[Buddha-l] Vipassana?

[curt]

Wow - thanks putting the effort into going through this tricky business! 
Your carefully and thoughtfully annotated comments are much better than 
my sloppy paraphrases were. As far as your last comment - I think it is 
always wisest to defer to a school's own explanation of itself - unless 
there is really an awfully good reason not to. But one should also study 
critiques and "other points of view" - especially of ones own particular 
school/faction/bowling-team. I did not intend to misrepresent modern 
Theravada Buddhism (or any other Buddhism).
- Curt

Bruce Burrill wrote:

> At 11:58 AM 10/16/2005, Curt wrote:
>
> >What "dharma" means here is "a thing that has inherent existence".
>
> Well, that is a tricky one. Nanamoli in a footnote in his PATH OF 
> PURIFICATION, pages 317-8, states:
>
> "In the Pitakas the word _sabhaava_ seems to appear only once...,"
>
> it appears several times in Milindapanha, and it is used quite a bit 
> in the PoP and it commentaries. He states it often roughly corresponds 
> to _dhaatu_, element and to _lakkhana_, characteristic.
>
> An interesting passage from the PoP reads:
>
> "On the contrary, before their rise [the bases, aayatana] they had no 
> individual essence [sabhaava], and after their fall their individual 
> essence are completely dissolved. And they occur without mastery 
> [being exercisable over them] since they exist in dependence on 
> conditions and in between the past and the future." Page 551 XV 15.
>
> And another XV 21:
>
> "These are elements (dhaatu) since they cause [a state's] own 
> individual essence [sabhaava] to be borne (<i>dhaarenti</i>)."
>
> There are several other passages that could be quoted. Nyanaponika 
> quotes a sub-commentary to an Abhidhamma text:
>
> "There is no other thing than the quality borne by it." (na ca 
> dhaariyamma-sabhaavaa an~n~o dhammo naama atthi). Abhidhamma Studies, 
> page 40.
>
> Warder, in INDIAN BUDDHISM, page 323, discussing the Pali Abhidhamma 
> commentarial literature, states:
>
> "The most significant new idea in the commentaries is the definition 
> of a 'principle' or element (<i>dharma</i>): <i>dharmas</i> are what 
> have (or 'hold', 'maintain', dhr. is the nearest equivalent in the 
> language to the English 'have') their own own-nature (svabhaava). It 
> is added that they naturally have this through conditions."
>
> Harvey in his excellent INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM, page 97, states in 
> reference to the Mahayana critique of the Abhidharma (of the 
> Sarvastivadins):
>
> "That is, seeing a dharma as an ultimate building block of reality, 
> with an inherent nature of its 'own', is to hold that it can be 
> identified without reference to other dharmas on which it depends. 
> This implies that it can exist independently, making it a virtual self."
>
> Harvey characterizes the Theravadin position, page 87:
>
> "'They are _dhammas_ because they uphold their own nature [sabhaava]. 
> They are _dhammas_ because they are upheld by conditions or they are 
> upheld according to their own nature' (Asl.39). Here 'own-nature' 
> would mean characteristic nature, which is not something inherent in a 
> _dhamma_ as a separate ultimate reality, but arise due to the 
> supporting conditions both of other _dhammas_ and previous occurrences 
> of that _dhamma_. This is of significance as it makes the Mahayana 
> critique of the Sarvastivadin's notion of own-nature largely 
> irrelevant to the Theravada."
>
> As Piatigorsky points out:
>
> a dharma [in the Pali Abhidhamma], in fact, ‘is’ no thing, yet a term 
> denoting (not being) a certain relation or type of relation to 
> thought, consciousness or mind. That is, dharma is not a concept in 
> the accepted terminological sense of the latter, but a purely 
> relational notion.
>
>> >These are the things that are "real", or "really real" - the things 
>> that everything else is made out of - but which themselves are not 
>> made from anything else. If you took the Universe completely apart 
>> until you couldn't take it apart any more - all you would have left 
>> is "dharmas". Vipassana meditation tends to be somewhat complicated 
>> precisely because it assume that there are actually lots of these 
>> things ("dharmas") to investigate. … But things are more complicated 
>> than that - because "vipassana" is not limited to schools or traditions.
>
>
>
> But that is not necessarily how vipassana works from the standpoint of 
> the modern Theravadin vipassana movement. The following is a good, 
> detailed and scholarly discussion of modern vipassana:
>
> <http://www.dharma.org/~study/strongroots/>http://www.dharma.org/~study/strongroots/ 
>
>
> How vipassana is understood by the Theravadins is not necessarily how 
> it is understood by other school.
>
>
>
>
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