/lit/ - Literature

>>22581049
>>22581142
Buddha has literal debates with brahmā in the nikayas (which would refute the Western conception of God), and later texts also contain refutations of brahmā/ishvara including the Cheng Weishi Lun, which is a Chinese treatise on Yogacara Buddhism, and the Tattvasangraha, a late Indian polemical work criticizing non-Buddhist philosophies. Even the Tibetan forms of deity yoga are not western style God-worship or covenant theology but about integrating or embodying the god as part of one's consciousness

>>20547236
Amitayurdhyana Sutra

>>20464601
>Does reality change for the individual based upon his beliefs?
Yes, of course.

You perceive reality through the senses of course but after that it gets filtered through belief and only then does it seem real.

Have you ever thought a person is your friend only to realize you’ve mistaken him? In that moment he really was your friend because you believed so.
If you believe something is impossible you will attribute the sensual perceptions arising from it to other concepts/phenomena. Vice Versa.

You gotta train and trick parts of yourself to get yourself to believe things that are beneficial though. Most people can‘t just choose to believe or not believe something.

To borrow an example from Ajahn Thanissaro:
You’re hungry. You desire pizza. You believe pizza will make you happy and end your suffering. You identify with the desire for pizza and as you go looking for it everything that could lead you to pizza, as seen in commercials or experienced in the past, is much more easy to focus on and perceive. Your whole reality is now made up of things that have a certain degree of getpizzaness to them.

If you didn’t believe pizza was a good choice your view of the world would be very different.

An alcoholic believes alcohol gives him something valuable, much more even on a subconscious level. He notices liquor stores, bars, mini-fridges much more easily than the pious Muslim.

>>20462378
I don't advertise but I have done the needful

Threadly reminder to avoid Californian textual sources

>>19167214
There's no one, so there's no many

>>18958661
Well there is no self as is commonly understood as a subject grasping at objects of experience. The bigger debate, developed in argument with Hindu theologians and logicians is about whether Buddhists should recognize any higher form of self than the person. In Mahayana at least you get a number of concepts similar to it or taking over what its function would be, but avoiding the term, and these schools also equate that higher self with emptiness, which is not nihilism because emptiness is taught to be essential to form. So in a roundabout way, a higher self could be affirmed through negation. On the other hand this very sort of speculation, while perhaps intellectually satisfying, tends to miss the point.

>>18442012
>Advaita was the first Vedanta school to coalesce into a formalized school with a systematic theology.
Ah so it wasn't some there-from-the-beginning situation after all. As I said, competitive religious landscape. Which also explains the accusations of mayavada being cryptobuddhism. This stuff has a genealogy you know.
>not really
Yes really. Dozens of pages of scholastic autism to prove that calling everything an illusion but also brahman at the same time isn't smuggled-in Buddhism.

>>17795341
>he hasn't thus heard in front of forty billion quadrillion bodhisattvas directly from Vairocana Buddha
ngmi

>>17489256
Time to work on those mandalas fren

>>17442101
>noooo don't solve your own problems
Your delusion fills me with coooompassion.

Mahayanasamgraha

>>17243913
Pepe is a peaceful deity.