In these sutras, the Buddha warned against mistaken
understandings of the I AM and non-dual experience/realisation
prior to the Anatta insight (i.e. Thusness Stage 1~4). Shurangama
Sutra in particular maps well with Thusness/PasserBy's Seven Stages of
Enlightenment
First Sutra (Shurangama Sutra)
http://www.heartspace.org/writings/traditi...ngamaSutra.html
(Hinduism and Monistic traditions is at fault in 41, 42, 43,
44
Some Taoists at fault in 46, 47)
<!--QuoteEEnd-->Buddha warned (in Shurangama Sutra)
against taking Consciousness as a permanent Spiritual Self:
Second Sutra (Mulapariyaya
Sutta: The Root Sequence)
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html
..."He directly knows water as water... the All as the
All...
"He directly knows Unbinding as Unbinding. Directly knowing
Unbinding as Unbinding, he does not conceive things about
Unbinding, does not conceive things in Unbinding, does not conceive
things coming out of Unbinding, does not conceive Unbinding as
'mine,' does not delight in Unbinding. Why is that? Because he has
known that delight is the root of suffering & stress, that from
coming-into-being there is birth, and that for what has come into
being there is aging & death. Therefore, with the total ending,
fading away, cessation, letting go, relinquishment of craving, the
Tathagata has totally awakened to the unexcelled right
self-awakening, I tell you."
That is what the Blessed One said. Displeased, the monks did not
delight in the Blessed One's words.
Rob Burbea in Realizing the Nature of Mind:
One time the Buddha to a group of monks and he basically told
them not to see Awareness as The Source of all things. So this
sense of there being a vast awareness and everything just appears
out of that and disappears back into it, beautiful as that is, he
told them that’s actually not a skillful way of viewing reality.
And that is a very interesting sutta, because it’s one of the only
suttas where at the end it doesn’t say the monks rejoiced in his
words.
This group of monks didn’t want to hear that. They were quite happy
with that level of insight, lovely as it was, and it said the monks
did not rejoice in the Buddha’s words. (laughter) And similarly,
one runs into this as a teacher, I have to say. This level is so
attractive, it has so much of the flavor of something ultimate,
that often times people are unbudgeable there.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
The Buddha taught that clinging to views is one of the four
forms of clinging that tie the mind to the processes of suffering.
He thus recommended that his followers relinquish their clinging,
not only to views in their full-blown form as specific positions,
but also in their rudimentary form as the categories &
relationships that the mind reads into experience. This is a point
he makes in the following discourse, which is apparently his
response to a particular school of Brahmanical thought that was
developing in his time — the Samkhya, or classification
school.
This school had its beginnings in the thought of Uddalaka, a
ninth-century B.C. philosopher who posited a "root": an abstract
principle out of which all things emanated and which was immanent
in all things. Philosophers who carried on this line of thinking
offered a variety of theories, based on logic and meditative
experience, about the nature of the ultimate root and about the
hierarchy of the emanation. Many of their theories were recorded in
the Upanishads and eventually developed into the classical Samkhya
system around the time of the Buddha.
Although the present discourse says nothing about the background of
the monks listening to it, the Commentary states that before their
ordination they were brahmans, and that even after their ordination
they continued to interpret the Buddha's teachings in light of
their previous training, which may well have been proto-Samkhya. If
this is so, then the Buddha's opening lines — "I will teach you the
sequence of the root of all phenomena" — would have them prepared
to hear his contribution to their line of thinking. And, in fact,
the list of topics he covers reads like a Buddhist Samkhya.
Paralleling the classical Samkhya, it contains 24 items, begins
with the physical world (here, the four physical properties), and
leads back through ever more refined & inclusive levels of
being & experience, culminating with the ultimate Buddhist
concept: Unbinding (nibbana). In the pattern of Samkhya thought,
Unbinding would thus be the ultimate "root" or ground of being
immanent in all things and out of which they all emanate.
However, instead of following this pattern of thinking, the Buddha
attacks it at its very root: the notion of a principle in the
abstract, the "in" (immanence) & "out of" (emanation)
superimposed on experience. Only an uninstructed, run of the mill
person, he says, would read experience in this way. In contrast, a
person in training should look for a different kind of "root" — the
root of suffering experienced in the present — and find it in the
act of delight. Developing dispassion for that delight, the trainee
can then comprehend the process of coming-into-being for what it
is, drop all participation in it, and thus achieve true
Awakening.
If the listeners present at this discourse were indeed interested
in fitting Buddhist teachings into a Samkhyan mold, then it's small
wonder that they were displeased — one of the few places where we
read of a negative reaction to the Buddha's words. They had hoped
to hear his contribution to their project, but instead they hear
their whole pattern of thinking & theorizing attacked as
ignorant & ill-informed. The Commentary tells us, though, they
were later able to overcome their displeasure and eventually attain
Awakening on listening to the discourse reported in AN 3.123.
Although at present we rarely think in the same terms as the
Samkhya philosophers, there has long been — and still is — a common
tendency to create a "Buddhist" metaphysics in which the experience
of emptiness, the Unconditioned, the Dharma-body, Buddha-nature,
rigpa, etc., is said to function as the ground of being from which
the "All" — the entirety of our sensory & mental experience —
is said to spring and to which we return when we meditate. Some
people think that these theories are the inventions of scholars
without any direct meditative experience, but actually they have
most often originated among meditators, who label (or in the words
of the discourse, "perceive") a particular meditative experience as
the ultimate goal, identify with it in a subtle way (as when we are
told that "we are the knowing"), and then view that level of
experience as the ground of being out of which all other experience
comes.
Any teaching that follows these lines would be subject to the same
criticism that the Buddha directed against the monks who first
heard this discourse.
p.s. With due respects to Thanissaro Bhikkhu who is a venerable
from the Theravadin tradition of Buddhism, his comments on "the
Dharma-body, Buddha-nature, rigpa" is not in accord with what is
taught in the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions, since in
these traditions the Dharmakaya (dharma body)/Buddha Nature/Rigpa
is explained as empty as well. It is however a common
misunderstanding even among Buddhists.
Also see: Rigpa and Aggregates
As my friend Vajrahridaya said:
Ah, but this is not at all what Rigpa or Dharmakaya means.
Rigpa is basically the consciousness of emptiness of dependent
origination, so also originates dependently and is not some self
supporting universal awareness. But since all aspects of the so
called "universe" are inherently empty always, so Rigpa is always,
only in as much as it is recognized.
p.s. Namdrol could clear this up, as he has access to
untranslated Tibetan texts and could talk about what Rigpa means.
He has said that it is not established as well. Rigpa is only
inherent in the sense that all compounded things are inherently
empty always. Just like the Buddhas first statement. "Mind and it's
phenomena are luminous, uncompounded and free since beginningless
time." Or something to that effect in maybe not that order. If
someone has the quote?