these modern revisionist theses all fall foul of Occam's razor.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 21, 2019 4:03 PM
Title: Re: Significance of the foot touching the earth?
Content:
The Buddha described the four satipaṭṭhānas as the "ekāyano path for the purification of beings". Ekāyano is glossed in several ways in the Niddesa and commentaries. See Dmytro's thread on the term:

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=5587

and the discussion in Ven. Anālayo's Satipaṭṭhāna - the Direct Path to Realization, pp. 27-9


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 21, 2019 3:43 PM
Title: Re: Buddha did not teach12 dependent arising links
Content:
Starting with Frauwallner in the 1950s, various academic scholars proposed that the twelvefold paṭiccasamuppāda as we have it now was actually a synthesis of several shorter and older versions. No two of them seem to have agreed on the nature of this alleged synthesis. This wiki entry gives a summary of some of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da#Synthesis_of_older_versions

But the entry omits the theory that seems to have enjoyed the longest vogue (i.e., at least a decade!), that of the Japanese scholar Hajime Nakamura. Though like Nakamura's once-fashionable positing of the Suttanipāta as the proto-Canon, his paṭiccasamuppāda synthesis theory was a dead parrot by about the mid-1980s. See the attached file.

.


 ./download/file.php?id=5413
(373.29 KiB) Downloaded 62 times


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 21, 2019 8:43 AM
Title: Re: Significance of the foot touching the earth?
Content:
In the Aṭṭhakanāgarasutta venerable Ānanda taught eleven doors to Nibbāna. Touching the earth with your feet isn't one of them.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn52


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 20, 2019 10:38 PM
Title: Re: The meaning of "abhi" ?
Content:
The traditional glosses on the abhi- in Abhidhamma are atireka ('extra', 'further') and visesa ('special'). 

Theravada tradition tends to lay especial stress on the second of these two prefixes. What makes the abhidhammic mode of expositon "special" is that it's "non-figurative" (nippariyāya) and definitive (nītattha). Now it does happen that Buddhaghosa and his heirs regard the Abhidhamma as a "higher teaching", but they regard it so because its contents are held to be "truth in the highest sense" (paramattha-sacca), not because they think the prefix abhi- means "higher".

As for atireka, this is the understanding of -abhi that tends to be favoured by modern academic scholars. For Theravadin ābhidhammikas, the Abhidhamma is "extra/further Dhamma" in the sense of being what was taught by the Buddha in addition to the Suttas, or going further than the Suttas. Modern scholars on the other hand, tend to construe it as meaning a further elaboration of the Dhamma by the Buddha's disciples in their own words.

As for the "abhi- as 'about'" theory, I don't think any scholar worth his salt would claim that it means that. I suspect what may have happened here is that the person proposing this idea looked at the entry for abhi- in the PTS dictionary, noted what the cognates of the prefix mean in other languages (these are given at the start of the entry) and then not bothered to read any further.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 20, 2019 8:44 PM
Title: Re: The meaning of "abhi" ?
Content:
"About" is the meaning of some of the cognate words of abhi in other languages: Latin ambi; Old Irish imb; Old High German umbi; Anglo-Saxon ymb, etc.. It's not among any of the glosses proposed either by the ancient grammarians or by modern philologists.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 20, 2019 8:08 PM
Title: Re: Significance of the foot touching the earth?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 20, 2019 7:38 PM
Title: Re: In which sutta does the Buddha explain what no self means?
Content:
The answer to your question will be the same as the answer to any "Who...?" question asked with regard to an arahant: 

No kallo pañho, - "Not a valid question."

See the Moḷiyaphagguna Sutta.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/sn12.12


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 17, 2019 4:53 PM
Title: Re: Permission of parents in Sri Lanka ordination
Content:
I wouldn't call it immoral, because I would see it as compensation rather than a bribe. 

