Buddhism - Outline

• Buddhism is:
  • Not a self-standing revelation that dropped from nowhere
  • A highly refined fork of existing Indian yogic / śramaṇa traditions
  • Genuinely radical at a specific point: how it treats the observer / “self”

• Context
  • Siddhattha Gotama:
    • Trained with yogic teachers like Āḷāra Kālāma
    • Mastered formless states any Upaniṣadic ascetic would recognize
    • Tried Jain-style self-mortification, then rejected it
  • Inherits:
    • Karma as volitional force
    • Saṃsāra as cyclic rebirth
    • Devas and cosmological scaffolding
    • The entire meditative stack: ethics → concentration → altered states
• Philosophical DNA
  • Strong parallels with Sāṃkhya:
    • Sāṃkhya:
      • Puruṣa (silent witness) vs. Prakṛti (seen, active nature)
      • Liberation = isolating the Seer from the Seen
    • Early Buddhism:
      • Nāma (mind) / Rūpa (form); observer vs. observed split in practice
• Buddha’s Specific Twist
  • Uses the yogic engine:
    • Ethical restraint to reduce noise
    • Samādhi to sharpen and stabilize awareness (e.g., fourth jhāna)
  • At the fork:
    • Instead of affirming a pure, eternal observer (puruṣa / ātman)
    • He points the same analytic blade at the observer itself:
      • “This too arises and passes”
      • Marked by: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, non-self
    • Result:
      • No metaphysical “witness” left to hide in
      • Liberation = deconstruction of the sense of observer, not its isolation

• Ritual & Devotional Layer
  • Everyday Buddhism includes:
    • Chanting paritta suttas for protection
    • Veneration of Buddha images and relics
    • Offerings: flowers, incense, food
    • Blessings that bleed into exorcism / magic
  • Cosmology:
    • 31 planes of existence
    • Hells, hungry ghosts (petas), animals, humans, devas, Brahmā realms
• Spiro’s Three Buddhisms
  • Nibbanic:
    • Small minority
    • Liberation-focused monastics and serious yogis
  • Kammatic:
    • Majority laity
    • Merit-making to get better rebirths and worldly benefits
  • Apotropaic:
    • Protection and luck work: chants, amulets, rituals
• Rational Narrative vs. Reality
  • Official line:
    • Buddhism is empirical, non-dogmatic, “come and see”
    • Ritual is “skillful means” for unready minds
  • Actual practice:
    • Functionally religious, with quasi-theistic devotion to “the Buddha”
    • Rituals act as psychological anchors and social glue
  • Takeaway:
    • It’s disingenuous to pretend Buddhism is purely rational philosophy
    • It’s a religion with a strong contemplative research program embedded inside it

• Pipeline
  • Sīla (ethics):
    • Reduces turbulence (remorse, drama, gross misconduct)
  • Samādhi (concentration):
    • Jhānas:
      • Intense unification of mind
      • Hyperreal clarity: colors, edges, bodily boundaries all feel different
  • Vipassanā / Prajñā (insight):
    • Once the mind is stable enough:
      • Investigation of sensations, mental events, “selfing” processes
      • Repeated observation → disidentification from the self-model
• Auto-Deepening Attractor
  • Past a certain depth:
    • The process stops feeling like “you doing something”
    • More like gravity:
      • The system folds in on the illusion of a subject
      • The “conceptual overlay” (constant narration of “I, me, mine”) thins
    • What appears:
      • Not fireworks
      • A sober, matter-of-fact recognition:
        • The “self” was a contraction all along, not the fundamental layer

4. The Deep Fracture: Negative vs Positive Pole

• Small doctrinal difference; large consequences in practice and culture.

• Core Question

  • When the self-contraction dissolves:
    • Does anything real remain?
      • Negative Pole → “No”
      • Positive Pole → “Yes, but not a ‘thing’ in the usual sense”

• 4.1 Negative Pole

  • Doctrinal Shape
    • Nibbāna:
      • Extinguishing of the fires (greed, hatred, delusion)
      • With them, extinction of the one who burned
    • No residue:
      • No enduring awareness
      • No ground, no luminosity
    • Strong in:
      • Scholastic Theravāda
      • Hardline Madhyamaka readings
  • Practice Framing
    • Liberation as subtraction:
      • Let go, let go, let go
      • Decompose body (bones, bile, viscera) to break charm
      • Disassemble all identity positions
    • Ambient message:
      • “You are the site of an error; your job is to dismantle yourself”
  • Psychological Outcomes
    • Upside:
      • For ascetic / analytic temperaments: sharp, clean, uncompromising
    • Downside:
      • Risk of:
        • Emotional flattening presented as equanimity
        • Dissociation misread as wisdom
        • Nihilistic undertones (“nothing matters, nothing remains”)
      • Vulnerable people:
        • Dark Night (dukkha-ñāṇas) stages hit harder
        • No doctrinal “floor” → higher risk of depression / depersonalization
  • Community / Cultural Effects
    • Communities:
      • Disciplined, efficient, austere
      • Often cold, hierarchical, evaluation-heavy
      • “Renounced = higher status”
    • Civilizations:
      • Strong on:
        • Monastic purity
        • Textual preservation
      • Weak on:
        • Cultural innovation
        • Integration with lay culture
      • Logic:
        • If the world is a burning house, why decorate it?

