Many believe that Buddhism was ousted from India due to the efforts of Adi Sankara to revive Hinduism. That is not quite the way it happened. The assumption that the Buddha was anti-Vedic is also erroneous. In the generations preceding the Buddha, there was a gradual deviation from the way of life taught in the Upanishads with ceremonialism and externals being emphasized instead of the spirit of internal practices. The Dark Ages had begun.

The Buddha, a yogi and student of Samkhya philosophy, attempted to restore the original purity of the Vedas but would not speculate on the existence of God or on the existence of the Buddhas upon the attainment of nirvana. A highly practical teacher, such theology was not worthy of any consideration - and he left such argument to the priests.

As to be expected though, his followers soon made the mistakes that his predecessors made. By the time of Sankara, the original teachings of the Buddha were muddled and degenerate. As Martin Buber put it, "His [the Buddha's] succession among the peoples, however, that "great vehicle" [Mahayana Buddhism], has contradicted him magnificently."

Enter Adi Sankara, who certainly attacks the philosophies of decadent Buddhism; but he never speaks of the Buddha himself derogatorily. In fact, he refers to the Buddha with the highest reverence calling him "Yoginam chakravarti," or the greatest among yogis. Adi Sankara, by admitting to the beauty of the Buddha's original teachings while disproving the distortions wrought by later Buddhists, brought Buddhists back into the fold of Vedanta where they belonged.

The Buddha, as a matter of course, had about as little to do with the development of Buddhism as Jesus has to do with the advent of Christianity and Catholicism, which is to say no involvement. Both their lives became the stuff of fables and mythology, and Jesus's might have always been only that. Like the New Testament, the Buddhacarita ("Life {Acts} of the Buddha) is a work of hagiographical fiction that has little to do with any real consideration of history. Both of these works have their didactic and inspirational purposes, but by in large the Buddha's biography stands, in its entirety, in conflict with the original teachings of the ascetic whose life it portrays. Today, Buddhism in East Asia is no more yogic than mainstream Judaism or Catholicism.

Shakespeare (1564-1646) wrote, "Words without thoughts never to heaven go," meaning that prayers without an earnest heartfelt sentiment are of no value. However, this simple truth eludes scores of modern day Buddhists; the prayer wheel now competes with the Buddha himself in omnipresence! For those of you unfamiliar with such a device, it is a cylinder, often metallic, stuffed with sutras and fitted with a handle for easy and quick rotation. Spinning the wheel counts for a prayer in your favor. Prayer wheels can be very large to afford hundreds of prayers in a short span of time, especially if the wheel is attached to a windmill or a water wheel (not sure if electric motors disqualify a prayer). Quantity, not quality, is the goal. Prayers can even be placed on flags or stone markers near roads so just driving by bestows a prayer (assuming good wind conditions where flags are involved). I suppose a bank robber would use a getaway route that had the most prayer slabs since he would need all the prayers he could get! In short, wheel-toting Buddhists wouldn't recognize the Buddha were he to bump right into them.

Like Catholicism, Buddhism developed its own cosmological theory that has very little connection to anything real but rather is an outgrowth of a blind and fear-ridden Dark Age theology. It too has its cult of mythological saints, called Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, that believers can pray to and venerate in order to receive certain merit. Buddhism developed liturgy, or external rituals, prayer books, and became perhaps the largest religion in the world through strenuous missionary efforts. As Bynner wrote, "Even the popes and lamas wear / Terror beneath a breast-bone bare, / Bell-wethering the flocks they lead / With a nostalgia for stampede."

Because it seems different and exotic to the average Christian Westerner, many in our countries believe that by becoming Buddhist they are somehow perforce entering the realm of mysticism or spirituality. They forget, or perhaps they never knew, that spirituality suffers with a narrow identity, Buddhist or otherwise, and simply requires the daily practice of directing the concentrated mind inward through sense-introversion and asceticism - just what one mystic, later named "the Buddha" (as if there is only one of those like there is only Son of God), did.