Bribes are payments made to dishonestly induce people to do something other than what it's their duty to do. But it's not a parent's duty either to let his son go forth or to prohibit him going forth. It is, however, a Buddhist son's duty to care for his parents in their old age. That being so, I would see the proffered payment to the parents not as a bribe, but rather as compensation for the fact that after going forth he won't be in a position to carry out his filial duties in full.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 15, 2019 11:32 PM
Title: Re: The cause of cycle of birth and death ?
Content:
You've raised objections of this sort several times before but were never satisfied with anyone's answers because you didn't accept the ten-fetter formula as buddhavacana. Rather, you rejected it as https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=31104#p455724 and https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=31104&start=15#p455841.

That being so, since I don't think you're actually open to persuasion in this matter, and since I don't hope to improve on the answers you've already been given, I'll keep my reply brief and would prefer not to pursue the matter with you beyond this present post.

• What is called 'avijjā' occurs in both gross and subtle forms.
• What are called the 'āsava of avijjā' and the 'fetter of avijjā' are broad terms that encompass all forms of avijjā.
• The elimination of grosser forms of avijjā by attainment of the lower ariyan paths suffices to eliminate diṭṭhāsava and kāmāsava, but...
• does not eliminate the underlying tendency to avijjā (avijjānusaya).
• So long as the underlying tendency to avijjā is intact, the āsava of avijjā and the fetter of avijjā cannot be said to be eliminated.
• The arahant alone has eliminated the underlying tendency to avijjā.
• Therefore the arahant alone has eliminated the āsava of avijjā and the fetter of avijjā.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 15, 2019 8:27 PM
Title: Re: The cause of cycle of birth and death ?
Content:
I don't think the texts relating to the āsavas ever state an order of abandoning. If one were derived inferentially from the account of the abandoning of the fetters, I expect it would be:

diṭṭhāsava: abandoned by the sotāpanna.
kāmāsava: abandoned by the anāgāmin.
bhavāsava: abandoned in part by the anāgāmin, fully by the arahant.
avijjāsava: abandoned by the arahant.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 15, 2019 8:21 AM
Title: Re: Uposatha drinks
Content:
In Thailand you can. In many Burmese monasteries tea is classified as a food because of the local practice of fermenting tea leaves and eating them.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 14, 2019 11:38 PM
Title: Re: The cause of cycle of birth and death ?
Content:
For their meaning see these two threads:

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=4419

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=24977

And in the second thread download the Har Dayal article that I uploaded.

They are ended by the attainment of arahatta.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 14, 2019 6:04 PM
Title: Re: The cause of cycle of birth and death ?
Content:
I expect that this idea (or something rather like it) would make sense to Sāṃkhya-Yogins, Jains and Goenkaists. But in the Pali texts the fact that some sotāpannas are single-seeded, some clan-to-clan and some seven-times-at-most isn't attributed to previous life kamma but rather to the relative strength in them of the five faculties.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 14, 2019 10:59 AM
Title: Re: Ajahn Chah speaks of "convention"
Content:
Probably either sommoot (สมมุติ or สมมติ) or banyat (บัญญัติ), the Thai pronunciations of sammuti and paññatti.

Sometimes the loanwords are used by forest ajaans in exactly the way the Pali commentators do. Other times they're used in peculiarly Thai or peculiarly forest tradition ways.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Dec 12, 2019 12:23 PM
Title: Re: Permission of parents in Sri Lanka ordination
Content:
https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=1243


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 10, 2019 9:27 PM
Title: Re: Translating sabbaṃ natthī ???
Content:
Again unlikely. The words khayadhamma and vayadhamma are what are normally used to characterize something that's arisen and is subject to passing away.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 10, 2019 2:03 PM
Title: Re: vipassanāñāṇa is not a superior human state?
Content:
Deliberate lies about things other than states exceeding the human would in most cases be a breach of the first pācittiya rule.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 10, 2019 1:48 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
I wouldn't generalize because I think it would be different sorts of action for different sorts of people. Or in abhidhammic terms, I think suicide might be prompted by any of the eight greed-rooted cittas, either of the two hate-rooted cittas or any of the eight great wholesome cittas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 10, 2019 1:23 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
I understand pāṇātipāta as having only to do with the killing of other beings.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 10, 2019 12:09 AM
Title: Re: Either Buddhism is pure nihilism or dependent origination must be reinterpreted?
Content:
How does that follow? 

