The Buddhist Doctrine Of Momentariness

Author : T. Magness
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781539012146
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (121 download)

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Download or read book The Dhammakaya written by T. Magness and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the INTRODUCTION. SPLIT-SELVES & FRACTURED KARMA by Prof. Winston L. King About two years ago quite unexpectedly, I received in the mail one day from Mr. T. Magness of Bangkok - a person totally unknown to me, even though I had spent a full 5 days in Bangkok in 1958 - two paper - covered volumes entitled Samma Ditthi (Right Understanding) and Samma Samadhi (Right Concentration). Immediately, I began to read one of them, being intrigued to find a Theravada Buddhist quoting from Alfred North Whitehead, but then they got somehow displaced from my mainstream of reading. And thus it was not till this past winter that I actually got around to reading them straight through. And not till I was well through my 2nd volume, the Samma Ditthi, did I realize that I was encountering something brand new, at least to me, in Theravada Buddhism. When I discovered this I wrote to Mr. Magness, who promptly and generously gave answers to my questions about this doctrine of split - personality or psychic - offshoots and their relation to the Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth. From his books and letters I will attempt to present something of this doctrine. But first it will be best briefly to present an outline of the basic Buddhist doctrine of self-hood as a background before dealing with the psychic - offshoot doctrine. I. The Traditional Buddhist Theory of Self-hood According to this doctrine each of us sentient individuals is one life - moment of an endless chain of life - moments of individualized existence, which has been projecting itself anew, moment by moment, life by life, and age after age, in many forms from some primordial but unspecificable beginning about which Buddhism refuses to speculate. This chain-of-being will continue to project itself forward into an indefinite future eternity, propelled by the blind will-to-be (or tanha, the thirst for existence), unless it achieves an absolute detachment from all desire-to-be in some new form, and thus gains Nirvana. This process may be viewed from two somewhat different perspectives. We may take it in cross-section, i.e. by an analysis of an existent sentient being at any one moment of its existence. In this perspective Buddhism holds that there is no integral self to be found in the final analysis of self, though of course there is an empirically perceptible being-of-sorts. This conviction it states in its doctrine of anatta- non-self, no-self, or no-soul. What appears to be a personal individual, says Buddhism, is actually a composite bundle of five loosely related factors, one of tangible form (including physical form) and four others comprising the feeling, volitional, and consciousness components. These have no true center, be it repeated; the so-called persons which we conceive ourselves to be, are of dependent origination, i.e. formed by the momentary association of our component factors which together make up a kind of "person" of illusory substantiality. But this person is never a true unity and comes completely unglued or unwound at physical death. It is more like a stream, to use another favorite Buddhist analogy, which is contained within the rough limits of its banks, i.e. individualized form; but it is really a fluxing, momentarily changing current of mental- physical events, rather than a substance; an "amorphous plurality," to use Mr. Magness' excellent phrase. It is only an impersonal blind will-to-be that thrusts forward from moment to moment and life to life, taking unto itself ever different sets of five-fold factors to form a new pseudo-being at each rebirth.