"There is no soul or self"

[Anonymous No.18191204]

Then what the fuck is getting rebirthed then?

[Anonymous No.18191234]

>>18191204
>muh karmic momentum

[Anonymous No.18191254]

John 3:3-8
>(3) Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
>(4) Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
>(5) Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
>(6) That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
>(7) Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
>(8) The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

[Anonymous No.18191256]

>>18191204
Don’t think about it brother it creates attachment. The important thing is that Buddhism is scientific and we don’t believe in any god.

[Anonymous No.18191265]

>>18191204
Nothing. Buddhism starts from the same theological background as Hinduism, criticizes it, but doesn't arrive at anything coherent itself.

[Anonymous No.18191266]

>>18191204
Yep, it's every bit as dumb as
>the Christian God isn't the one true God

[Anonymous No.18191285]

>>18191204
The world spirit, obviously. You’re a role that this God is playing, and when you die, he’ll take on a new role

[Anonymous No.18191287]

>>18191265
That’s not true. Buddhism is scientific. Did I tell you Buddhism doesn’t believe in any god?

[Anonymous No.18191288]

No people in this thread understand Buddhism.

[Anonymous No.18191308]

Exactly.

[Anonymous No.18191311]

>>18191288
do buddhists understand buddhism? there are some who claim an permanent self, true substance ontology, they discuss over what nirvana means etc. from what i have been observing not even buddhists know what is the underlying doctrine beneath all sects

[Anonymous No.18191321]

>>18191308
No! Fuck you! I've been having a lot of fun posting wojacks in this thread and you're going to ruin it by explaining shit! I know how this works! Don't make me post a wojack and greentext your post so it looks like I'm making the face that the wojack is in response to your post!

[Anonymous No.18191327]

>>18191311
>there are some who claim an permanent self
No there aren't. Diamond-Body shit has nothing to do with an Atman in the Hindu sense (yes, in Sanskrit, you HAVE to use the term "atman" at times as a reflexive pronoun, that's something different), it's just Buddhism trying to do Heraclitean/Thalean monism shit without actually nailing down what the primestuff is.

[Anonymous No.18191332]

>>18191327
what about tathagatagarbha?

[Anonymous No.18191348]

>>18191204
Buddhism doesn't say anything about the self. It doesn't talk either in.favour or against it's existence' You won't find a single passage saying "there is no soul or self". This whole thread is pointless and you should be rangebanned

[Anonymous No.18191354]

>>18191348
yet every >>>>>>wikipedia article reiterates they belief in no self

[Anonymous No.18191357]

>>18191354
If you are on this board you should learn about what a book says by reading it and not by scrolling the wikipedia article

[Anonymous No.18191364]

>>18191348
>what is anatta
I swear Buddhists are the East's Christians. You cannot be any more disingenuous about how incoherent your religion is.

[Anonymous No.18191365]

>>18191204
Consciousness :)

[Anonymous No.18191366]

>>18191357
if i read wikipedia articles they say buddhism believes in no self
if i argue the contrary /lit/ buddhists tells me there is no self

[Anonymous No.18191369]

>>18191332
Exactly what I said. Taking these high-level concepts that are ultimately just attempts at adopting a pure monism but not actually wanting to nail down what the principle substance that all things are made up of as a statement of multiple Selfs is silly. If everything is made up of the same stuff, you CAN'T have multiple Selfs because you can't have multiple of anything, and you can't actually have a Self at all because it would encompass everything. You can't even have a substance dualism like Advaita Vedanta does where everything is either made up of Atman=Brahman or Nothingness because this high-level Buddha-nature stuff explicitly includes things like rocks, trees, your hand, your foot, your mind, your spirit etc in the monistic framework.

And even then, if you look at stuff like the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, they just end up reifying Emptiness anyways, so even if you think you're going to get a Self out of this stuff (you won't), you'll lose it before you can grasp it because it will just be Empty, so it isn't a Self.

It's the result of Buddhism never wanting to set down an actual ontological framework to explain how things mechanistically occur, like what Taoism does (Aristotle isn't trying to do this from a monistic framework but much of his philosophy is focused around postulating mechanisms by which things occur). Whether this hesitance is justified (it doesn't help you get enlightened, after all) or a bad thing (it leads to these kinds of problems) is up to you.

[Anonymous No.18191376]

>>18191364
I'm not a buddhist. Anatta means not-self, it doesn't mean non-self or "there's no self".
If you were accused of a crime, and were innocent, and they showed you surveillance cam footage, you would point at the person in there and say "That isn't me." You wouldn't say "I don't exist."' You wouldn't even say "I exist" because you are being accused of a crime, you didn't get summoned so that the policemen could ask your opinion on philosophical matters
In the Pali canon it's expressed multiple times that the Buddha won't answer any question regarding the existence of a true self, and that anyone who keeps pondering about it will never receive anything out of it. Buddhism isn't metaphysical speculation.

[Anonymous No.18191392]

>>18191256
>Don’t think
This, just pay monks operating praying mills and fuck off.

[Anonymous No.18191394]

>>18191234
what precisely was meant by this

[Anonymous No.18191404]

>>18191204
This confusion comes from limited language and meaning lost in translation. When it says "there is no soul or self" it means that strictly as an individual soul or self. Your self is a part of a larger body, imagine the soul that you have is not yours exclusively, but rather just a piece of the "total" soul and each person is yet another piece. Your individuality is simply an illusion because your consciousness is limited to your piece of the total soul and that piece is what is reborn/reincarnated in physical form.