This defining practice is not the property of any religion. In fact, most organized religions disavow such a practice because a church, church funds, priests, and age-old ignorance-based rituals are superfluous and even burdensome to the mystic.

Some critics of organized religion feel that Christian churches are particularly dogmatic, and they certainly can be. However, it would be a mistake to assume dogma is confined to the West when it can be found in every religious sect that is in anyway organized. Western converts to Buddhism are merely replacing one dogma for another while they, in ignorant bliss, feel the elation of freedom from the stifling dogmas of the religion of their childhood and parents. Though the promise of heaven and threat of hell comprise the height of insult to reason, the doctrine of reincarnation becomes no less dogmatic, self-serving, and power centralizing where blind belief is concerned, else the human race would not continue to be burdened with a Dalai Lama or a Pope.

Fortunately, the flimsy stilts of priestly assurances easily collapse when a few penetrating questions are posed to the followers of dogma. Exposing themselves to such questions is another matter. Ashrams and retreat centers are largely built to keep those kinds of questions out.

In whichever hemisphere it is found, ecclesiastical attempts at dominating the human mind with the hubris of its priests, baseless super-terrestrial claims, and hocus pocus rituals are nefarious and subversive to human progress. Westerners who graft onto religious identities imported from cultures that have not even passed through the Enlightenment, let alone the fact that they are provided for by leaders utterly lacking in enlightenment, continually amazes me. We'd be stuck with book burning and inquisitions were it not for the likes of Voltaire, and yet we're fine with a culture that had no Voltaires of its own to question the nonsense! We credit not the Western religion that values mere statements of belief and faith; but we credit the Eastern variety as if it has a perfect credit score and a no limit credit account. And when we are emotionally and psychologically bankrupt after years of investment in East Asian stupidity, we revert to our Western religious upbringing and blame ourselves.

East or West, people look for the same things. Ultimately the religiously organized are not asking you to believe in certain tenets, but rather to believe in them, apparently because they can’t believe in themselves on their own. It also appears that the more ridiculous one's convictions the more they require bolstering by the conversion and convincing of others. Misery isn't the only thing that loves company.

The difficulty in unraveling Buddhist thought from the vantage point of the theory of self is that the two appear to be similar to those who have a cursory understanding of both. After all, the Buddha and Buddhist philosophers played a role in the transmission of the theory of self. Bringing someone to an awareness of the discrepancies and then revealing the limitations in Buddhist thinking that developed during the Dark Ages is not an easy task. It becomes doubly difficult if the reader has already bought into Buddhist indoctrination and grafted onto Buddhist identity. But with the right questions, the simplicity of Samkhya and Vedanta, which is expressed in the simplicity of the Buddha's original message, eventually shines forth and overpowers the degenerations that crept in during the Dark Ages in India, Tibet, China, and Japan.

Today, Buddhists are taught that the world is currently in a Dark Age because China borrowed faulty astronomical calculations from Dark Age India. Hindus, of course, are also taught this. China's act of borrowing this cosmological model leads us to the first point, namely that Buddhism was primarily an Indian phenomenon, the Buddha was an Indian yogi, the Buddha taught Indian philosophy, the Buddha did not stray from Vedanta and Samkhya, his realizations or samadhis were not new or exceptional in the lexicon of Indian yoga, and the entire Indian spiritual revival that centered around the Buddha was exported from India to China during the Dark Ages as a result of the reverence of the Chinese for the Indian mind. Even as the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians, and the Romans borrowed from the Greeks, so too did the Chinese borrow from the Indian and the Japanese borrow from the Chinese. The Chinese often expressed a bit of confusion and even distrust of the higher age Indian mind as did the degenerate Romans express their distrust of the Greeks.

