Some claim that the concept of "Buddha-nature" (the innate, pure and potent capacity for every being to become awakened) in Mahayana Buddhism is a supernatural, arbitrary posit and an aberration of the teachings of Early Buddhism. Even some Buddhists who accept the doctrine will relegate it to an "inferior" level of truth or doxographic strata, …
Continue reading "Buddha-Nature as a Logical and Practical Necessity in Process Buddhism"
One of the definitions of conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya) — that domain of truth that ordinary sentient beings like you and I occupy — that Candrakīrti gives is that it conceals the ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) of things — that domain of truth that is the exclusive purview of awakened or enlightened beings: “Because delusion obscures the true nature, …
In Buddhism there is a critical emphasis on the cessation of craving due to its inextricable link to "duḥkha" or suffering, but there is no direct correlation in Whitehead’s thought pointing to the necessity of ceasing appetition. In fact, appetition is built into the processive universe, for according to Whitehead “all physical experience is accompanied …
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For me, at their best, Process philosophy and Buddhism engage in the "project of ontology", not in order to try and construct a perfectly itemized, categorical reflection of reality, but to reconstruct experience in service of some greater praxis: the path to awakening in Buddhism and the adventure of civilization in Process. Since both DE-construct …
Recently I have been studying the nature of the five skandhas or "aggregates," which is a Buddhist classification of aspects of experience broken down into five sets: form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), perception (saṃjñā), volition (saṃskāra), and consciousness (vijñāna). Classically, the idea is that what is commonly assumed to be the enduring, substrative Self-identity must in some sense …
Continue reading "Without Discrimination: some reflections from meditation on the skandhas"
Holopoiesis 