If Enlightenment is instantaneous but requires tremendous amounts of will-power and time...

If Enlightenment is instantaneous but requires tremendous amounts of will-power and time, is it even possible to start without a leap of faith? Or can one fiddle with Zen?

Enlightenment is a mental state that is carefully crafted over a long period of time. If you look at pre-Sectarian Buddhism, what you realize is that the "religion" preached by Siddhartha Gautama is really more like a proto-psychology explained through the language of the Indian subcontinent, mainly Indian customs and Hindu metaphysics. Siddhartha Gautama describes what the mind is, how it causes suffering, and then advocates the solution to it through the acceptance of truth and, more importantly, the attempt to fully incorporate it into one's beliefs through meditation and the like.

The interesting thing about pre-sectarian Buddhism is that, due to its practical nature, it is very compatible with a lot of other materialist and reductionist thought from the West, and you start seeing comparisons with Heraclitus, Epictetus, etc. In other words, you don't need to fully accept the Hindu account of the life, i.e., reincarnation, to fully appreciate pre-sectarian Buddhism, which made Buddhism very appealing to Western philosophers in the modern age like Schopenhauer. But ultimately only Epictetus gets close to the type of lifestyle change advocated by Siddhartha Gautama, since without practical changes, no philosophy will improve your life.

yes students must have faith, or doubts, since the two words are the same.
you lose faith, you lose doubt, or like normies put it, you gain certainty when you see ''the dhamma'' which is called ''being a sotapana''.

I'm reading DT Suzuki atm and he clarifies the history and psychology of buddhism a lot. Also how practical it can be. Yet he maintains then Enlightenment is one timeless event and this I have trouble with. I can agree with crafting yourself, changing (or developint or whatever) but not so that after one moment you are forever without doubt. Ibn Arabi described knowing God as a constant shifting between ecstasy and anxiety. Because at first you marvel at his greatness but then despair in your own limitations. I'm much more inclined to think like the latter.

>you lose faith, you lose doubt
You don't know what you're talking about.

once you see the dhamma, you no longer go by faith, that's the whole point

But saying the two words are the same? When I run naked through a battered woman shelter - I've lost both my decency AND my clothes. they must be the same thing then

maybe I never even had the clothes in the first place, who knows

a faith in something and a doubt about something means you are on a fence about at least two ways of life, when there is doubt of something, there is faith in something else and vice versa. It is just that some people see sometimes doubt as a positive attitude and faith as a negative one, sometimes it is the inverse.

By virtue of its all-penetrating freedom this Awareness that has no centre or circumference, no inside or outside, is innocent of all partiality and knows no blocks or barriers. This all-penetrating intrinsic Awareness is a vast expanse of space. All experience of samsara and nirvana arises in it like rainbows in the sky. In all its diverse manifestation it is but a play of mind."

You need only look out from the motionless space of intrinsic Awareness at all experience, illusory like the reflection of the moon in water, to know the impossibility of dividing appearances from emptiness.

"In a state of Awareness there is no separation of samsara and nirvana." Look out from the motionless space of intrinsic Awareness at all experience, illusory like the reflection in a mirror, and no matter what manifests it can never be tasted, its existence can never be proved. In this dimension samsara and nirvana do not exist and everything is the dharmakaya.

How would that work if you doubt everything? Or if you have faith in something, but you don't doubt some other way of life, just outright dismiss it as wrong?

Random question: while buddhism is eager to disband all sorts of categories and distinctions of thought, epistemology, metaphysics - why are there so many precise numbers in buddhist dogmatics? 4 reasons for this, 8-fold method for that, 12 instances of this-and-that, 26 or 42 boddhisatvas at given time and 400 billion aeons since some event.

Is there some sort of language use that means they aren't supposed to be precise? Like Jesus' 40 days of fast? Indians surely had number theory by then.

Faith doesn't have to be absolute in the sense that you are 100% convinced and engrossed in a particular belief. You just have to believe it enough to act as if you were, to give something charity or a fair trial, and then the benefits will follow. A lot of people who obsess over what goes on in their own head, i.e., being a "rationalist" about everything, forget that much that we think about has no tangible effect and forgot how often circumstance comes before reason rather than the other way around.

This

Mahayana is just retarded fanfic.

but nobody doubts everything nor do you have pure faith in X. The whole point of being a puttajana is first and foremost to take seriously the sensuality, to cling to this even when bad experiences happen (by believing it will get better, sooner or later, by sticking to sensuality and sometimes to even claim bad moments are worth it), some guys try to stop this due to tradition, due to boredom-curiosity, due to craving the pleasure that people claim they retrieve from mediation, due to despair to stop being unhappy.
You have doubt in the dhamma, or faith in the dhamma as long as you are a puttujana who trains (or not) to stop being a puttujana .

At some point there must be a decision to choose and follow sincerely a path and see where it goes for a while, while decreasing the pondering over other doctrines.
Having faith in the buddha means this when the faith is about following the teaching of the buddha, by reading some suttras, endorsing some precepts to pause the normie life a bit and make spare time for contemplation of sensuality and mediation on the teaching, then judging the result with respect to the initial state before taking up the path.

