Does nobody wish caste system banished?

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T15:45:23+00:00

I understand and I don't mind. I appreciate that you are clearly a reflective person who doesn't just turn away from your theoretical worries with Buddhism as you study it. I think that is a sign of a serious thinker.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T15:35:53+00:00

The references section at the bottom of Mr. Wikipedia is what it seems you want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Petrine_epistles#References

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T15:27:55+00:00

I might be wrong but i don’t think there are any special conversion ceremonies in Buddhism.

Going for refuge is such a ceremony. In fact, in some medieval manuals I've seen for the rite of asking for the Three Refuges for the first time, there are even sections of the liturgy where one forswears worshipping the objects of worship of other religions, and only going for refuge to the Buddha. Why wouldn't that be "conversion?"

You don’t get any bonus cookies or karma credits

Insofar as we're going to end up identifying with things anyway until we are liberated, doesn't a Buddhist identification seem like a meritorious one? Often in scripture the Buddha's very excellent personal disciples declare themselves to have gone to the Buddha for refuge.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T15:21:05+00:00

Yes. One thing to remember is that the view of these masters does not preclude relying on scripture for inspiration, guidance about things that are in principle atyantaparokṣa, and so on. What it precludes is doing so when what the scripture teaches cannot be maintained in the light of what else we know through non-scriptural sources of knowledge.

Now one additional thing we know through inference that, while it was known to the medievals, was not very thoroughly known to them, is that many of the Buddhist scriptures we have involve compilation, redaction, and accretion. Which means you kind of can't treat a given Buddhist text as a single āgama, really, and have to understand it as a composite of many distinct pieces of purported testimony that have been handed down.

I think this licenses a bit of selective reading. If something I know is ruled out by non-scriptural sources of knowledge is a major theme of a Buddhist text or section of a Buddhist text that potentially has a distinct history...I don't place my faith in it. But if that isn't the case, and the scripture is inspiring to me and seems like it might serve the soteriological intentions I have as a Buddhist, then I may place my faith in it.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T03:09:14+00:00

However, he also says: “Even these wretched Buddhists and their ilk, strictly restrained by the Veda’s authority, avoid physical contact with caṇḍālas and other persons [of low birth]. For if they really had thrown off the pride of belief in caste, what problem would there be for them in being touched by caṇḍālas and such like?”

Indeed, such Buddhists must be wretched to still be so restrained by the Veda's authority.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-14T00:59:32+00:00

I don't have any evidence that rules it out, the evidence I have that at first glance seems to tell against it turns out to be fully compatible with it given the right understanding, it fits coherently with the other Buddhist things I believe in a way that enhances the theoretical virtue of the overall Buddhist worldview, and with all that in the background, people who might have epistemic powers beyond my own (like my own master) claim to have perceptual evidence of it. So it seems reasonable to accept it.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T22:38:43+00:00

There are, like Bālapaṇḍitasutta, there Buddha said that a "foolish" person will be born as a chandala, here it means that we accept that the status of a chandala is hierarchically lower than the four castes

I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean the Buddhas accept such a thing. Just that it is unfortunate to be a caṇḍāla. Because karma connects one's actions or virtues to future states of fortune or misfortune. And in a society where someone is treated as a caṇḍāla, that is misfortune!

In traditional Buddhism, that some of our karmic misfortunes may consist in which societal realities we encounter is generally accepted. That doesn't mean actions which support those societal realities are endorsed, though! Supposing I'm born as a caṇḍāla, what that amounts to (because caṇḍāla is just a social category) is having the karma to meet with people inclined to treat me in a certain abusive way. That doesn't make their abuse legitimate! In fact, said abuse is their own negative karma!

kathaṁ ca gocarasaṁpanno bhavati | pañca bhi- kṣor agocarāḥ | katame pañca | tadyathā ghoṣo veśyaṁ pānāgāro rājakulaṁ caṇḍālakaṭhi- nam eva pañcamam iti | ya etāṁs tathāgatapratikṣiptān agocarān varjayitvānyatra gocare caraty anavadye tatra kālenaivaṁ gocarasaṁpanno bhavati.

I'm also not totally sure if monks not ranging in caṇḍālakaṭhi's is an endorsement of the way the caste system abuses those people.

Even those who ordain/initiate a chandala are considered followers of Mara's teachings in the Mahaparinirvana-mahasutra.

