Interesting. Want to say more on that, or would it take a book? :-)
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Replying to @xuenay
The framework is called Abhidharma. Studying Abhidharma was the main activity of elite Theravadin monks before they reinvented meditation. Their theories of meditation came out of trying to make that framework functional instead of dogmatic. 1/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
Abhidharma is concerned with foundational philosophical questions of metaphysics, cosmology, ethics, and psychology. It is not *the* Buddhist theory of those things. It is *a* Buddhist theory. It comes from, roughly speaking, the second major period of scriptural innovation. 2/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
The first period generated the Hinayana sutras; Abhidharma was second; Mahayana was third; Tantra fourth. (Simplifying history a bit.) Each of these had quite different, sharply contradicting accounts of mind, enlightenment, metaphysics, etc. 3/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
Mahayana and especially Tantra rejected the Abhidharma theories, for good reasons. They don’t work. They have irresolvable internal contradictions, as well as contradicting evidence and experience. 4/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
The kings of Sri Lanka—which was the only Theravdin country until a few centuries ago—banned Mahayana and especially Tantra because they tended to make subjects resist royal rule. 5/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
Meditation was also politically inconvenient, and monastic Buddhism was mostly reduced to memorizing the Abhidharma texts. When Theravadins tried to figure out how to meditate again, around 1900, Abhidharma was their only politically-acceptable source. 6/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
The currently-most-popular meditation theories in the West derive mainly from Mahasi Sayadaw’s ideas, which explicitly synthesized Abhidharma with modern (=Western) psychology & philosophy. 7/https://vividness.live/2011/07/07/theravada-reinvents-meditation/ …
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
This half-baked mash-up is given as Transcendent Eternal Truth That Must Not Be Questioned by most Western Buddhist teachers. I think it’s pervasively mistaken and often harmful. 8/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
Students are encouraged to make their experiences conform to theories that were, in my opinion, thoroughly refuted 2000 years ago. 9/
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There’s no single-source secular debunking of modernized Abhidharma. @Jayarava has done great work addressing many particular points. Glenn Wallis has attacked the whole dogmatic framework (with less specificity). There are others, including me… 10/https://www.glennwallis.com
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My approach has been mainly to point toward a better alternative (a meta-systematic reconstruction of Buddhist Tantra) instead of critiquing ones I reject (e.g. “Consensus Buddhism,” which is primarily the American rehash of Mahasi). 11/
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay
FWIW, I think trying to explain your meditation experiences in secular terms is a great idea. I would suggest not taking any source’s theories as Timeless Ancient Wisdom, because ancient ideas are often wrong, and because current meditation dogma is only a century old anyway. 12/
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