[Buddha-l] Belated response re jivanmukti

[Fort, Andrew]

I have been "out of station" and am just now catching up with things not demanding an immediate response.
I have been called out of lurkerhood (lurkerdom?) by Richard's reference:
    "Sangharakshita has allegedly said that Jack Kornfield should stop calling himself a Buddhist, because Kornfield has said that nirvana as traditionally understood is impossible. (By the way, the Nyaya school held the same view. Andy Fort, I believe can tell us more about jivanmukti and its deniers in classical India. But will he?)"
    Anyone interested in this matter (a small crew, to be sure) can look at the introduction to my book "Jivanmukti in Transformation."  Liberation is knowing the self (atman) is brahman, and not the body, but the body can continue post-knowledge due to ignorance from a special kind of karma (prarabdha) which started pre-jnana and continues until fully used up, like the momentum of an already launched arrow or a whirling potter's wheel now abandoned continues for a time.  An ever more baroque debate continued in Advaita about the exact nature of this trace, or impression of the trace, of ignorance.
    Perhaps more interesting, and another demonstration of impermanence, is that I tried to share a paragraph from my files of the book, but discovered that since I wrote it (c. 1997) in WordPerfect, I can't access the files any more (or at least not without a lot of effort).  Thank goodness for print!  Andy

Andrew O. Fort, Professor of Religion
TCU Box 298100, Fort Worth TX 76129
a.fort at tcu.edu, 817-257-6448
http://personal.tcu.edu/afort