/lit/ - Literature

>it’s another thread about Advaita Vedanta vs Buddhism

lrn 2 get into existential post-modern philosophy of Hermetic ontology, newfags.

The three divisions in this article, incidentally, correspond to both the trikaya (three bodies) teaching of Buddhism — nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya, and dharmakaya — as well as the Sarira Triya (Three Bodies Doctrine) of various Hindu yogic schools (Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya, and Tantra), where these are known as the sthula sarira (gross body), the sukshma sarira (subtle body — corresponding to the state of dreaming), and the karana sarira (the causal body).

The third body is essentially the realm of abstract thinking, thoughts — true thoughts, not just daydreams, emotions, and the like, which would correspond to the second body. The causal body (which would exist in the causal realm, if you want to call it that) could also be said to correspond, even, to Plato’s realm of the forms, being the true abstract thoughts or essential archetypes behind what appears to us in the material world. You could even make a parallel to this and Jung’s idea of the realm of the archetypes and the collective unconscious.

In Theosophical teachings, this is known as the division between gross body, the astral body, and the causal body. G. I. Gurdjieff, trained by Naqshbandi Sufis, the very esoteric Sarmouni Sufi sect (a universal school hidden out somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia which views all authentic religions as essentially having one underlying truth behind them), and who learned from and stayed at places as diverse as Orthodox monasteries, Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and Nestorian Christian (very unconventional Christians in the region of the Near East, usually, who revere Christ but don’t view him as God) monasteries as a young man traveling to find whatever religious truth he could, gives this same teaching of man having three bodies, as recorded in “In Search of the Miraculous,” by his disciple, P.D. Ouspensky.

In Christianity, this could also known as the division between body, soul, and spirit, which was carried over into Western occult teachings which flourished during the Renaissance, for instance, such as Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and alchemy, where this seems to correspond to the famous alchemical trinity of salt, mercury, and sulphur. Alchemy, remember, was a front for something corresponding to internal psychological and spiritual processes, as Jung pointed out. The Great Work (transmuting lead into gold) is to be done in the individual human self, the unregenerated human self turning into the perfected human being, and balancing

In esoteric Sufi teachings, this division is made as Gross Body, Jism-e-Kasif, Subtle Body, Jism-e-Latif, and Causal Body, Jism-e-Altaf.