The fact that, say, trees exist dependent on soil, water, sunlight, the seeds from which they grew, etc., surely doesn't mean that no single tree exists. It just means that no tree is its own cause and no tree exists independently.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 9, 2019 9:08 PM
Title: Re: vipassanāñāṇa is not a superior human state?
Content:
Your writer seems to be referring to Buddhaghosa's gloss on the word ñāṇa in Vin-a II 495-6. But since the Vinaya Piṭaka has defined this as the three vijjās, I don't see how it could be "incorrect" of Buddhaghosa to exclude lower levels of insight knowledge, i.e., those which fall short of the noble paths and fruitions.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 9, 2019 7:02 PM
Title: Re: How is meditation practiced in other Buddhism sects?
Content:
Not the Visuddhimagga, for they have their own meditation manuals based on the ideas peculiar to each school. For example, Kamalaśīla's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bh%C4%81van%C4%81krama and Atiśa's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhipathaprad%C4%ABpa for the Tibetan schools; Koan collections like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cliff_Record and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Barrier for the Ch'an school; the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longer_Sukh%C4%81vat%C4%ABvy%C5%ABha_S%C5%ABtra and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorter_Sukh%C4%81vat%C4%ABvy%C5%ABha_S%C5%ABtra Sūtras for the Pure Land schools, etc., etc.

I think Thich Nhat Hanh makes use of the Chinese translation of a non-Theravadin version of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, but I haven't heard of anyone else doing so.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 9, 2019 9:03 AM
Title: Re: Pada parama vs normal non buddhist layman
Content:
Which of the four types you are has nothing to do with whether you're a Buddhist or a non-Buddhist, a householder or a monastic. Bāhiya, for example, before meeting the Buddha, was both a non-Buddhist and an ugghaṭitaññū. Sunakkhatta was both a Buddhist monk and a padaparama.

As for the lower realms, all puthujjanas are vulnerable to rebirth in them.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 8, 2019 11:34 PM
Title: Re: Online Retreats
Content:
Though it's not exactly a retreat, the Samatha Trust — a UK-based lay meditation group — has an annual online course. Unfortunately it runs from October to June, so you'd have to wait until next year to enrol. The course is free of charge, with instruction via weekly Skype interviews with one's teacher and uploaded instruction files.

https://www.samatha.org/online-course


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 7, 2019 8:43 PM
Title: Re: Sex only for procreation
Content:
I've never heard of any who teach this. If they did I don't think they'd get away with it. In Thailand, for example, even eight-year-old Buddhist Sunday School kids can recite the "Two Fives and Three Fours" - a Pali chant listing the factors of transgression for each of the five precepts.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 7, 2019 6:16 PM
Title: Re: Canonical reference that arahants were/are doctors, firefighters, politicians, etc.?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 7, 2019 2:56 PM
Title: Re: Is "expedient means" explicitly taught in the abhidhamma?
Content:
Abhidhamma has to do with aggregates, elements, sense-bases, dependent arising, etc., when these are expounded as such, rather than in relation to living beings.

Upaya has to do with skilful teaching tactics that are appropriate to the disciple's condition, like the Buddha promising the besotted Nanda five hundred celestial nymphs if he remains a monk.

The two things don't really have anything to do with each other, unless it happens that the upaya consists in teaching someone Abhidhamma.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Dec 7, 2019 1:52 PM
Title: Re: Permission of parents in Sri Lanka ordination
Content:
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mn82


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 6, 2019 11:04 AM
Title: Re: Sex is always unwholesome
Content:
A classical Theravadin view would be a momentarist view.

With a typical sexual act between two persons in love, there will be moments of mettā, which are wholesome, moments of lust, which are unwholesome, and moments of visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, olfactory consciousness, etc., which are kammically neutral.

