[UncoonsKala]

yikes, that isn't gonna fly here!

Thanks for the article A-D. I am woefully deficient in my knowledge about Vajrayana Buddhism and I will read this later on. The line you quoted is standard fare in my particular practice tradition. We say the Buddha gave us 84.000 kind of medicine to cure suffering.

Actually, he taught only one: the Noble Eightfold Path.


Like all medicine, if we take it all at once it would probably make us sick. But the different traditions point in the same direction, just different kinds of medicine. (I know, that won't fly either!) No, it won't. Many point to superstition and irrelevant philosophical speculations, but the Buddha's only pointed toward liberation.

I found this interesting:
At the same time, it is important to realize that understanding relative truth is the cause of understanding absolute truth. Thus relative truth should not be thought of as being something inferior and unrelated to absolute truth. Relative truth may be conceptual, but there is no way to realize nonconceptual absolute truth without it. The understanding of either one of the two truths assists the understanding of the other. Of course, this idea of "relative truth and absolute truth" is not to be found in the Buddha's teachings, as there is no need to prop up a gigantic card-house of superstition and speculative view. Part of what the Buddha's teachings liberate one from is just the sort of convolution and mental and logical gyration that this sort of contrivance requires.

A good example of this idea can be seen in Chapter 3 of the Diamond Sutra......
....a counterfeit contrivance that the Buddha did not teach, as he did not teach either of the later "turnings of the wheel" that the author claims.