Thanks for that analysis, I too have found many parallels with neo-Platonism. There's a suggestive passage in D T Suzuki's preamble to his translation of the Lanka, about the parallels between the Sanskrit 'pravritti' and the Greek 'metanoia'. The latter has somewhat unfortunately been glossed as simply 'repentance' by translators but in the original texts it has a connotation of 'insight' that I think is missing from that translation. (I know D T is pretty passé but I still like him.)Indrajala wrote:There is a similar process of liberation in Neoplatonic thought...
I don't know if I have, either, but I suppose from the perspective of archetypal psychology, that is precisely what the guru or the bodhisattvas represent.Indrajala wrote:To be honest, I haven't met anyone whom I thought really overcame their biological and social programmings.
Going back to the famous Huineng 'there is no mirror' poem - the point surely is that so long as we believe there is 'a person' who has to be improved or gain something called 'enlightenment' then in some fundamental way, we're still cultivating delusion. The radical nature of Prajna undercuts that - and syllogistic logic along with it. Nothing to 'get' because nobody to 'get it'. But as long as we're still born beings, then we're still somehow 'other' to that.
There's a problem with the current English philosophical lexicon in this regard. A distinction ought to be able to be made between [mere] existence and [actual] being, or between 'what exists' and 'what is real'. This is also not something you find explicitly discussed in a lot of Buddhist texts, but I think it's because it's an implicit understanding. But the long and short is, 'existence' is what prajna is transcendental in relation to.PVS wrote:To exist in the buddhist sense means to exist intrinsically.
I wasn't really meaning to suggest any kind of materialist theory of mind. What I mean is strictly in accordance with Buddhist theory - that the action of insight actually causes cognitive changes. By seeing how the mind operates in terms of conditioned origination, then that very 'seeing' is liberation itself. Not that it's an easy matter to understand, as 'clinging' is very persistent. But that 'seeing it as it is' is the essential ingredient in Buddhist mind-training, is it not? And that's a cognitive shift, it's a different neural pathway - because instead of seeing everything through the net of conceptual and discursive thought, we're learning a different kind of 'seeing', are we not?Vasana wrote:It's near undeniable that some neural correlates of consciousness are involved in our subjective states...