The unwholesome moments, however, will not amount to an akusala kammapatha (an unwholesome kamma with the power to cause a bad rebirth), provided you're not doing it with someone you shouldn't be (which would be the akusala kammapatha of sexual misconduct) or lusting after someone you shouldn't be (which would be the akusala kammapatha of covetousness).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Dec 6, 2019 10:52 AM
Title: Re: Permission of parents in Sri Lanka ordination
Content:
I think what the monk means by this rather reckless statement is that ordination candidates can in practice get away with not having their parents' permission even though the Vinaya requires that they do have it and ought not to be ordained if they don't have it.

In other words, you do need to obtain your parents' permission if you wish your ordination to be fully in line with the Buddha's ordinances. Failure to obtain that permission, however, is not included in the list of procedural defects that are serious enough to cause an ordination to be invalid.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 8:34 PM
Title: Re: Sex only for procreation
Content:
This is what the Tibetans say, but they get it from Aśvaghoṣa, not the Buddha. 

In the Buddha's teaching on sexual misconduct there are no instructions as to what manner of sexual acts householders should or shouldn't engage in. The sole concern is who they do it with.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 8:20 PM
Title: Re: In which sutta does the Buddha explain what no self means?
Content:
It would seem so. If you read how the arahant monks and nuns of the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā speak of their impending death, the commonest refrain is "I delight not in death, I delight not in life," which is then followed either by, "I await my time like a hireling his wages" or "I await my time clearly comprehending and mindful." None of them voice even the slightest anticipation of anything after that in the way that Christian saints, Islamic martyrs and suchlike usually do.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 7:46 PM
Title: Re: In which sutta does the Buddha explain what no self means?
Content:
Being free of both personality view and the 'I am' conceit arahants don't hold to even the subtlest conception of 'self'. That being so, they would be neither of the view that there's a self that's perishable nor that there's a self that's eternal.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 5:47 PM
Title: Re: Is it strange to oppose the Lotus Sutra but be ok with the Pureland Sutras?
Content:
Can you state what your reasons are for not regarding the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras with the same disdain as you have for the Saddharmapuṇḍarika Sūtra? Without knowing these I don't see how one could make any judgment as to whether your position is a strange one or not.

It wouldn't of course be a strange position for certain Japanese Buddhists to take, given the often ferocious historical rivalry between those sects which hold the Saddharmapuṇḍarika to be the Buddha's highest teaching and those which hold that only the Sukhāvatīvyūha is of any use in the present degenerate age. But since you've described yourself as "holding a sort of Theravada position" I guess your reasons wouldn't be quite the same as those of a follower of Hōnen or Shinran.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 5:14 PM
Title: Re: Teachers who teach/taught that parinibbana/anupadisesa nibbana is the end of all forms of consciousness?
Content:
I think what you describe is what's taught by virtually all teachers in traditions where the Abhidhamma and commentaries supply the theoretical underpinnings for bhāvanā. For example, in all of the modern Burmese dry insight traditions anupādisesa nibbāna will be conceived this way. Likewise in samatha-vipassanā traditions like that of Pa Auk Sayadaw.

It actually might be easier to answer your question by listing the teachers who don't teach this but instead assert some kind of postmortem continuance.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 4:18 PM
Title: Re: bhāvitakāyo as developing physical endurance ?
Content:
I'm travelling today, so can't consult my books. Just going from memory, I believe bhāvitakāyo and abhāvitakāyo are defined in the commentaries as possessing/lacking restraint with regard to the five bodily doors; in other words, indriyasaṃvara and the lack of this.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 1:25 PM
Title: Re: Teachers who teach/taught that parinibbana/anupadisesa nibbana is the end of all forms of consciousness?
Content:
Please stay on topic. The thread is concerned with who teaches the view in question, not about whether the view is right.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Dec 4, 2019 10:31 AM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
Pakati-upanissayapaccaya or Pakatūpanissayapaccaya

"Decisive support is the most prominent condition relating non-simultaneous phenomena. It signifies the powerful causal influence one thing may exert on another when they are separated by an interval of time – either a moment's lapse (object decisive support), immediate succession (proximity decisive support), or an extended period (natural decisive support)."
- Bhikkhu Bodhi, Great Discourse on Causation