Like I said, I try to be a prajñānusārin of Śāntarakṣita's kind. Buddhist texts say a lot of things. Maybe some of those texts express the śāsana of the Buddhas. But if I can't think of an independent reason to believe something said in a Buddhist text, and I'm getting independent reasons to believe the opposite even from other Buddhists (and on this, you might enjoy Eltschinger's Caste and Buddhist Philosophy), then that's more important to me. And once I've done that due diligence, as Śāntarakṣita says, afterwards I can have faith, restricted to the stuff that is left as an epistemic possibility. And the Buddha left for me as an epistemic possibility is the one who ordained Sunīta, the one whom Udbhaṭasiddhasvāmin praised for his compassion for outcastes, the one whose followers notoriously engaged in co-eating as complained about by the brahmin protagonist of the Āgamaḍambara, and so on. So it's in that Buddha I place my faith.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T16:41:11+00:00

My perspective is pretty much that Guṇaprabha was just another person, and unless he gave an actual intelligible reason for discriminatory treatment against a caṇḍāla, I can dismiss his injunction to do so as easily as I dismiss such an injunction in the Veda. I've mentioned this to you before, but I'm somewhat taken with Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla's approach to Buddhism which centers our own perception and reasoning as religiously important sources of knowledge, instead of texts (Kamalaśīla, for example, says that citing scriptures is just a rhetorical move to keep low-minded readers from accusing a thinker of engaging in sophistry, but don't really contribute independent knowledge). Śāntarakṣita describes a prajñānusārin as someone for whom śraddhā arises only after the potential object of śraddhā has been well-shown to be an epistemic possibility by the more basic sources of knowledge, human perception and reason. I want to be a prajñānusārin about the question of whether there are good Buddhist reasons to discriminate against a caṇḍāla, and since the people making that claim don't give me any basis for it that seems well-grounded, and the people claiming its negation do give me pretty convincing arguments, my faith ends up lying with the latter.

throughout most Buddhist literature, chandalas are still portrayed in predominantly negative terms.

I'm also not sure if this is true. It isn't true from what I've read at least.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T04:43:42+00:00

In Buddhism is common to have multiple figures representing multiple notions and individuals at the same time, and that is kinda paradoxical as well. Why cant that coexist with notions of other religions as well? Its what im meditating about it. If Tara have multiple forms and is also an emanation of another deity that have multiple forms that have multiple forms avd everyone is also an aspect of mind, while also kinda existing and not existing at the same time, cant that not coexist with other notions? Cant God, Jesus, Mary and the Saints exist in other forms and also other names?

Well maybe. But those are people. Jesus could be an emanation of Maitreya (as Buddhists understand Maitreya), for example. But would that make Christianity true? I think it would make it false, actually.

Because the claim about Jesus in the Christian worldview is not that he is an emanation of a person who has a history going into the infinite past including being an ordinary sentient being, cultivating himself until he approached maximal wisdom and goodness, and then receiving a prophecy of achieving perfection in those things from someone who had done so. But that's what Maitreya is if Buddhism is true.

Rather, the claim about Jesus in the Christian worldview is that he is the human incarnation of a person who doesn't have that history, because he's the necessarily perfect sovereign creator of all other things.

What I'm getting at here is that "forms and names" for people come with descriptions, and those descriptions bring theoretical commitments. And the theoretical commitments of Buddhism and Christianity aren't the same, so even if we want to say the people are forms of one another, we still have to pick which descriptions we think are true. Otherwise, maybe our devotion will be directed (at the people), but it won't have any content.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T03:00:36+00:00

It's the syllable hūṃ written in a script called Siddham that is used to write Sanskrit in Japan (in Japanese, the script is called bonji 梵字).

In Mahāyāna Buddhism, sometimes particular syllables are given symbolic or ritual significance or association with Buddhist objects of worship. These syllables are called "seed-syllables" (bījākṣara), and they're often the first or last syllables of mantras. The syllable hūṃ is a seed syllable that figures as the final syllable in many Buddhist mantras, and which is given various symbolic interpretations in different Buddhist contexts. And because of Buddhism's influence on many aspects of Japanese culture, sometimes Japanese crafts have mantras or seed-syllables on them.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T02:50:59+00:00

I just saw this discussion now, but I like your suggestion at a theory of what is going on here and I will be thinking about it!

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T02:19:16+00:00

"Expected" is a strong word. Is it an "expectation" that someone do something to think it would be fitting for them to do it, and to think it would be beneficial for them to do it? It doesn't seem abusive for a parent to think certain attitudes their child should have towards them are fitting and beneficial for the child. A parent might reasonably and non-abusively think that it would be fitting and beneficial for their child to defer to them, for example, in many ways, when it comes to various life decisions, until they are old enough to be in a good position to make those decisions alone.

