Cleary on Cultish Zen

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oushi
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Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2012 6:18 am

Re: Cleary on Cultish Zen

Post by oushi »

Parasamgate wrote:
oushi wrote:
Astus wrote:That is denying personal responsibility for one's thoughts. Karma is one's own action, not some external force.
No doubt that for me, free will i just ignorant concept that cannot be explained in any ground. Beside this fact, it perfectly fits the rest without even enforcing it. If a person is illusion, what is personal responsibility? One's own action is cause by conditions not by some homonculus "self", but this is a different topic.
My perception is that this veers too far towards nihilism with denying the conventional existence of the ability to make choices. The opposite extreme would be that everyone has infinite capacity to control their own actions. Humans, generally speaking, have more impulse control than animals. Using the doctrine of no-self to deny this common knowledge is using ultimate truth to deny the existence of relative truth. I think the correct path is somewhere in the middle.

At least that is how I currently understand things. Being a baby Buddhist I could be very wrong though.
It is not as bad as it looks :smile: . Free will, control, choices are of the idea domain. Negating the truth behind them is far from nihilism. From the conventional perspective, all responsibility is carried by karma and "I"\"Self" is nothing but karma. If you move backward in the causal chain of particular action, it will not end on "self" but it will continue into the past. In this way, I am responsible for my action in the same way as Universe is. But, as I said before, this is a subject for a different topic.
Say what you think about me here.
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