How and why did Samkhya degenerate through the Indian and East Asian developments in Buddhism? Because this devolution in many ways parallels the degeneracy that determined the course of Western civilization with the advent of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages, Western Christian apostates will find, if they look, the same issues with Buddhism that sickened them with Christianity. Some general examples are:

1) Neither Buddhism nor Christianity were founded by the Buddha or Jesus, but both religions claim otherwise;
2) Both Buddhism and Christianity emerged from broader (at least at the time) religious traditions, namely what are now referred to as Hinduism and the Hebrew tradition, respectively;
3) Both Buddhism and Christianity became two of the largest religions in the world through strenuous proselytizing;
4) Both Buddhism and Christianity became theological opponents of the religious traditions from which they emerged;
5) The original ethical and spiritual messages of the Buddha and Jesus, as best as we can determine them, are very similar, though both figures are largely mythic;
6) Both Buddhism and Christianity developed a cosmology of angels and cult worship - Buddhas/Mary, Bodhisattvas/Saints and Angles, and Pure Lands/Heaven;
7) Both the Buddha and Jesus, as myths, taught the people of their own faith and culture, but their messages were transplanted into, a people (Chinese and Roman) of different cultural mindset and religious traditions;
8) The mystical teachings inherent in both Buddhism and early Christianity became muddled by the materialism of China (and India) and Rome, respectively;
9) Both the Buddha and Christ taught directly from their respective traditions (Vedanta and Hebraic Prophetic traditions, respectively) without deviation from those traditions, but both are nevertheless credited with saying new things and starting new religions;
10) Both the Buddha and Jesus became an object of worship;
11) Both Buddhists and Christians used interpolations and hagiographical writings, putting fabricated words into the mouths of their founders, to reconcile the contradictions in what they taught;
12) Both the Buddha and Jesus were later claimed to have been born from virgins;
13) The births of both the Buddha and Christ were later considered the fulfillment of earlier prophecies - the coming of an avatara of Visnu and the Moshiach (Messiah), respectively.

The Buddha's teachings began as an ascetic tradition, though its influence extended into the privileged class. The discourses in the Pali canon where the Buddha is addressing monks reflects the ideal of the spiritual seeker as one who renounces the world, dedicating everything to the spiritual quest. The priests, who controlled religious life for the masses, constituted an opposition to the Buddha's teachings, which made it difficult for this message to reach the commoner. This parallels the mythic conflict between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, and indeed a recurring theme of mystical traditions and organized religion standing in often-severe opposition to one another.

Early followers of the Buddha, who were ascetic yogis, had no interest in proselytizing the teachings or in missionary work. It was not until Emperor Asoka, a sort of St. Paul or Constantine for Buddhism, came into the picture that Buddhism began to widely spread. Even as Paul is characterized for his lack of concern for Jesus's teachings, neither did Asoka bother over the Buddha's teachings in attaining nonfinite self-knolwedge. He wanted to spread the elementary ideals of Buddhism to everyone and normalize them. These ideals revolved more around the moral implications of the Buddha's teachings than the esoteric or mystical aspect.

The stricter segment of the Buddha's following, which was in the minority, did not appreciate this watering down of their master's teachings. They wanted to keep to the teachings pure, even if it meant that Buddhism would not spread, while the more liberal segment advocated flexibility, a relaxing of discipline, a moving away from the historical yogi Gautama, and the stressing of a more faith-oriented view of the Buddha. Again, we find this very same trend in the history of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages, where only faith - in a larger Christ figure than in a historical man named Jesus - became necessary for salvation.

Of course, where faith is at issue, the larger Mahayana segment that formed saw no reason to limit their faith to the worship of only one Buddha. As Christian theology developed a heavenly host of saints and angels, so too did the Buddhist heaven become populated with Buddha's and Bodhisattvas of the past and future. It short time, Mahayana became an all-accommodating faith, willing to allow adherents to keep their own indigenous faith and further willing to absorb into its doctrines other belief systems as it moved through East Asia. It therefore took on magic, superstition, demonology, and animistic characteristics.

