Tagged: Mahāyāna
Pages with this tag
Anālayo - Dependent Arising and Interdependence (2021)
1The early Buddhist doctrine of "dependent arising" posits a specific conditionality, where particular phenomena arise due to identifiable causes, with the primary aim of understanding and eradicating the specific conditions, such as ignorance, that lead to human suffering. This principle is distinct from the concept of "interdependence" or "interconnectedness" — the idea that all phenomena are mutually related in a vast web — which is a later development from Mahāyāna traditions like Huayan philosophy. The text argues that modern interpretations often conflate these two divergent concepts, a confusion that diminishes the practical focus of the original teaching and is exemplified by contemporary research tools like the "Interconnectedness Scale," which incorrectly mixes items reflecting both specific conditionality and universal interdependence.
Gombrich - What the Buddha Thought (2009)
2In *What the Buddha Thought*, Richard Gombrich argues that the Buddha was a brilliant and original thinker whose coherent system of thought can only be understood by placing it in its historical context as a pragmatic debate with and reaction to contemporary Brahminical and Jain ideas. Gombrich posits that the Buddha was not an essentialist philosopher but a practical teacher focused on how things function, redefining concepts like *kamma* from ritual action to ethical intention and clarifying "no-self" as the absence of an *unchanging* essence. A central thesis is that subsequent generations, failing to grasp the Buddha's use of metaphor, irony, and context-dependent arguments, took his teachings literally, thereby creating new scholastic doctrines—such as misinterpreting the *brahma-vihāras* as a path to heaven rather than nirvana. This process of misinterpretation, Gombrich contends, explains many apparent inconsistencies in the Pali Canon, which he establishes as the key evidence for understanding how the Buddha used fire as a central metaphor for non-random process and satirized Vedic cosmogony in the Chain of Dependent Origination.