> It’s all part of one of the central themes that accumulating merit is for the phenomenal world and ultimately meaningless for the transcendent.
I feel confused about something.
Even though you've read the prajnaparamita sutra and words like 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form', you say there is a phenomenal world and a transcendent world. But the phenomenal world can't be impermanent if it is not born and doesn't die. Although possibly apocryphal, the sutra of immeasurable meanings has a sentence like the nature of true reality is that appearance and no appearance not apart from each other. That is to say, it seems that the things like Bodhisattvas referenced in the Lotus Sutra may need to be understood with the background training that transcendent wisdom means that the phenomenal world is the transcendent world. It isn't that they don't exist but that Buddha's enlightenment was explained, as you know, to not have been obtaining anything distinct. I take it to mean that enlightenment needs to be in and about the entirety of real life.
It's been said sometimes to be a waste of time to debate whether a certain thing exists or doesn't exist because, for one, a thing cannot be said to exist to anything else in the universe if it is totally isolated, i.e. not been localized by any other system yet, and cannot be entangled with. A controlled experiment could be said to basically mean "one unknown to vary (hopefully)". But entanglement is a reality.
"Anyone who, for even a moment, gives rise to a pure and clear confidence upon hearing these words of the Tathagata, the Tathagata sees and knows that person, and they will attain immeasurable merit because of this understanding."
"If you are caught up in the idea of a dharma, you are also caught up in the idea of a self, a person, a living being and a life span. If you are caught up in the idea that there is no dharma you are still caught up in the idea of a self, a person, a living being and a life span. That is why we should not be caught up in the idea of dharmas, or in the idea that dharmas do not exist."
The analogy I like to use is that of the waves and the ocean. You can look and see both. You can tell where one wave ends and another begins. You can see the waves forming and dissipating. But can you tell where the ocean ends and the wave begins?
The sutra strikes down the idea of dualism and yet it at the same time it says:
"Do not think that when one gives rise to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, one needs to see all objects as non-existent, cut off from life."