[Anonymous No.18191419]

>>18191404
how does that differ advaita by any means

[Anonymous No.18191436]

>>18191419
Not him, but for starters, it includes things other than just consciousness, like trees or chariots. Advaita Vedanta explicitly rejects the idea of any shared one-ness between atmans (which are really just brahman) and things like your actual body or animals or grass.

This is one of the reasons Shankara's thought never really took off in India, as it was perceived as a half-measure. Either go all the way like Ramanuja did and just say "yes, Brahman is in everything" or take up an explicitly dualist (again, in terms of man's relation to Brahman) stance, don't pussyfoot around and try to UHM ACHKTYHUYALLY.

[Anonymous No.18191458]

>>18191204
that is interesting, but also important to know it's from an afterthought in a particular mind state and not the one you're in, you would have to achieve that state for it to be true

[Anonymous No.18191464]

>>18191404
>Your individuality is simply an illusion
Okay, then what causes the illusion? Is this "total soul" playing finger puppets? Why is the total soul divided into pieces to begin with? What about division that makes it necessarily illusionary and not just another way for things to be?

[Anonymous No.18191471]

>>18191464
>Why tho?
Begone hylic

[Anonymous No.18191475]

The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples toward practical efforts.

Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity of the world, the Buddha said, "Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same." Another time he said, "Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first."

[Anonymous No.18191485]

>>18191471
>hylic
Go back, gnostard.

[Anonymous No.18191505]

>>18191436
ehh i fail to see the distinction. i thought advaita believed in a shared ultimate atman, perhaps i was misled by lit posters. anyway i read the dhammapada and my translation mentions eternity, immortality and bliss in reference to nirvana, which seems to go against what i read on the internet (nirvana being a candle going out into eternal void etc)

anyway i read a thesis on shankara being probably a crypto buddhist and this throws more confusion https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=rs_theses

[Anonymous No.18191515]

search "if there is no soul what reincarnates?"

tl;dr your MIND is what passes from body to body

[Anonymous No.18191520]

>>18191285
That's Hinduism

[Anonymous No.18191526]

>>18191471
>Begone hylic
Never seen that error message before.
Actual hylics are incredibly receptive to the "you don't actually exist, just a part of a greater whole" shit.

[Anonymous No.18191544]

If there is no ''self'', who is making the statement? Who is judging it? Is the self merely an illusion?

[Anonymous No.18191552]

>>18191505
>i thought advaita believed in a shared ultimate atman
This is correct, and only humans have atmans. Rocks, chariots, cows, grass, the sea, these things don't. Anything that isn't an Atman is made up of Nothingness. Again, where this differs from what Buddhism teases towards, and what post-Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism alongside other self-admitted monistic schools of thought (like that of Thales or Ramanuja) is that EVERYTHING is made up of the monistic primestuff in these schools. Yes, this includes thing like dead bodies and poop (the work-around here is some measure of "disclosiness", wherein the primestuff is more readily accessible or visible in certain things than others, thereby allowing poop to both be made up of the primestuff and still bad for you as a human to eat or something similarly gross).

There's a Zen Koan about this, wherein a master is asked if dogs have Buddha-nature. The answer is "mu", meaning "negation", but more contextually "Emptiness". The meaning here is that yes, the dog has Buddha-nature, as do rocks, trees, chariots, because all things are Empty of self-essence, which means that they have Buddha-nature.

Anyways, yes, Nirvana is held as blissful, but it's a sort of characterized bliss. It's not the bliss of annihilation (because annihilation can't be because nothing can be annihilated) as much as it is a sort of almost transcendent bliss (how this even works is obviously something you can write entire fucking books on, and people have).

I don't think Shankara should be viewed as a crypto-Buddhist in the same sense that someone might accuse the Pope of being a crypto-Jew, as if he were a spy or something. I think he just found some novel ideas in Buddhism and tried to retool them in Hinduism. I don't see anything immoral about doing this (good ideas should be shared), however, and I don't mean this as a defense of Buddhism.

[Anonymous No.18191611]

>>18191552
but deep down both are pantheistic monism, it seems, the difference being advaita pointing to materiality as illusion

thanks for the patience though. i have no interest in converting to this stuff but i often see it mentioned here and to me monism doesnt make sense

[Anonymous No.18191656]

>>18191611
>to materiality as illusion
I'd argue that this is actually a form of dualism, but then at that point we're constructing systems to explain other systems, and these new systems only exist to explain other systems.

[Anonymous No.18191669]

That’s right, you don’t have a soul. Everything is emptiness.

[Anonymous No.18191670]

>>18191656
yes that thesis also argues there is some kind of dualism in the maya doctrine

[Anonymous No.18191679]

>this thread again
>mfw

[Anonymous No.18191703]

>>18191669

[Anonymous No.18192629]

>>18191404
>This confusion comes from limited language and meaning lost in translation. When it says "there is no soul or self" it means that strictly as an individual soul or self. Your self is a part of a larger body, imagine the soul that you have is not yours exclusively, but rather just a piece of the "total" soul and each person is yet another piece. Your individuality is simply an illusion because your consciousness is limited to your piece of the total soul and that piece is what is reborn/reincarnated in physical form.
none of this is buddhism

[Anonymous No.18192787]

Well when you apply logic to buddhism it falls apart completely. And I'm sure that Buddhists use the word "I" much more often than "we" just like everyone else, which would conflict with this idea of no-self

[Anonymous No.18192788]

>>18191369
if you write about religions I will read it