re: WHAT IS TRUE SITTING IN EMPTINESS?

Well, Patanjali’s incredibly concise, scientific yoga sutras, which have clear mention of chakras–and therefore of working with the energy body–are dated at around the second century BC. Sakyamuni lived just a few centuries earlier.

It is generally accepted that Patanjali wrote down precepts of an ancient tradition, probably one that even dated back to the ancient civilizations of pre-recorded history that have been mentioned recently. Probably the yoga discipline is linked to vedic times/spiritual science.

My intuition tells me that these kinds of practices were a taken-for-granted part of any aristocrat’s higher education in the ancient world, not just in India, where I believe this was the case, and that Sakyamuni would have sampled and gone far with such practices as part of his intense search. Naturally they may not have included variations that are particularly similar to daoist practices, though I’ve read that some forms of indian yoga employ the microcosmic.

In Tibetan thinking the idea of a sterile emptiness that leads to an empty absorption is considered to be a primitive, dead-end understanding of emptiness within certain sects of the hinayana subsection of the buddhist historical hodge-podge; it was a misunderstanding or partial understanding of Sakyamuni’s teaching. On the other hand, what is considered useful about “hinayana” (the lesser vehicle) is its intense focus on the touchy, intimate emotional feeling of a vulnerible, needy self that urgently needs to be protected from what it dislikes and furthered in its desires, to the point where it becomes so thoroughly understood and penetrated by concentrative skill, that it is rendered workably transparent–a new, flexible operative mode can unfold from this process when sincerely followed, is the idea (which became misunderstood in exactly the way Sakyamuni warned against, in that what is an unfixatable process-mode was fixated upon as a projected desirable end state/goal).

Interpretations of Sakyamuni’s enlightenment are extremely varied. A fairly common story of it includes description of his knowing all karma, being able to endlessly see into his own and others’ incarnations, to know all paths, to have instant access to the most appropriate course of action or teaching–here simple, there complex, here gentle and gradual, there sudden and radical. In other words there is a “Buddha the super psychic” idea of his enlightenment. This aspect I feel is a little lost on a lot of contemporary buddhists I find. I prefer not to lose sight of the spectacular, superfreaky vision of enlightenment (buddhist or otherwise).
Simon

I still feel that the full-blown, very orderly and scientific system that Patanjali presents speaks of the great antiquity of that kind of yoga discipline within India.

I can imagine an idea of ancient cultures wherein development of the energy body was like the development of the physical body–such common skills that children learned them as a matter of course.

The six yogas of Naropa were kept oral for a very long time–Naropa gave a specific time period, measured in centuries, when they could finally be written down (coinciding with Tsongkapa’s time). People were intensely secretive about such powerful practices then.

In anciest times the practice of “artificial memory”, as it was called in Rome (see Frances Yates), which I have experimented with, using architectural visualizations etc to memorize even vast tracts, whole books with true precision, was the norm (again, amongst aristocrats).

Also, in Egypt, for example, they didn’t “write down” their esoteric practices in the way we think of it–they were encrypted in symbolic shorthand. Surely the finer details were passed down only orally (maybe not for the most noble of reasons…)

Simon

Tell me more about this “artificial memoriy” techniques. Willing to learn more…!!!