“Watching the Breath” as Alchemical Practice

>When we are born, emotion/thought is introduced and a separate self comes as a result of needing to think, to become intellectual, to become emotional and it gets overdeveloped through life.

This is what I find to be dualistic thinking, i.e. a “separate self” vs. false perceptions. Separate self leads to judgements….and judgements become Self-Judgements at the moment of death, when there is no one else to project them onto. Forewarned is forearmed….the religiously self-righteous may find their categories come back to haunt them.

Thanks, Fajin,
for finally clarifying which school of Buddhism you subscribe to.

Curiously this text on which this school relied on arose first in China in the 6th century, and copies many of the essence-function of the Taoists. Its ;ate dating and wholly differerent take – reversing the standard mainstream Buddhist notions of Emptiness and Self – raises questions about its origins, and whether it was generated in response to the failiure of the Chinese to originally accept hte notions of Pali Buddhism that entered China as basically incomporehensible/ungrounded and thus ungraspable. Other scholars have noted it is nearly identical to Hindu notions of Atman as immortal self, which parallels Taoist thinking but NOT methodology or stages of development.

Just to clarify, I’m quoting further from the section of Wikipedia you linked to:

??nyat?, ??????? (Sanskrit) or Suññat? (P?li) is a term, translated as “Emptiness” or “Voidness”, which constitutes an aspect of the Buddhist metaphysical critique as well as Buddhist epistemology and phenomenology. ??nyat? signifies that everything one encounters in life is empty of soul, permanence, and self-nature. Everything is inter-related, never self-sufficient or independent; nothing has independent reality. Yet ??nyat? never connotes nihilism, which Buddhist doctrine considers to be a delusion, just as it considers materialism to be a delusion.
In the Mahayana Tathagatagarbha sutras, in contrast, only impermanent, changeful things and states (the realm of samsara) are said to be empty in a negative sense – but not the Buddha or Nirvana, which are stated to be Real, eternal and filled with inconceivable, enduring virtues.

…..Buddha-nature is not at all accepted by Theravada Buddhism and was not universally accepted in Indian Mahayana, but did become a cornerstone of East Asian Buddhist soteriological thought in terms of the essence-function paradigm

The Mahaparinirvana Sutra is a voluminous and major Mahayana scripture which purports to enshrine the Buddha’s “final explanation” of his Doctrine, an explanation characterised by “exhaustive thoroughness” and allegedly delivered on the last day and night before his parinirvana.

-I am always amused by Buddhist attacks on intellect, and in the same breath their ability to product voluminous texts filled with abstract intellectual ideas, allegedly delivered by Buddha on his final death bed.
Certainly stretches my credulity as to which “ancient sage” actually composed these doctrines….much like the new testament, written from 80 to 400 years after Jesus died….

….The scripture further presents itself as providing the correct understanding of earlier Buddhist teachings, such as those on non-Self and Emptiness……

….Here the sutra controverts the familiar Buddhist dictum that “all dharmas [phenomena] are non-Self”, and in the Dharmakshema version the Buddha even declares that “in truth there is Self (Atman) in all dharmas”.

– the switcheroo to Hinduism’s “Atman on top”.

The highest form of Nirvana — Mahaparinirvana — …this state or sphere (visaya) of ultimate awareness and Knowing (jnana), however, is said to be accessible only to those who have become fully awakened Buddhas. Even 10th-level Bodhisattvas (i.e. the very highest level of Bodhisattva) are not able clearly to perceive the Buddha-dhatu, and they further fail to see with clarity that the immutable, unfabricated Dhatu dwells indestructibly within all beings.

— Basically, as I understand this, you have to attain first a very hgh level of immortality (boddisattava) before you could possibly attain Buddha-dhatu. Sounds like a longer wait than even alchemical Daoism proposes through 7 formulas of self-cultivation. Very high-minded…but again, pushes the process to Other Worlds.

I admire your patience. Good luck.

michael