In the West, we don't care to worship other humans, like the kings and popes of old, and have benefited from the demystification of Enlightenment scientists and thinkers. And yet, we'll worship a guru or lama or rinpoche because that's different. If Spinoza-pa didn't bother to question worshipping humans as gods in Tibet, we tell ourselves there must be some good reason for that. There is a good reason. But the reason is not that those Eastern humans are worthy of worship but the Western ones weren't. The reason was the oppressiveness of Eastern tradition and thought, and that's a good reason to question their traditions and really bring some enlightenment to them.

In approximately 500 CE, the darkest portion of the Dark Ages, tantric Buddhism began to flourish. The Buddha's ascetic ideals made a one hundred and eighty degree turn and sexuality, which at one time was to be regulated, became the door to enlightenment. This decadent form of tantra still infects the lives of Buddhists and Western New Age enthusiasts. In the ideal of embracing the finite senses as incapable of covering the infinite, Dark Age tantric practices ignored the basic principles of electromagnetism that regulate the motion of energy in the human body and the expansion of consciousness.

Of all the places that it went, Buddhism arguably transformed most radically in Tibet, even by the already liberal and relaxed standards of Mahayana. While Buddhism entered China in around 60 CE, Buddhism entered Tibet around 750 CE and became Lamaism.

Tibetans were a very superstitious people. They considered the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, the Indian Padma Sambhava, to have been a kind of exorcist. Lamaism combines nationalistic tendencies, demonology, the deification of human beings, and a diverse pantheon of gods, bodhisattvas, and Buddhas. It has strong magical elements prompted by the desire to gain control over the host of terrifying demons that their over-active superstitious imaginations created. From this desire sprang the use of grotesque masks employed to scare off the demons. Magic, art, and ritualistic liturgy are harnessed to ward against a ubiquitous evil.

Tibetans had little to no interest in the asceticism of the Buddha. Even the little discipline and philosophical investigation that remained in Mahayana was in the most part rejected by them. At the same time, they had a tendency to deify visiting teachers, especially Indian sages and texts, and the leaders of Buddhists institutions were viewed as incarnated deities as well.

Svami Rama, a Himalayan yogi, tells the story of his visit to a monastery in Tibet in the 1940's where the residents believed that even touching one of their sacred Sanskrit works would mean sure death to the reader. Undeterred by such nonsensical superstition, Svami Rama waited till none was around, lifted the glass over the book and began to thumb through it only to find that it was a text that he recognized. He was caught reading the book, however, and they threatened to kill him. He decided to tell them a white lie in order to save his life. He said that he was sent to look over the book, and that his surviving the reading of the book is proof. They preferred to hold onto their self-mystification, took the ego-boosting bait, and let him go.

Buddhist scholar Edward Conze wrote, "Much of what has been handed down as 'Buddhism' is due not to the exercise of wisdom, but to the social conditions in which the Buddhist community existed, to the language employed, and to the science and mythology in vogue among the people who adopted it. One must throughout distinguish the exotic curiosities from the essentials of a holy life."

The methods to realize infinite self-knowledge (nirvana) that developed during Buddhism's travel across space and time reflected these indigenous trends. But Westerners are vibrant consumers of the exotic and rarely bother to discriminate as Conze advised. Few discover that Buddhism from the mouth of the Buddha (as best we can ascertain), stripped down to its most basic and fundamental principles, is no different than ancient yoga: the pragmatic, systematic effort to realize the infinite self-knowledge through asceticism and sense-introversion.

The interest in Buddhism in the West today is, of course, in large part due to a wider importation of Eastern products. But Americans and Europeans give themselves less credit than they deserve, for we are equally, if not surpassingly, exporting our ways of thinking into the East. Westerners largely believe that the West exports material trends while the East exports spiritual and philosophical trends. But the East is importing from us what the East desires and even needs in both material and philosophical outlooks. Marx was a Westerner, after all. Further, the West is importing those Eastern philosophies that help the West move beyond its own intellectual confines. We ignore our own pantheon of great Western philosophers and forget that Eastern thinkers have much need to read them.

