There is no doubt that the millennia-long database of human experience in Buddhism is an important part of what we have to draw on in trying to understand the soul more deeply, and in understanding the uncertainties which ALL of us will face up to if we have even a meager degree of sanity (sanity, as I define in papers linked to at www.werbos.com/religions.htm). Over decades of probing, and visits to spiritual centers from Nepal to Japan... I was surprised even today and yesterday to learn very important aspects of the Buddhist experience I was not aware of before!
It started when my wife acted once again as a guide, leading me to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDzLjz0wdw
That very much contradicted impressions I had had before. It started out with reference to Journey to the West, the highest of the four great classics of literature which any Chinese scholar must qualify in. I am grateful to my friend in the Liu family, the leading family of the Han dynasty, for bringing me to bookstore in Beijing where I found a great translation, with English and Chinese and illustrations, and explanatory history. Some call that book "The monkey and the monk". We got to visit many of the places depicted in that story across China, and the great building in Xian which they brought the scrolls back to. That book conveyed a very well developed version of Mahayana Buddhism, still a key force in China.
But this new movie depicted a totally different view of that story! And it begins with reference to a British scholar Cunningham, who seems to claim that the author of Journey to the West (as powerful as it has been in China) was actually just a simplifier and popularizer.
The movie builds up to a Great Debate in Tibet, which sounded radically different from the focused clear great debate in Samye which I had read about, with huge implications for what Buddhists believe, at many levels. After the movie, my wife did a web search this morning, in bed by cellphone, which sorted out the true story. There were many great debates in Tibet, but three which stand out:
(1) An early debate (mid 500s?), what I remembered, discussed in great detail in Tricycle magazine https://tricycle.org/ years ago.
Tricycle reported a great debate in the US a few years ago, between the "Mindfulness" school of Buddhism (led by Tibetans) and the "No Mind" or "Mindlessness" school (led by Zen, descendants of Chan, descendants of Bodhidharma of Shao Lin, whose place we have visited and probed). I am VERY clear than mindfulness AS OPPOSED to mindlessness is the path of sanity, the path of choosing life, the path which follows nature, life, light, love, "because that is who we are." A later issue of Tricycle described the great debate in Samye on the same issue, where Bodhidharma basically went in exile and loss to China with a few followers, to try to establish his contrary path, in a place which has become famous for economic success and efforts to sell itself as "true Chinese" (since Tibetans would not have him).
(2) The great debate depicted in the movie, which I found very disorienting but which calls out for thought and discussion.
Not at all like The Xuan Yuan I knew so much about!!! Or saw all over Xian!!!
This great debate began with two clear focused positions, like what many of us debate even now!!
One debater takes a position which fits exactly with my core new worldview expressed at http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm. He says something like "Our perceptions of the world are not real, are an illusion, but the world itself IS real." (Actually, BOTH of the families of theories of physics I present in my web page, EWD and HCER, postulate that the world itself is real.) But that debater is labelled as the spokesman for Hinayana Buddhism, which the hero of the movie, Xuan Yuan, is asked to disintegrate. Xuan Yuan argues that our perceptions, our selves AND our world, are BOTH illusions. The hero is less like me and more like Deepak Chopra.
ME A HINAYANA? Wow is that a wild zinger of an idea! I DO remember a video course from Princeton (which my wife also led me to) where they brought in a Vipassana (Hinayana) meditator whose approaches to meditation seemed very close in spirit to many things I had experimented with, and continue to respect, but there are many other historic differences between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism.
In any case, if we are still debating reality versus total illusion even now, it is still on the table, a dichotomy of thought reaching
all the way to the noosphere. Am I the last true realist left on earth (now that Einstein etc are dead) who has not ignored or neglected or grossly twisted the hard core evidence we have seen from physics through mathematics?
Is the cosmic mind working (with help from my wife, though she had no such intention) to enlighten me to the fact that Deepak was right in spirit, at some level, however many crucial questions he leaves open on the table? Or is this an instance of Kipling's great poem "If" (which my wife and I both paid very deep attention to for many decades) where he talks about keeping one's head when all about us are losing theirs?
It reminds me of an old Japanese sci fi, The Island of the mushroom eaters, which my wife says was a remake of a very old repeated story in human literature. And hell, there are Marxists who talk about the power of the folks who keep feeding opiates to the masses. (But is Xi now one of those folks, if HE supports the version of Xuan Yuan in this movie? And Putin's house Rasputin as well?)
Again, I have to admit I do not REALLY know who is ultimately right in the great debate. The realist worldview has plenty more to give us and enlighten us about, and my next tasks do build on where it leads me, in quantum technology. What could we DO about a fuzzy all-possibilities belief that reality as such is an illusion? Yet there was ... well, we have discussed several ways one MIGHT try to do something more meaningful with the nonrealist position, other than classic psychotic mushroom eating. We mentioned the world-is-a-school school, the astral realism school, and the People Are Real World is Not school. I guess we should keep out eyes open, with peripheral vision as best we can,
but now...
Having done this duty, I will go to the next one, an incredibly focused looking-ahead task in quantum areas. I do agree with the neuroscientist Levitin that we need to BALANCE shifts of focus, and now I must shift.
My wife noted a third great debate later in Samye on whether enlightenment must be gradual or sudden, or a middle way. But not today for me.
Who are those creatures who claim to tell us they know exactly what all Buddhists believe?
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