With this quote as a contribution to the emergent discussion on Buddhism and Dialectical Materialism comes my temporary unsubscribing -- this said to preclude expectations of my continuing participation:
"In denying the soul hypothesis, Buddhism of all Schools maintains that personal immortality is impossible, because all personal existence is but a mere flux of instability and continual change *karmically* dependent upon the false concept that phenomena, or phenomenal appearances, or phenomenal states and beings, are real. In other words, Buddhism holds that individualized mind or conciousness cannot realize Reality.
The essence of the *Bardo Thödel* teachings is, likewise, that so long as the mind is human, so long as it is individualized, so long as it regards itself as separate and apart from all other minds, it is but the plaything of the *Maya*, of Ignorance, which causes it to look upon the hallucinatory panorama of existences within the *Sangsara* as real, and thence leads it to lose itself in the Quagmire of Phenomena.
Followers of the Semetic Faiths are hereditarily so completely dominated by the theory of soul and of personal immortality after death, in a phenomenal paradise or hell, that in their view there can be no alternative; and to them the Buddhist denial of the theory erroneously appears to imply a doctrine of the absolute negation of being."
Addendum to "the tibetan book of the dead" by W.Y. Evans-Wentz 3rd ed. p224-225
Emphasis is that of the original author's.
And many thanks again to whomever sent the book to me. I'll be looking forward to catching up on the discussion in a few weeks.
bb
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