[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[jkirk]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> According to some abhidharma traditions, one of the last obstacles 
> that a person overcomes on the road to liberation is maana, usually 
> translated as pride. (Maana can have a very positive sense; it could, 
> for example, be a translation of Emerson's famous self-reliance.) In 
> abhidharma literature, maana is described as the tendency to think in 
> one of three ways: 1) thinking of oneself as better than others; 2) 
> thinking of oneself as inferior to others; and 3) thinking of oneself 
> as equal to others.
Okay, Richard, I'm going to be an ass here:

If someone has overcome maana, and therefore is no longer comparing 
herself to others (including, one presumes, her former self), then how 
the heck does she know that overcoming maana has brought her further 
along on the road to liberation than she was before?


Cheers,

TH
==================
This discussion is getting a bit to legalistic. 
Maana as an obstacle refers basically to thinking about oneself-- too much, 
too often-- being over-aware or obsessively aware of oneself, however one
conceives of one's self. Thus, the practice with respect to maana would be
to be mindful of this tendency or issue, and thus to work on dropping it. 
Obsessively pondering on how far down the road one has gotten, whether or
not 
one has eliminated this obstacle or that obstacle, just stimulates more
obsessive pondering, and gets in the way of the way.
Joanna

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