The closing paragraphs here remind me of a friend who read The Supreme Source: The Fundamental Tantra of the Dzogchen Semde, and asserted with absolute certainty that it demonstrated that Buddhism believes in a transcendent deity. Being astonished by this, I went to the translation and discovered that the introduction was unequivocal in explaining that such an interpretation was a misunderstanding of the text. People seem to see either what they want to or what they expect to,
Dear Richard, that's so interesting. You will find some similar claims in the world of yoga, nowadays, where "turiya" is described as the experience of God. As for the case of Adi Buddha in Buddhist Studies, as far as I've been able to read, in the first decade of the 19th century the Buddha, before being imagined as a philosopher, was imagined as a prophet, in a way that returned dignity to him among the early (false) prophets of the ancient world before the advent of Christ, especially Zoroaster, who was the prophet of Ahura Mazda (as imagined by Anquetil-Duperron et. al.). Like Zoroaster, the Buddha had to be a prophet of a supreme, monotheistic god, comparable to the God of the Bible. Later, the Buddha became a philosopher, so the Adi Buddha was forgotten, but, it seems, because this history was forgotten, Adi Buddha may still be in place, somewhere, working wonders in the consciousness of Buddhist studies.
The closing paragraphs here remind me of a friend who read The Supreme Source: The Fundamental Tantra of the Dzogchen Semde, and asserted with absolute certainty that it demonstrated that Buddhism believes in a transcendent deity. Being astonished by this, I went to the translation and discovered that the introduction was unequivocal in explaining that such an interpretation was a misunderstanding of the text. People seem to see either what they want to or what they expect to,
thank you for your work on this resource
Dear Richard, that's so interesting. You will find some similar claims in the world of yoga, nowadays, where "turiya" is described as the experience of God. As for the case of Adi Buddha in Buddhist Studies, as far as I've been able to read, in the first decade of the 19th century the Buddha, before being imagined as a philosopher, was imagined as a prophet, in a way that returned dignity to him among the early (false) prophets of the ancient world before the advent of Christ, especially Zoroaster, who was the prophet of Ahura Mazda (as imagined by Anquetil-Duperron et. al.). Like Zoroaster, the Buddha had to be a prophet of a supreme, monotheistic god, comparable to the God of the Bible. Later, the Buddha became a philosopher, so the Adi Buddha was forgotten, but, it seems, because this history was forgotten, Adi Buddha may still be in place, somewhere, working wonders in the consciousness of Buddhist studies.