>Random question: while buddhism is eager to disband all sorts of categories and distinctions of thought, epistemology, metaphysics - why are there so many precise numbers in buddhist dogmatics? 4 reasons for this, 8-fold method for that, 12 instances of this-and-that, 26 or 42 boddhisatvas at given time and 400 billion aeons since some event.
people say it is for the easier memory of the suttras

Buddhist Sutras had to be memorized via oral tradition for awhile and, as you can see, the Buddha taught a very large amount of very dense information. Poetry, repetition, and numbering helped people remember.

I believe it's a process, it takes time to work your way through conditioning, getting better to understand yourself ,your fears, and to develop your ability to stand heavy no matter what happens. There are some other things that need developing as well, like your ability to know the right action and as cliche as it sounds to accept your present situation.

I agree. I can see where Theravada and Zen gets its appeal, but anybody who thinks you can pray to Buddha for enlightenment is a knuckledragging retard. How the fuck can a philosophy be so corrupted over time?

>muh Hindu metaphysics

Buddhism is inherently religious, and has little to do with psychology. It is not compatible with a modern, physicalist framework of reality. It was not in any way influenced by other contemporary outlooks on reality, and explicitly refutes them.

Read an academic book on Early Buddhism you nigger.

>ignoring the history of pre-sectarian Buddhism where there was no organized religion
>ignoring the six sense doors, the steps of cognition, and the mechanisms of suffering as explained by Siddhartha Gautama
>ignoring the fact that Siddhartha Gautama expressed a deterministic, atomistic understanding of reality
>believing that Buddhism was not in any way influenced by Hinduism, even if it rejects important concepts like the existence of gods
Goddamn you are spooked beyond belief. Don't lecture me on reading books when you have much to read yourself first.

Why do we talk of Buddhism as "philosophy" and Christianity as "theology"?

>deterministic, atomistic understanding of reality
what are you on about

>he doesn't even know about causality and kalapas as described by dhamma

partly because buddhism lacks a central god figure that necessitates problems of the theological order

How can willpower be dedicated to the cessation of will? Isn't desire for enlightenment an attachment?

Buddhism is secular

Will and "desire" (better interpreted as craving) is different. You can have goals and move towards them, i.e. will, without attachment. But you've touched on an interesting point: you can crave enlightenment, as in want it so badly that it gives you disproportionate pleasure when you make a slight gain or that it causes you anguish when it doesn't seem forthcoming, though it would set you back on your quest. Such a craving is the embodiment of a mindset that will only stifle your attempts to become enlightened because it only reinforces the psychological causes of suffering.

Honestly dude, skip Buddhism altogether.

Develop your own spirituality and your own path.

Meditate, be present, and make your own religion.

Buddha SPECIFICALLY stated that reality is NOT deterministic. Holy shit fuck off

>believing that Buddha denied causality
I'm not saying that he believed in deterministic free will, since that runs counter to "The Middle Path", but he did believe in causality quite clearly.

normies can have fantasies about the dispassion towards sensuality and becoming, and normies can cling to these fantasies, but whatever is fantasized as dispassion towards sensuality and becoming is not ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming''.
you cannot cling to ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming'' nor can you desire it. normies can desire whatever they put behind what they intellectually understand as ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming''.

also, the desire of ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming'' is not the way to achieve the ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming''. This desire is natural to have it for students, it is the only desire that is not totally wrong to cling to, but the will to stop being unhappy is the one that matters. it turns out that the ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming'' is exactly the end of unhapiness, but that is known only after ''seeing the dhamma'' and beforehand the ''dispassion towards sensuality and becoming'' means nothing experiential-ly.

If you want answers to these kind of questions read "I am that".

no one is a mountain unto himself

buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho buddho

you can feel it coming on. an orgasm is similar to enlightenment

Always seek to take another step towards enlightenment each day. Whether you reach it or not is irrelevant.

In the theravada view, they make a distinction between enlightenment and insight. Insight is instantaneous and acquired through meditative practices but 'Enlightenment' (nirvana) is not a state of mind nor can it be accessed instantaneously, it's a state of being that needs to cultivated through behavior/insight/etc. in order for one to dwell in it.

In the Zen view however zazen (insight) is enlightenment and you build it up through extensive meditative practices from baby steps until you reach that point.

>is it even possible to start without a leap of faith?

I wouldn't necessarily say so. It's hard to practice without some sort of trust in it, especially in Zen where you have delve right into it. And you can't exactly see the effects from the outside, a zen master looks like any other person but can still the mind with ease, yet you won't be able to tell just looking at him. Maybe you can assess him through koans and see if it's good enough but even the Buddha himself said that his monks should have faith in their practice.

>Buddhism is secular
>talks about karma, rebirth, gods (devas), heaven (realm of devas), hell (naraka), axis mundi (mount meru), etc

please, it's just a religion like any other