For details see chapter 7 of Nina van Gorkom's The Conditionality of Life - An Outline of the Twenty-four Conditions as taught in the Abhidhamma.

https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/conditions/d/doc2907.html
https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/conditions/d/doc2908.html

The whole work in a single file:

https://ia800501.us.archive.org/24/items/TheConditionalityOfLife/cond.pdf


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 6:05 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
Nobody has claimed that it's inevitable that A will be harmed by B. Natural decisive support condition just makes it slightly more likely that the kamma (especially if it's a weighty one) will ripen through the agency of B than through the agency of any other being.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 4:07 PM
Title: Re: Monastery may be destroyed by fire in the next few days
Content:
https://www.bps.lk/olib/bl/bl091_Khantipalo_Buddha-Bush--Seeing-Dhamma-in-Nature.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 3:55 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
No. Repentance is valuable in that it sets you on the right course for the future, but (pace the Tibetans) it doesn't destroy your past kammas or turn them into something different.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 12:14 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
It would seem so, for if the Buddha had regularly suffered hardship in this regard there would have been no reason to single out the Verañjā episode for any special attention.

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Why-the-Buddha-Suffered/10-Eating-Barley.htm


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 12:07 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
That a kamma may ripen in more than just one way can be seen from many sutta teachings and narratives. You might start with the two Kammavibhangasuttas, MN 135 and 136.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 9:55 AM
Title: Re: Classical, orthodox Theravada teachers who reject flux?
Content:
Go to the Ajahn Chah page at Access to Insight.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/chah/index.html

The very last item is a 700-page pdf file of his talks. Just download it and then search for the words 'moment' or 'khaṇika'.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 1:56 AM
Title: Re: Classical, orthodox Theravada teachers who reject flux?
Content:
Ajahn Brahm is a sutta-based Buddhist who has no liking for the Abhidhamma. He differs from most others of this persuasion by virtue of the fact that his views on contested issues happen to coincide with those of the commentators much more often than is the case with most other sutta-based Buddhists. But I've no idea what he thinks about momentarism.

Ajahn Chah was part of a guru-centric rather than text-centric tradition. Nevertheless he did recommend his monks to read the Visuddhimagga and there are a lot of statements in his talks which seem to indicate an acceptance of momentarism at least in its broad outline


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Dec 3, 2019 1:23 AM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
It's only "illogical" if you assume that the precise manner in which a kamma is performed will be the precise manner in which its ripening will be experienced and that the ripening cannot take any other form than that. But that would be a Hare Kṛṣṇa-like conception of kamma and vipāka, not a Buddhist one.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 11:20 PM
Title: Re: Classical, orthodox Theravada teachers who reject flux?
Content:
That's probably because of the somewhat loose wording in Thanissaro's paraphrase, which might make it appear that the bhavaṅga is a persistent entity when in fact it's conceived by ābhidhammikas as comprising a succession of momentary cittas.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 8:59 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 8:14 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
This is a popular folk belief in Buddhist countries, not a teaching found in any Buddhist texts.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 3:17 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 2:30 PM
Title: Re: Classical, orthodox Theravada teachers who reject flux?
Content:
Removed off-topic posts - those concerned with teachers who neither were, nor ever claimed to be, exponents of "classical Theravada" (i.e. the form of Theravāda which treats the Abhidhamma and commentaries as authoritative on doctrine).


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Dec 2, 2019 2:19 PM
Title: Re: Classical, orthodox Theravada teachers who reject flux?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 1, 2019 10:18 PM
Title: Re: Who came first?
Content:
The thread's still there but Bibek Sharma's post got hidden after being down-voted too many times. You have to click to make it appear.

https://www.quora.com/Why-should-anyone-practice-Mahayana-Buddhism-when-Theravada-Buddhism-is-closer-to-the-actual-teachings-of-Gautama-Buddha


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 1, 2019 9:44 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
Just click on the link that I posted earlier.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Dec 1, 2019 5:24 AM
Title: Re: Nibbana and samsara are identical. Change my view.
Content:
But there's no such thing as "the view in general". For different Mahayana teachers and different Mahayana schools the claim that saṃsāra is nirvāṇa has meant all sorts of different things. For some examples see the attached article by George Rupp: The Relationship between Nirvāna and Samsāra - An Essay on the Evolution of Buddhist Ethics.