• 4.2 Positive Pole

  • Doctrinal Shape
    • Core notion:
      • There is a luminous ground already present:
        • Tathāgatagarbha / Buddha Nature
        • “Original mind” (Chan/Zen)
        • Rigpa (Dzogchen)
        • Radiant citta (Thai Forest)
    • Framing:
      • Defilements = adventitious obscurations
      • Ground = awareness that was never defiled, never born, cannot die
    • Emphasized in:
      • Tathāgatagarbha sutras
      • Chan/Zen (e.g., Sheng Yen)
      • Dzogchen / Mahāmudrā
      • Thai Forest “one who knows” / “indestructible citta”
  • Practice Framing
    • Liberation as uncovering / recognizing:
      • The project is not to erase yourself into nothing
      • It’s to:
        • See through the contracted self
        • Recognize the ground that was prior to the contraction
    • Ambient message:
      • “You are not fundamentally broken; something intact is already here”
  • Psychological Outcomes
    • Upside:
      • Clear floor:
        • Practitioners feel “held” by the practice
        • The ego can dissolve without annihilation anxiety
      • Especially important for:
        • Westerners with pre-existing trauma
        • People for whom “you are empty, nothing remains” is destabilizing
    • Downside:
      • Failure modes:
        • Complacency (“already Buddha—no need to do the hard work”)
        • Spiritual narcissism (“my true nature is beyond criticism”)
        • Bypassing (“light-washing” unresolved issues)
  • Community / Cultural Effects
    • Communities:
      • Warmer, more relational
      • People greeted as bearers of Buddha Nature, not as pathology cases
      • Better integration of practice with daily life
    • Civilizations:
      • Strong on:
        • Art, aesthetics, cultural experimentation (e.g. Chan/Zen: tea ceremony, calligraphy, gardens)
        • Engaged, this-worldly expressions of practice
      • Logic:
        • If form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then form matters

• 4.3 Why This Schism Matters

  • It determines:
    • Psychological texture of practice
    • Type of practitioner produced
    • Style of community (cold hospital vs. warm workshop)
    • Civilizational footprint (preservation vs. creativity)
  • Over decades:
    • Tiny metaphysical difference in “what remains” → large differences in:
      • Emotional tone
      • Mental health risk profile
      • Attitude toward the world (escape vs. engagement)

5. The Novice’s Dilemma

• Situation
  • A newcomer enters “Buddhism” and encounters:
    • Multiple schools, each:
      • Claiming fidelity to the Buddha
      • Implicitly or explicitly contradicting each other on:
        • Rebirth
        • Nature of nibbāna
        • Existence of Buddha Nature
        • Role of gods / devas
  • Simultaneous messages:
    • “Let go of all views”
    • “Here is the correct view about everything (ours)”
• Institutional Dynamics
  • Incentives:
    • Each lineage must:
      • Justify its existence
      • Present itself as preserving the true Dhamma
    • Leads to:
      • Ontological branding
      • Quiet competition between maps
  • Teachers:
    • Usually deeply trained in one map
    • Sincere but often unaware of how different their stance is from others
• Practical Heuristic: Warmth as a Signal
  • Communities that feel:
    • Warm, clear, and honest:
      • Often Positive-Pole-inflected, or at least moderated
      • Treat you as already containing what’s needed
    • Cold, brittle, superiority-laden:
      • Often Negative-Pole-locked
      • Treat you as fundamentally deluded unless you assimilate their view
  • Not a guarantee of truth, but:
    • A good predictor of whether long-term practice there will be survivable

6. What Still Makes Buddhism Remarkable

• Honest Critique
  • Buddhism is not:
    • A pristine, unique, rational philosophy floated above “religion”
    • Free from mythology, ritual, or institutional ego
  • It does:
    • Mythologize its own uniqueness
    • Underplay its debts to Vedic / Sāṃkhya / yogic culture
    • Mask internal fractures under the label “different skillful means”
• Real Achievements
  • 1. Diagnosis of Suffering (Dukkha)
    • Suffering as:
      • Structural feature of conditioned experience
      • Linked to craving and misidentification, not random punishment
  • 2. Attention Technologies
    • Carefully tuned methods:
      • Jhānas, insight stages, subtle phenomenological categories
    • Anticipate:
      • A kind of first-person cognitive science avant la lettre
  • 3. Radical Non-Self (Taken All the Way)
    • Refusal to:
      • Leave an ultimate “witness” untouched
    • Forces:
      • A deeper confrontation:
        • No sanctuary for ego, even at the loftiest levels
  • 4. Ethics as Mind-Engineering
    • Precepts:
      • Not arbitrary divine rules
      • Designed constraints to stabilize perceptual and emotional systems
  • 5. The Sangha as an Institution
    • A 2,500-year-old open-source guild:
      • Preserved at least some serious contemplative research
      • Despite politics, corruption, and drift
  • 6. Positive-Pole Corrections
    • Tathāgatagarbha, Chan/Zen, Dzogchen, Thai Forest, etc.:
      • Counterbalance potential nihilism
      • Insist that what’s uncovered is:
        • Empty of “self” yet experientially rich, luminous, capable of love

7. How to Relate to Buddhism

• Not as:
  • Infallible revelation
  • A single, internally consistent system
• But as:
  • A historically contingent, yet extraordinarily sophisticated:
    • Map of experiments in consciousness
    • Developed by people who pushed human introspection further than most
• Practical Attitude
  • Take seriously:
    • Its methods and phenomenological insights
    • Its warnings about suffering and clinging
  • Stay wary of:
    • Claims of absolute doctrinal coherence
    • Any single lineage insisting it alone owns “the real Dhamma”
  • Use:
    • Warmth, clarity, and psychological safety as part of your filter
• Final Frame
  • Treat Buddhism as:
    • A map drawn by explorers who actually walked extreme terrain
    • Not the territory itself
  • The work:
    • Is not to believe the map
    • But to verify the territory in the only place it ever shows up—your own experience