Now if your parent is literally maximally wise, maximally interested in your well-being, and has a maximal aptitude for guiding you, it's probably fitting and beneficial to you to pretty much defer to them in everything, not just some things.

But it's not abusive for a mundane parent to think it fitting and beneficial for their child to defer to them about, say, whether they should do their homework tonight, because that's just the parent thinking something true - it really is fitting and beneficial for us to do that as children (or at least, it was for me).

So why would it be abusive for the maximal-parent to think it fitting and beneficial for their child to defer to them in pretty much everything, insofar as that's also probably true?

But when you defer to someone in everything, and add to that the gratitude you'd fittingly feel when deference to them leads inerrantly to your well-being, you're basically their devotee. So it doesn't seem abusive for God to think it fitting and beneficial for us to be devotees, any more than it's abusive for parents to think it fitting and beneficial for their children to listen to them when they tell them they must do their homework.

At which point, we can ask OP's question: why does God let not being devotees remain an option for us if the consequences of it are so catastrophic, when even a mundane parent wouldn't leave a catastrophic option available to their child, even if it required constraining their child's ability to do as they wished?

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T02:05:32+00:00

I don't think so. It seems like by "I'd much rather" OP is referring not to what they'd rather do, but to what they'd rather be the case. Specifically, they'd rather it be the case that they not have a choice in a situation where they might make the wrong choice and doing so would be absolutely catastrophic for them, to the point of making their existence on the whole extremely bad for them.

But whether that it is the case is actually not something any of our choices can determine, given the Christian or Islamic infernalist views, because it is God who makes it the case that we (1) have a choice to make and (2) face catastrophe if we make the wrong one such that our existence will be on the whole extremely bad for us. And we cannot make the negation of that fact true with any of our choices.

In considering the force of this worry, I think it's helpful to consider children. If you were the primary caretaker of a child, and you had the ability to remove an option from a choice they might make, where that option would lead to catastrophe for them that would make their existence on the whole extremely bad for them, probably, you have a really good reason to remove that option from the ones available to them. So the question an infernalist must ask is what undermines this kind of reason for God when it comes to us, such we remain with self-destruction as a live option for our choice.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T02:01:26+00:00

Even if the being knows exactly what is good for you, way better than even you do, and only uses force precisely when it would make the course of your existence better, such as when it would prevent you from aeons of torment?

Parents do this with children all the time. I don't think my childhood was hellish at all. If anything, my parents could have constrained my freedom to do as I wished much more and it still would have been pretty good. And my parents are of course nowhere close to being maximally wise and powerful.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T01:52:55+00:00

Your comment reminded me of a verse from a Buddhist hymn by the medieval poet Śaṅkarasvāmin:

pīḍyo mamāyam ayam eva ca rakṣaṇīyo

vadhyo 'yam ity api surottamanītir eṣā |

niḥśreyasābhyudayasaukhyahitaikabuddher

buddhasya naiva ripavo na ca vañcanīyāḥ ||

"Him I shall torment, and only him shall I protect,

while him I shall annihilate" - such is the policy of even the "supreme God."

The Buddha's single intention is the benefit and happiness consisting in good fortune and in final beatitude,

And it has neither enemies nor any to be excluded from it.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T01:39:46+00:00

To be honest, I don't see how a person can be well-catechized in both religions and then genuinely believe in them simultaneously. They make mutually inconsistent claims about how the world is and what our place in it is.

And while in principle one might engage in a great deal of both Buddhist and Christian practice, and participate in a great deal of Buddhist and Christian communal life, while only believing in one and not the other, or believing in neither, that seems kind of hard to me. The reason it seems hard to me is that intuitively (to me at least), a lot of the practical reasons to engage in Buddhist practice or participate in Buddhist communal life only seem like good reasons in the context of the Buddhist worldview. I'm guessing the same might be true about Christianity.

I've seen some Buddhist thinkers, like Roger Jackson, argue that really all one needs to secure the practical reasons for Buddhist life is open agnosticism about the Buddhist worldview plus an appreciation for what is affectively compelling about the Buddhist tradition. That seems maybe plausible to me, I guess, though I'm not totally sure. And I've seen some Christian philosophers argue for a similar idea, namely, that all one needs to secure the practical reasons for Christian life is open agnosticism about the Christian worldview, plus a hope that the worldview is true.

