Old Buddhism
The
Sakya Buddha’s primary insights were:
“All
that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.”
“Yan kiñci
samudayadhamman sabban tan nirodhadhammanti.”
Moreover:
“A
thing arises because of conditions; it ceases when the conditions for its
arising cease!”
From this
he concluded that the transiently arisen is dependent on (i.e. determined
by) conditions, hence can’t be owned.
Consequently,
his liberating (from suffering) insight was:
Detach,
and be free from suffering!
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Ergo, if
you cling or get addicted to what doesn’t last and you can’t own, you’re
going to suffer. But you can change the conditions from which you arise (a novel though for
ancient Indians).
And that was the Sakya Buddha’s basic message. The rest of his
own and the 5 Schools’ and scores of sect’s highly entertaining
gobblede-gook served initially to provide lunches, then palaces; indeed
the Tibetan monks actually parleyed their way to an entire country.
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Suffering (Pali: dukkha:
distress, sorrow, etc.,.), he concluded, arises by
responding (i.e. clinging) to two,
albeit sequential universal conditions,
namely that arisen things (i.e. beings) must cease/die, and that all arisen
things are dependent (un-free).
His
successors later adlibbed a long list of specific common, everyday causes
of sorrow, such as greed (i.e. desire), hatred and stupidity, this, no
doubt, to make his product more user friendly.
See: The 4 Noble Truths, old and
new
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Comments
The
great fear amongst the ancient Indians, specifically those who invented the
Upanishads, was death and re-death and no escape therefrom.
Old Buddhism describes
‘a thing’ as arisen from a conditions cluster.
New
Buddhism describes an ‘output’ as an emerging (from inputs) phenomenon, or
more abstractly still, as on-going ‘wave interference or discontinuous
quantum interaction pattern’.
Both the
notion of ‘thing’ and of ‘output’, hence of stable objects, are
fundamentally misleading. ‘Thing’ and ‘output’ actually function as ongoing
discretely discontinuous processes (i.e. as lives or birth sequences, hence
as mini-samsaras) reified, hence quantised by an observer who arbitrarily
slices (or decides) the processes. 200 years after the Old Buddha, Nagasena
still had not grasped the problem.
This was later misrepresented (in the mightily
flawed 3 Charactristics Sutra) to mean that the arisen was ‘fully’
dependent, and which seems not to have been the Old Buddha’s view. The
initial state of a ‘thing’ or output (e.g. the DNA) would be determined by
the final state of the conditions cluster, i.e. by ‘karmic’ residue. After
all, the Sakyamuni himself, like all arisen things, altered his karma.
In short, he offered to escape routes. 1:
detachment and 2: change the conditions (i.e. karma), for instance via the
8-fold Noble Path.
Sorrow (distress, suffering and so on (Pali:
dukkha)) does not necessarily arise from dependency or transience/death. In
the everyday situation suffering signals failure to respond @ best to
whatever condition presents for new arising (i.e. a new birth),
specifically the response of detachment.
In short, sorrow punishes underperformance,
thereby driving change.
New Buddhism understands sorrow (distress,
suffering etc.,.) to function as a Guide & Control device, the other
function being happiness (i.e. joy, elation and so on; Pali: sukkha).
Elation rewards upgraded perform-ance, thereby driving continuity.
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New Buddhism
The modern
version:
“In the long run we are all dead.” (Keynes’
variation).
Moreover:
“Output happens because of input; output ceases when
input ceases.”
From this it can be concluded that output happens as transient
interaction pattern dependent on that which interacts.
Sorrow (i.e. distress, suffering and so on) happens
as response to failure to control input thereby failing to determine
output (and stay alive wholly fulfilled).
In fact, suffering happens as high-level language signal
about systems (survival, i.e. fitness) failure
indicator (in Christian speak: the wages of sin).
Happiness signals systems success (i.e. function
completion). Ecstasy signals out-performance.
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