.


 ./download/file.php?id=5361
(460.49 KiB) Downloaded 52 times


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Nov 30, 2019 4:22 PM
Title: Re: Eating at inappropriate times is as bad as consuming alcohol?
Content:
I don't think that's so.

Suppose Tissa, Citta and Nāga all undertake the uposatha precepts.

Tissa consumes food in the vikāla because his clock is showing the wrong time and he believes it's still morning.
Citta consumes food in the vikāla knowing that it's the vikāla but being of the view that there's nothing akusala in transgressing a precept one has undertaken.
Nāga does the same as Citta but knows that what he's doing is akusala.

They have all broken the sixth precept, but only Citta's transgression involves wrong view.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Nov 30, 2019 3:43 PM
Title: Re: In which sutta does the Buddha explain what no self means?
Content:
The materialist is only one kind of ucchedavādin. The Brahmajālasutta describes six others. As ucchedavādins they all agree that there's a self that gets zapped at death, but disagree about its nature before it gets zapped.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/dn1


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Nov 30, 2019 2:57 PM
Title: Re: Taungpulu Sayadaw
Content:
His student Rina Sircar has published a book, The Psycho-Ethical Aspects of Abhidhamma, but I haven't read it and don't know if it's informed by Taungpulu's teaching.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psycho-Ethical-Aspects-Abhidhamma-Rina-Sircar/dp/0761813233

At Dhamma Seed there are some talks by the American nun Dhammadinnā who was ordained by the sayādaw. I haven't listened to them myself, so again I don't know how Taungpulu-influenced they might be.

https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/504/talk/18679/


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Nov 28, 2019 6:37 PM
Title: Re: Ajahn Mun honoured by UNESCO
Content:
Their names have been added to the list of persons whose anniversaries are celebrated in association with UNESCO.

This is an announcement of their nomination in February this year:

http://www.thailandtoday.in.th/news-update/culture/1958

Their acceptance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thai_anniversaries_celebrated_in_association_with_UNESCO

The criteria for a nation's nominations being accepted:

https://en.unesco.org/celebrations/anniversaries-criteria

It doesn't appear to be especially about "world peace" and only the Thai newspapers seem to be spinning it this way.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:34 PM
Title: Re: Situation awareness
Content:
The distinctively Buddhist type would be that which discerns the three characteristics at the vipassanā level.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 27, 2019 8:24 PM
Title: Re: Situation awareness
Content:
If they were jhāna-attainers then they would have had sampajañña of a sort even before they met the Buddha. But it would have been the sampajañña of the samatha-level kind - the kind that sees only the peril in sense-desire.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 26, 2019 6:36 PM
Title: Re: Ābhādhātu, subhadhātu
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 26, 2019 3:37 PM
Title: Re: Ābhādhātu, subhadhātu
Content:
Another name for the āloka-kasiṇa and the jhāna developed on the basis of it.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 26, 2019 2:56 PM
Title: Re: Situation awareness
Content:
The third sort of rendering is "self-possession" or something like it. This was used a lot in the pioneering days of Pali studies but has been abandoned now. It seems to have been informed by attention to those Sutta passages in which sampajāno comes as one of a string of adjectives giving a seemingly physical description of how a person acting mindfully will appear to an observer.

As for Ven. Sujāto's rendering, I would guess this would be based on an approach like Ñāṇavīra's, but I don't know if he's ever stated this to be the case.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:15 AM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:
It seems so, unless there were other ailments that were thought too trifling to be worth recording.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:06 PM
Title: Re: What type of sickness Buddha had over lifetimes ?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:25 PM
Title: Re: Samadhi is death !
Content:
That's not relevant to my point, which is that the use of samādhi to refer to the death of enlightened beings is exclusively Hindu.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 25, 2019 9:45 PM
Title: Re: Samadhi is death !
Content:
But it has nothing to do with the Buddhist use of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahasam%C4%81dhi


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:35 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
Well, I wouldn't put it quite like that.

