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Dhammanando, Mikenz66, Sujato, Brahmali, suttacentral with their wrong views on jhāna

 

Re: Ajahn Brahmali - UK Tour - May 2023

Post by frank k » 

mikenz66 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:09 pm... I'm not clear why Frank is so worried about a particular small subset of the people who hold different views from him.
...
Why was Trump banned from twitter and facebook? Because charismatic cult leaders have the potential to influence millions of adoring fans.
Sujato made available the entire sutta collection translations that are very readable, and free, easily available instantly digitally.
Bodhi's is expensive, and copyrighted, and usually consumed in book form.
So anyone who cares about preserving true Dharma for future generations has to have some concern if the most popular easily available translation has fatal flaws.
mikenz66 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:09 pm...
If people hold incompatible views, and are unlikely to change, then, in my opinion, the best thing to do is simply respect their right to have their own views. Ven Dhammanando, who is by no means an EBT enthusiast summed it up well with this post addressed to Frank:
Dhammanando wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 3:55 pmWhether you are trying to, or whether you are not trying to, it would be unavoidable if I let myself continue to engage with you, for this is a matter on which my view is settled and on which I'm not open to changing my mind. As far as I can tell this is the case with you too. That is, if you were open to changing your mind, I think your lengthy exchanges on Discourse Central with venerables Sujāto and Brahmali, and Sylvester (especially Sylvester) would have been more than enough to persuade you to do so.
This post has a summary of Sutta Central threads on Hearing sounds in jhāna, Vitakka and vicāra, and so on that Ceisiwr is referring to: viewtopic.php?p=560317#p560317
...
No, that post by Dhammanando does not summarize the situation very well.
It's just his excuse to dodge the fatal flaws in his argument that I asked him to address and he did not.
And it shows Mike and Dhammanando really didn't pay attention to the threads in sutta central being referred to.
Because Sujato never participated in debate with me.
Brahmāli, to his credit, would attempt to answer every point I asked, but the debate was coveniently prevented from continuing by the moderator banning me from that forum (on no valid grounds, no forum rules were violated).

If anyone does bother to look through the limited amount of debate on sutta central, you will notice:
1. Brahmāli, Sylvester, cherry pick some sutta passages to support their claim, but can not show why my interpretation is not valid.
2. I show how their passages are biased, cherry picked, and incoherent when you check it against all sutta passages on jhāna, vitakka, etc.
3. I show how my interpretation is coherent, using a digital search of every sutta occurence of vitakka, jhāna, samādhi, etc. I did my due diligence, I carefully considered all the issues over ten years, I was thorough, I looked at every. single. relevant. reference in the suttas.

So I show why I'm right, that it's internally consistent, coherent throughout the entire sutta collection.
I show why they're wrong, because their interpretation only works for a few cherry picked passsages, and fails on the vast majority of the suttas.

This is not a situation where several interpretations are possible, and we have to respect everyone's opinion.
While jhāna is not an exact science, and my interpretation is not the only valid one, I can show how the known valid interpretations on jhāna that are out there, is something like saying

(2+2 > 3.9) and (2+2 < 4.1). In other words, plus or minus a few % of potential error, but they agree on the important parts.

Whereas Ajahn Brahm, Sujato, Sylvester, their interpretation is like saying 2+2 = 128. That's like 7 orders of magnitude, exponentially, heinously wrong.

So when I say they remain silent, is that if you see what they've stated publicly in writing, they've never addressed the real crux of the issue. They don't address the incoherence when they apply their interpretation to all the suttas on samādhi, jhāna, vitakka.

Here are some articles summarizing their incoherence and logical fallacies:
https://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/ ... index.html
https://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/ ... index.html
and many articles on vitakka under here:
https://lucid24.org/sted/8aam/8samadhi/ ... index.html



HolbeachJames wrote: ↑Mon Apr 03, 2023 3:20 am...
Regardless of what teachers I listen to I know I'm far away from achieving Jhana! There's a lot of ground work to be done yet!
...

frank responds:


That is precisely one of the biggest problems as a direct result of you listening to wrong jhāna advice from your teachers.
How about trust in the Buddha's words instead?
Getting a few seconds of low quality first jhāna is really easy, just about anyone can do.
See the suttas describing how easy here:
https://lucid24.org/tped/g/goldcraft/in ... l#4.3.1.12

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