Buddhists speaking with an enlightened man

This video is truly amazing. Video 2 of Jiddu Krishnamurthi being what Buddhists explain.

J.K. transcending and being a Buddha, and the Buddhist monk with due respect seemingly repeats memories and ideas.

It is difficult to not have been born enlightened or having a spiritual transformation that was not cultivated and then only have books, like most of us.

For any seriously inquisitive person there is deep value in these videos. To the monks credit he knows when to keep quiet and listen. I look forwards to video 3.

 

Enlightenment is the stupidest of all ill-defined stupid terms in spirituality, which is in itself a very stupid term

It can mean nothing and everything, whatever someone is projecting on it, you can claim anyone you idealize is enlightened and then uncritically accept whatever from them.

It is all a big pile of pseudoreligious crap.

It is also a Western fantasy projected on Eastern religions, there is nothing exactly like that in any of them. What would exactly that enlightenment be? Samadhi of the yogis? Kaivalya? Moksha? Prajna or vipassana of the budhists? Nirvana? Satori? What?

The perennial ideals trying to universalize all those things in a single structure are the stupidest of all, completely inconsistent, both internally and comparatively with actual sources in all those different religions.

This concept that has been developed in pop spirituality of someone who has reached some exotic "enlightened" stage and now understands and knows everything about everything, conveniently adopted by Eastern cult leaders for the market, is just an extreme version of people's need to regress into childhood and look for perfect parent figures in their gurus or what not. Nothing like that exists, not even the most "enlighteny" and "non-intellectual" tradition of Zen claims anything like that.

Btw that is one of the fundamental characteristics differentiating the historical Buddha from other enlightened beings in Buddhist doctrine, including his direct disciples - anyone can become "enlightened" in the sense of liberating from samsara, achieving Nirvana, but only those who start the turning of dharma, only the samyaksambuddha has the characteristics of being "all knowing", it does not come with Buddahood itself.

But of course that is also just a religious doctrine and therefore also a pile of bullshit.

What is even more bullshity though is the attempts by Oshoite and now Krishnamurti fanboys to usurp Buddhism and push them on Buddhist themes. They were not Buddhists, they knew surprisingly little about it and are irrelevant in that context. I have never anywhere seen more misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Buddhism than from Indian gurus, even Christians demonising all eastern religions are not so disingenuous.

 

That would be a theravada and madhyamaka approach, but not necessarily shared by all strains of Buddhism and most strains of Hinduism.

Samadhi is an interesting thing that is not necessarily consistent even amongst Hindu sources. Earlier ones that are close to sramana predecessors and therefore Buddhism, even Yoga sutra to some degree, see it as a “technical state” of immersion above concentration to then be implemented into getting insight into various things.

But later Hinduism is just paying lip service to it, actual practices and ideas are more a combination of tantric and vedantic influences. So samadhi becomes more akin to “unio mistica”, ecstatic experience for its own sake. When I was practicing in a neo-advaita, smarta-like conceptualised tradition with a practical shakta background samadhi was identified with the ecstatic experience where you feel “energy” rise to extatic levels at heart, intensifying to the point of loosing speech above that, than getting on the verge of ego disappearance into light and ultimately loosing all body and outward consciousness (and not remembering much once back down actually).
That was a very different experience to the one in Zen, specially in my lineage that was more Madhyamaka based and closer to what you describe, more dissociative than extatic and focused on emptiness which is in essence related to interconnectedness and no-independent-essence. Advaita is a different form of impersonalism where it is not about no-essence but the single mega essence.

Now things get more complicated if we go to some laterChinese developments of Yogachara that are verging on essentialism, or if we go to early non theist samkhya-yoga sources in Hinduism, or dualist nonadvaitic or semiadvaitic strains in Hinduism, and they all have their mystical trance-experiences supporting their narrative.

Trying to subsume it all in a single universalist narrative is a fool’s endeavour.

Other mentioned terminology is in my opinion a bit messed up and not necessarily aligned with “native use”, but I need a keyboard to get into it, bit too much typing for the phone.

 

Here's some sincere religious fuckers doing sincere religious ritual. Sorry---humans are INSANE!!

 

Are they eaten afterwards? (did not watch the whole thing). If they are I don’t see a problem, seems all farm animals, not exactly endangered species.

 

Yes - as long as we don't get involved in religious discussions in the first place.