The Buddha taught that there is mixed "dark and bright kamma with a dark and bright ripening". Some instances of this are quite widely approved and so they get given complimentary or euphemistic names like "compassionate killing", "altruistic stealing", "white lies", etc. While one might question how dhammically appropriate such designations are, it would be going too far to say that they're terms without referents.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sat Nov 23, 2019 7:29 AM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
I don't accept your premise. A doctor performing euthanasia does have the intention to kill, even if he's just following orders.

The best that can be said for him is that an akusala kamma performed at another's prompting is less weighty than an unprompted akusala kamma. But that's pretty small comfort when the kamma is as weighty as killing a human.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2019 11:29 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
Of course he would. Why would you think otherwise?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2019 11:05 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
I don't understand your question. Did you mean "... not a Buddhist"?

If so, the term 'pāṇātipāta' is not used only with regard to the first of the five precepts, but also of the first of the three kinds of bodily misconduct and the first of the ten akusala kammapatha. A non-Buddhist doctor who performs euthanasia wouldn't be described as breaking the first precept, for he hasn't undertaken them, but he would be said to have committed kāyaduccarita and an akusala kammapatha.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2019 9:30 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
It would be wrong livelihood.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2019 4:08 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
Though I'm not one of those who's said that (or who thinks it), I'll reply anyway...

I think that voluntary euthanasia would be much worse than suicide by one's own hand. Whereas it's a matter of debate whether suicide should be classed as pāṇātipāta (I've argued in the past https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?t=23927&start=195#p343438), there's no debate that if you instruct a doctor to kill you then you're instigating him to commit pāṇātipāta; if you instruct him to kill some sick relative then you both commit pāṇātipāta.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2019 8:35 AM
Title: Re: We can't change the past. So isn't the past permanent?
Content:
Like any present knowledge of the past, it requires that: (1) past khandhas have been; (2) past khandhas have been noted/marked by saññā; (3) the mental continuum is unbroken. It doesn't require the continuance of past khandhas into the present.

See the Kathāvatthu's refutation of the Sarvāstivāda.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/kv1.6


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Nov 21, 2019 3:32 PM
Title: Re: Non-parajika reasons for disrobing?
Content:
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/politics/395505/brown-robed-forest-monks-disdain-change-to-orange-garb


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:26 AM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:35 AM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:46 PM
Title: Re: Any restrictions on marrying more than 1 wife / husband ?
Content:
Ven. Pandita discusses this in his latest article in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.

https://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2019/07/27/sexual-misconduct-in-early-buddhist-ethics/


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:14 PM
Title: Re: How to recover after heartbreak
Content:
I don't think it started with that. Divorce in Britain, for example, started skyrocketing just as soon as it became easy to obtain. And this was at a time when unmarried cohabiting relationships were rather exceptional, widely disapproved and still commonly referred to as "living in sin".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:00 PM
Title: Re: Sotapanna has abandoned all remorse forever?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 5:51 PM
Title: Re: should I marry or be single?
Content:
Just a quibble...

If you mean Cleopatra VII, she was Caesar's squeeze, not his wife. She first married her two younger brothers, Ptolemaeus XIII and XIV, and then the triumvir Marcus Antonius.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 4:07 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
The five hindrances have to be absent on the occasion of any kind of exalted attainment, whether jhānic or ariyan. But their temporary absence on the occasion of certain peak experiences is not synonymous with their irreversible abandonment.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 3:13 PM
Title: Re: Monastics and suicide
Content:
Also (at greater length) in the Milindapañha.

https://legacy.suttacentral.net/en/mil5.4.5


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 8:18 AM
Title: Re: Is there a place on the internet to find commentaries and sub commentaries?
Content:
The ones that are legally available online are:

