Thursday 1 October 2009

The Path in Advayavada Buddhism

In most other forms of Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path is made up of eight largely unrelated and prescriptive factors. For Advayavada Buddhism, however, it is clear that the objective of the Middle Way devoid of extremes, the madhyama-pratipad, being the correct existential attitude expounded by the Buddha, is the abandonment of all fixed views and to reconnect and reconcile us with wondrous overall existence as it truly is beyond our commonly limited and biased personal experience of it - the Eightfold Path is therefore understood dynamically as an ongoing reflexion at the level of our personal lives of existence as a whole becoming over time, as an ongoing reflexion in human terms of pratityasamutpada. It is for this reason, that the eight steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, as advocated by Advayavada Buddhism, do depend sequentially on each other, are to be followed repeatedly step by step one step at the time, are free of any conventional criteria set beforehand by others or ourselves that one is supposed to conform to, and are fully 'actual' in the sense that they are not done for a further purpose or motive which is not in the step itself - the only thing one has to consider is whether our realisation of this next step is to our knowledge at this very moment (acquired through texts, teachers and thought) the best possible one under the everchanging circumstances. (from the Advayavada Buddhism website)

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