cloudburst wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2017 8:31 pm
Malcolm wrote: ↑Sat Nov 18, 2017 5:30 am
cloudburst wrote: ↑Sat Nov 18, 2017 5:01 am
To be less sloppy, horns of rabbits can NOT actually be known by mind, as such a thing never existed. You could perhaps apprehend a generic image of Rabbit horns.
The point is that cessations and space, of course, do exist.
They have the same existence as anything which cannot be/is not produced. They simply don't. The example for how things exist is space. The example for how space exists is hair on a tortoise— it just doesn't grow.
I guess its you vs Chandrakiriti then
It's actually your misinterpretation of Chandrakirti, but this is the same old conversation, isn't it?
Your position is akin to the Svatantrika position that things exist not truly, but by virtue of their characteristics. Svatantrikas say that things like the process of production exist on the conventional level and that to deny this is to posit a complete nonexistence.
Chandrakirti answers that Madhyamaka analysis counters a truly existent "process of production," (and thus, a cesssation, etc., on the absolute level), and that which cannot be existent on the absolute level is impossible to find on the conventional level. We can say that there is the appearance of the process of production, etc., but that such appearance has no ontological status. It appears to ordinary beings and is only on the level of no analysis that such an existence could be assumed.
Mipham says:
"There is no such thing as ordinary, conventional, specifically characterized production; and since ordinary beings never themselves apprehend any other kind of production, there is no need of absolutist reasoning to refute it. This notion that the specifically characterized production of conventional phenomena exists as it appears is none other than the apprehension of, and clinging to, the phenomenal self. On the ultimate level, however, such a thing cannot be found. When one uses absolutist reasoning to investigate production, no such production is found from the point of view of either of the two truths. It is inadmissible to assert that conventional, specifically characterized production is not disproved."
--"Introduction to the Middle Way: Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara with Commentary by Ju Mipham," p. 207.