* Buddhist Birth Stories / Jātaka Atthakathā (stories and verses only, not the word commentary)
* Buddhist Legends / Dhammapada Atthakathā (stories and verses only, not the word commentary)
* Psalms of the Brethren &amp; Sisters / Theragāthā and Therīgāthā Atthakathā (stories and verses only, not the word commentary)
* The Expositor / Dhammasaṅgaṇī Atthakathā
* The Debates Commentary / Kathāvatthu Atthakathā
* The Path of Purity &amp; The Path of Purification / Visuddhimagga (2 translations)

Translated but still subject to PTS or Wisdom Pubs copyright:

* Suttanipāta Atthakathā (Bhikkhu Bodhi)
* Dispeller of Delusion / Vibhaṅga Atthakathā (Ñāṇamoli)
* Minor Readings and Illustrator / Khuddakapāṭha Atthakathā (Ñāṇamoli)
* Itivuttaka Atthakathā (Peter Masefield)
* Udāna Atthakathā (Peter Masefield)
* Petavatthu and Vimānavatthu Atthakathā (Peter Masefield)
* Buddhavaṃsa Atthakathā (I.B. Horner)


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Wed Nov 20, 2019 3:59 AM
Title: Re: All powers should be eliminated to become an Arahant?
Content:
"Making much of", "carrying on", "establishing", "maintaining", "augmenting", and "properly instigating". But no talk of "eliminating".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 19, 2019 6:43 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
A contradiction? I'd call it a lack of imagination if someone finds it impossible to conceive of a being who, despite being free of sense-desire and ill will, is nonetheless still subject to some degree of mental stiffness and agitation.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 19, 2019 1:50 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
There are no hindrances while they are in jhāna. When there are not in jhāna they may still experience those hindrances that have not yet been abandoned by cutting off.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Tue Nov 19, 2019 12:32 PM
Title: Re: Is there a place on the internet to find commentaries and sub commentaries?
Content:
The Vipassanā Research Institute's Pali romanized edition

http://www.tipitaka.de/roman/atthakatha/index.html

http://www.tipitaka.de/roman/tika/index.html


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 9:48 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
Bhante Sujāto translates samādhi as "immersion", Bhikkhu Bodhi as "concentration".


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 9:47 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 8:01 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 7:27 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:



Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 6:14 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
I've already said that they haven't done so. They have abandoned wrong view, however, and therefore micchāpaṭipatti avijjā too.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 4:34 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
Can you quote the sutta you have in mind?


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 4:25 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
Since even the non-returner isn't yet free of the fetter of avijjā, it goes without saying that the sotāpanna is still fettered with it. But I don't see how this is connected with the manner in which nibbāna is attained.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 1:22 AM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
There's no cognizing nibbāna on an occasion when the mind is deluded. 

On the occasion of awakening, nibbāna is cognized by a mind that is jhānically concentrated.

But on most occasions when the mind is jhānically concentrated the object of cognition will be the meditation subject, not nibbāna.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 1:10 AM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
In reflection (paccavekkhaṇa), which doesn't take place in a deep samādhi state, the arahant can apprehend the fact that he's free of attachment, aversion and delusion. But when we speak of him apprehending nibbāna in this sense we're using 'nibbāna' rather loosely to refer to the lived experience of being without defilement. When we're talking about what the mind actually cognizes at the moment of awakening (and on later occasions whenever entering the fruition attainment), then we're talking about something that always involves a jhānic consciousness.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Mon Nov 18, 2019 12:52 AM
Title: Re: Did the Buddha addresses himself as the Buddha ?
Content:
The reasons adduced by him might well be persuasive to those Buddhists who think methodological naturalism an appropriate approach to the suttas, but there's no reason a Buddhist believer should feel obliged to accept them.


Author: Dhammanando
Date: Sun Nov 17, 2019 8:56 PM
Title: Re: Is nibbana a state of immersion ?
Content:
Nibbāna isn't a state of samādhi, but it's in a state of samādhi that it's apprehended.


