[Ad0i89Od]

I don't quite get where you stand so let me ask you again. Do you think it is possible, according to your knowledge of Dhamma, that a person can realize nibbaha just by thinking about not-self and logically analyzing what it is?

I'm saying that I don't know for a fact that it is impossible that rational analysis is insufficient to know anatta. What I do know is that the suttas portray the Buddha as telling "study monks" and "meditation monks" to respect each other equally. If he had known that either analysis or meditation alone was inferior, I think he would have made that clear. I tentatively conclude that more possibilities are open. Perhaps either is sufficient, perhaps neither alone is, or perhaps both are necessary.

As for the rest of your answers, I repeatedly said my answers are based on what I have read and not my personal experiences. I did not make any personal statements. I agree with verifying what you have learned with direct experience. But, unless either one of us is enlightened, we both should be speaking of knowledge and not direct experience. This is perfectly fine for me. I don't have a problem with that First of all, who is there to be enlightened? Also, now there seems to be a distinction between "knowledge" and "direct experience" in your argument. Earlier you seemed to equate them. If it isn't direct experience, it's belief, isn't it? Faith? That's not equivalent to knowledge. What I mean is, there's a difference between knowing that the teacher said X and knowing that X is true. If you jump from knowing that the teacher said it to believing that it's true, without the intervening direct experience, it's not knowledge at all. It's knowledge after you've directly experienced it, processed it by means of reasoning into the larger framework and found that it fits into and supports the larger framework without contradiction. Experience processed through reason.


I don't know. You were the one who brought up something about not liking "hair-splitting debates" lol For me, hair-splitting involves heated debate over trivial detail that leads nowhere. Discussion of the Dhamma can either lead to insight or to a fruitless contest of wits based on sutta-thumping. If this discussion were to show signs of the former, I'd be interested in continuing, but if it's doing neither of us any good, I'd rather just walk away.

As it is now, it seems that what I've said has challenged what you believe and that you're dead-set on defending your belief. I'm trying to say that your belief includes ruling out something that you have no rational or empirical basis to rule out. Whether or not reason alone is sufficient doesn't matter much to me, but I'm convinced by my own experience that meditation without reasoning is, if not impossible, at least fruitless.

When I was ordained in the Thai forest monastery, where they don't study the suttas, I saw a lot of monks who were guided by emotional attachments to tradition and veneration of the teacher. They wouldn't question what the teacher said, even to the point that they believed that Ajahn Chah's decades-old turds had turned into sariras. That degree of credulity is only possible in the absence of rational analysis and healthy skepticism. I'm not willing to go there and believe what anyone tells me. Until I've verified something through direct experience, I suspend judgement on it altogether.

Thus, when you declare that reason/analysis alone is insufficient, but that thoughtless/unreasoned meditation is, I'm unwilling to agree until I've experienced this for myself. I've already done a lot of both, so I may never be in a position to say for sure. But based on what some suttas suggest, there is adequate reason to doubt your assertion. If you're inflexible and determined to believe that only through thoughtless/unreasoned meditation can one achieve an understanding of anatta, I ask you to support this dogmatic assertion. If you can't, then I will maintain my posture of suspended judgement until better information/experience comes along.

If you present something definitive, I'll gladly agree with you. This isn't a battle of egos for me. But I'm not going to agree to something when I don't know that it's true. This is just a matter of intellectual integrity/honesty. You're ruling something out without substantial support for doing so, and I'm saying keep the possibility open unless you have credible evidence to support your claim. You seem to think that absorption and one-pointedness is thoughless and unreasoning; I cast doubt on this.

Experience only has meaing only after it has been processed and fitted into a larger framework, and this process is the very process of reasoning. In my experience, it sometimes involves an internal dialog and sometimes it doesn't. Yet, the processiong of empirical data into a larger framework is the rational function, nevertheless. Without empirical data, reasoning is impossible; without reasoning, empirical data is meaningless. In my experience, that is.