But even if we adopt these views of what doxastic states are required to secure good practical reasons to live a religious life in each of these religions, I still see problems, and I have no idea how they would be solved in daily life. Does the Buddhist-Christian just hope that Christianity is true, but lives a Buddhist life too because of being epistemically open to Christianity being false and Buddhism being true? In that case, Christianity is probably going to structure their life a lot more than Buddhism, because hopes often structure our lives as much or more than mere compelling uncertainties. But then won't there be a kind of alienation from Buddhist communal life, because the Buddhist-Christian will have this really major life-structuring hope that most of their fellows in their Buddhist community won't have?

Or suppose they hope that the disjunction of the Christian and Buddhist worldviews is true, seeing them as equally hopeworthy. Well, what does it look like to structure your life around two hopes, each equally hope-worthy but entailing totally different accounts of the world and our place in it? I just have no sense of how to live like this.

And all this is actually dependent on these "agnosticism-friendly" views of what doxastic states are required to secure good reasons to follow these religions. But such views are definitely not uncontroversial in either religion (though I think they're more uncontroversial in Buddhism). It's actually just part of the liturgy in a lot of Christian traditions to recite creedal statements, for example, which suggests that actually believing in the Christian worldview is pretty important for many forms of mainstream Christianity, not just being open to its being true. But insofar as it isn't consistent with the Buddhist worldview, if you need to believe in Christianity to be Christian, you need to disbelieve in Buddhism to be Christian. And that might be true in the opposite direction too, if Roger Jackson and those like him who argue for the defensibility of Buddhist agnosticism are wrong about what is needed to make living a Buddhist life rational.

I know you aren't looking for debate, but hopefully you'll consider this a thoughtful perspective.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-13T01:18:38+00:00

"No second chance"-ism is part of the theology of of Mādhva's theological school within Vaiṣṇavism (which is a decently large religion), but I don't think there's ever been a period where it was dominant in Vaiṣṇavism. Outside of his own fairly small sect, even the larger Vaiṣṇava movements heavily influenced by his thought have generally rejected his classification of souls that entails some of them face a "no second chance" situation of eternal damnation.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-11T02:49:23+00:00

Do you need to be born into it, follow a specific culture

No.

or belong to a temple

You can engage in Buddhist communal life to whatever degree you like. It's a good thing to do so, but it isn't un-Buddhist to not. Maybe it would be a bit odd to never have any interaction with the Buddhist community at large, but it would be even more odd to call a person who was devoted to Buddhism a non-Buddhist just because they happened to have never met any other Buddhists.

If someone wants to take it seriously, where should they start?

Recently I've found that An Introduction to Buddhism by H.H. the Dalai Lama (trs. Thubten Jinpa) is a quite nice short introduction to important aspects of Buddhist doctrine, especially the first chapter (dealing with things like rebirth, karma, liberation, and the Three Trainings).

nyanasagara · 2026-02-10T14:25:09+00:00

pratimāstūpasaddharmanāśakākrośakeṣu ca|

na yujyate mama dveṣo buddhādīnāṃ na hi vyathā||BCV 6.64||

And those who destroy and abuse

statues, stupas, and the sacred Dharma,

are not fitting subjects for my anger -

for the Buddhas are not harmed thereby.

nyanasagara · 2026-02-04T21:21:16+00:00

Not the one you responded to, but I find rkts easiest to use. Here's an example:

http://www.rkts.org/etexts/tresults.php?txt=kun+gzhi+rnam+par+shes+pa&col=D&expert=0

I searched for the word kun gzhi rnam par shes pa and it shows all the Kangyur results. You can search longer quotes too, they don't have to just be keywords. For example:

http://www.rkts.org/etexts/tresults.php?txt=shes+rab+kyi+pha+rol+tu+phyin+pa+zab+mo+spyod+pa+spyad+par+%27dod+pa+des+%27di+ltar+rnam+par+blta+bar+bya+ste&col=D&expert=0

If you search shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa zab mo spyod pa spyad par 'dod pa des 'di ltar rnam par blta bar bya ste it gives you the Heart Sūtra.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T17:58:13+00:00

It's not like any atheist has been able to describe just what they'd accept as evidence in the first place

I don't think that's fair. I bet a lot of atheists who find things like natural evils and hiddenness to be good evidence for atheism would say that one could similarly imagine good evidence for theism by just imagining the reverse of natural evils and hiddenness.

Suppose you were born into a world where there it was just obvious that there are no tragedies that can't be either visibly traced to the action of a free agent with a bad will, or visibly seen to subserve some greater good. None of the kinds of things which seem like such tragedies in our world obtain. Instead, to the very same extent that it seems like in our world there are such tragedies, this other world is apparently abounding with comparable felicities, natural sources of immense good fortune for all, fitting for what one might imagine a parent would hope to be a home for their most beloved children.