But if someone is a Hindu or NewAge perennial asshole trying to misrepresent other religions for personal agendas and then gets called out, then he can't be given the luxury to hide behind "it is all irrelevant" or "he is enlightened" BS, it is not genuine.

I even prefer a good old fanatical Christian calling everything else Satanic than the sneaky Hindu approach of tweaking every other religion in an attempt to subsume it under Hinduism, and perennialists tend to do the same. Nothing new btw, they made Buddha an avatar of Vishnu a long time ago, modern "universalists" like Vivekananda even made him into a God, they are always doing that shit. And it is always really bad, a lot of Hindu teachers can't deal with the most basic logic and historical facts, but it is also all aimed at a very gullible target market.

If we are on a subforum about Buddhism, then we need to talk about Buddhism here, don't we?

 

I watch the videos and have nothing to comment on them. It all seems very clear to me. I will continue meditating until I find/presentation of the key for instantaneous enlightenment.

I think Krishnamurthi sums it up when he asks, "does more knowledge free the mind ?"

His questions are the most profound I have ever heard.

We have to be this. Being simple for some reason is seemingly very complex.

This series of videos are the best videos I have ever seen in my life. Uncomfortable to watch
but very powerful.

The precision and clarity is very refreshing.

 

It is just a word to describe a state of being, there are many words, that one is as good as any, don't hang onto it like an achor that will drag you to the bottom of the sea. Let go of the anchor.

In which case Jiddu Krishnamurthi is the most Buddhist non Buddhist I have ever heard speaking. I personally think he is a Bodhisattva.

Don't forget we are meant to let go of the small boat that is trying to get us to the other side of the river, once there or letting go of the need to chastise a fellow monk for giving the tired lady a lift over the stream.

It is no good to have such a strong grip on the signposts so strong we cannot see the wood for the trees.

Buddhism seems to usurp itself in its own ideas, remember you must let go of the signposts supposedly, the scriptures and doctrine. And then when someone has transcended, it is called out as being BS, that is a very odd position to take.

Where do you do go from there, a question you must ask yourself.

 

Kaivalya is from an older non-teistic and pre-advaitic strata, closer to sramana religions than modern Hinduism, though probably later reinterpreted to fit. It is related to Samkhya and ideas of purusha i prakriti, not with the monistic ideas of (param)Brahman.

How to achieve moksha differs between sects, as does what it even means, samadhi is not a necessary prerequisite. It is not an universal idea that either Moksha comes from Samadhi nor that it requires it.

Self and ego are not equivalent.

Hinduism is a mix of different doctrines, there is no single one that all Hindus believe. Hare Krishnas (a reformed version of Bengali Gaudya Vaishnavism) are for example dualists and maintain that the self is always separate from God, but advaitins consider the individual experience of separation to be illusory and there to be only one essence in the universe, for Atman and Brahman to be one and the same. Bot Advaitins and Buddhists deny a separate self, but Buddhists in general (though not all sects) do not believe in any permanent essence, while Advaitins believe in a single universal essence.

I would be more inclined to consider Prajna a result of samadhi than a prerequisite.

Vipassana is more related to prajna, both describe insights into the nature of reality, not a specific state. It would make more sense to relate samadhi to samatha.

To be more technical samatha is the method for samadhi, and vipassana is the insight (often through samadhi).

Sometimes samatha and vipassana can be considered just aspects of the same technical practice though.

The confusion this day comes from vipassana being used as a catchphrase for the totality of the meditative part of the late-colonial reform movement in SA Buddhism. A lot of people seem to believe it is something ancient from Buddhas' time, but that is as much BS as the Zen pseudohistorical transmission narrative. It is something that near the end of the colonial period groups of monks experimented with based on scripture and trying to develop functional meditation methods, with two or three traditions becoming dominant and now basically synonymous with "vipassana" and Theravada meditation in general. It goes back about two or three generations, not more, it is a modern invention and vipassana here is a bit of a misnomer, what is done under that name includes both samatha and vipassana propper, with samatha being closely related to samadhi, not vipassana.

Nirvana is not a mental state.

So it is samatha->samadhi->vipassana/prajna->Nirvana

With samatha being optional. It makes vipassana/prajna easier, but it is not a necessary prerequisite, there can be insight even without practicing samatha, so it is also not necessary for Nirvana.

Zen had a lot of non-Buddhist influence and whatever way we try to explain it in Theravada terminology someone might complain, but if I had to I would say it does not differentiate between samadhi and prajna. But ultimately prajna is always the goal of practice, samadhi just a tool.