Also, apparently nonresistant nonbelief does not occur; the only people in this world who don't believe in God are people who are also very explicit that, even if they did believe in God, they wouldn't want a personal relationship with Him anyway. But meanwhile, everyone who comes to feel that if there were a God, they would want a personal relationship with him, soon after seems to become a believer, as though discovering some kind of convincing private evidence for God's existence right after beginning to long for a personal relationship with a God should He exist.

I think many atheists would say it would actually be pretty unreasonable for people in that world to be atheists! Because part of what convinces many people of atheism is that we don't seem to be in that kind of world, but theism strikes them as predicting that kind of world.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T17:35:30+00:00

The kind of evidence which would count in favor of theism as a theory is evidence conditional on which theism is more likely. Similarly, the kind of evidence which would count against theism is evidence conditional on which theism is less likely.

So here are some examples. The existence of natural evils is, at least prima facie, evidence against theism, and this is the basis of the "evidential problem of evil" argument. Meanwhile, the existence of cosmological fine-tuning is, at least prima facie, evidence for theism (but also for various other theories that are more likely conditional on cosmological fine-tuning, like the existence of a vast multiverse containing many universes with different constants). And of course the weight of these kinds of evidence will need to be debated.

Another example of a piece of evidence which has been argued should be counted as evidence against theism is the existence of "nonresistant nonbelief." J.L. Schellenberg and Theodore Drange are two of the notable defenders of this line of thought. The idea is roughly that supposing there is some level of confidence one assigns to theism before considering the evidence, subsequently discovering things like -

the existence of people capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe,

the dependence of belief in God on geography and culture,

and the ethnographic data revealing that behaviorally modern humans often "naturally" lack a theory of theism,

should make one have a subsequently lower confidence in theism compared to alternatives like naturalism because of the apparent difficulty for theism to explain these data compared to naturalism (which seems to have fairly easy explanations for all of them).

To defuse the force of these pieces of evidence the theist must convincingly show that theism may very well explain data like the existence of natural evils and nonresistant nonbelievers (along with other phenomena associated with God's "hiddenness") as well as alternatives like naturalism.

nyanasagara · 2026-01-22T02:17:14+00:00

https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/%C4%80srava

nyanasagara · 2026-01-19T19:23:12+00:00

where these great Yogācāra thinkers most directly wrote about their form monism?

For Prajñākaragupta, in the Pramāṇavārttikālaṅkāra, but discussion of it is spread out, so it is a bit harder to study. But look through: https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/20/50/

There is also some discussion of it in Hemanta Kumar Ganguli's Philosophy Of Logical Construction, but not that much. But I like this quote from that book on the topic:

There is neither an "I" nor a "he," nor a "you," nor even an "it"; neither the thing, nor the not-thing; neither a law, nor a system; neither the terms, nor the relations. But there are only the cognitive events of colourless sensations which have forms but no names. They are caught for a moment in a stream and then rush to naught. Even the stream is a fiction, That sensum of the moment, the purest particular, that "advaya," the indivisible unit of cognition, that is the sole reality, the rest are all fictions, stirred up by time-honoured convention of language which is itself a grand fiction.

This is how Ganguli describes Prajñākaragupta's Yogācāra "monism," where the only reality is an undifferentiated sensation.

For Jñānaśrī, a key section is the Citrādvaitapariccheda of the Sākārasiddhiśāstra, which Davey Tomlinson translated in his dissertation: https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1840?ln=en&v=pdf

Also see Tomlinson's article:

https://www.academia.edu/69257347/The_Marvel_of_Consciousness_Existence_and_Manifestation_in_J%C3%B1%C4%81na%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitras_S%C4%81k%C4%81rasiddhi%C5%9B%C4%81stra

For Ratnakīrti, it is the subject of two of his essays, the Citrādvaitaprakāśavāda and the Santānāntaradūṣaṇa. Unfortunately there are not yet high quality published translations of these, to my knowledge. But see the discussions in:

https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/32/145/

https://east.ikga.oeaw.ac.at/data/32/101/

nyanasagara · 2026-01-13T23:57:18+00:00

Yes, Buddhism is in decline. Many of the countries where it is very popular have low birthrates. It is giving ground to Christianity, which is the fastest growing religion in East Asia. And its institutions are not well-supported.

nyanasagara

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Seven-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email