The East may have toyed with the ideas of relativity and absolutes for centuries, but so has the West, and it was the West in Einstein that put it to actual calculations. Further, while the West has been in the grip of religious blindness for centuries, so has the East. Each blindness creates more blindness in its homeland, but it is useful in foreign lands for uprooting the indigenous blindness. Still, it was the West in thinkers like the ancient Greek philosophers, Spinoza, Voltaire and Rousseau, Marx, the Existentialists, the New England Transcendentalists, Ingersoll, America's Founding Fathers, and a host of others that saw a world free from religious shackles long before the steeped-in-tradition East caught up with the idea.

While some Western scholars made reference to Eastern texts and were inspired by them, their inspiration was born in their own hearts, not in the East. Also, many Eastern teachers come to the West not to help "all those lost Western souls," but because they thought their message would be heard better in the West and because the West is richer. Why on earth would a Western thinker go to China to teach its poor and uneducated populace the fundamentals of psychology? Because they got the Buddha wrong and made a mess of communism? Still, we fly off to the East because it's "spiritual" there.

Today, all strains of Buddhism in the East are intimately intertwined with Eastern cultural values, and there is little worth in translating them into our ways of thinking since they have no direct bearing on the spiritual life. But that's exactly what we do. We mystify their mundane.

A reverse example of this is the way that the East understands and practices Christianity. Many Eastern scholars have pointed out that, try as it might, the West will never export Christianity as it understands and practices it into the East because that very understanding/practice is tied in with the West's cultural backdrop. There are millions of Asian Christians, likely more than there are Western Buddhists, but their Christianity is not the same as Southern Baptism.

Even in the West, expressions of the same religion change from one local cultural group to the next. This is not simply a matter of genetic differences either, for an Asian born in the West will effortlessly understand, and perhaps even share, a Western flavor of appreciation for its traditions because such an individual will have been raised in Western culture.

So try as they might, Western Buddhists will never be Buddhists in the same way that an Eastern Buddhist is Buddhist, unless the Western individual immerses him/herself in Eastern culture. Now that’s probably a good thing. Of course, the whole idea of life is hopefully not to become a Buddhist or Christian exactly in the same manner that another group exemplifies Buddhism or Christianity. Such an attempt only points to an individual's lack of personal self-confidence, self-esteem, and need to graft onto a well-established model.

Ideally, a life will not revolve around becoming even our idea of what it means to be a Buddhist or Christian. The idea of life, or at least one of them, is to seek truth as distinguished from cultural baggage. As truth is not subject to culture, we may understand Buddhism - its strengths and weaknesses - with perhaps even more clarity than an Asian since we can, with any amount of discrimination, automatically reject those tenets of Buddhism that are merely culturally informed. That is, so long as we don’t burden Buddhism with our own cultural baggage!

And this brings us to the whole purpose of the Buddha's disciplined yoga, namely to transcend the limitations of conditioned phenomenal existence; to go from finite to infinite, including the realization that the infinite includes the finite. And it is in this endeavor that Dark Age intellectual trends in Buddhism failed to grasp the brilliance of higher age realizations.

Most scholars of Buddhism, and especially Buddhist "insiders," will say that not only did later developments in Buddhism grasp the principles behind Vedanta and Samkhya, but after grasping them and seeing their limitations, they improved upon them! Ironically, this viewpoint was precisely the cause for development of the degeneracy in the first place; later Buddhists only thought they understood the higher age knowledge that the Buddha expounded, and so too do most scholars only think they understand yoga. But with the right questions, it will be shown again and again how later Buddhist scholars argued obvious points, thinking they diverged with the ancients, only to arrive at faulty conclusions.

The purpose of engaging penetrating questions is not to convert from one set of beliefs to another. Those who are sincerest in seeking the truth never define themselves for or against narrow religious or philosophical ideologies.

One of the tenets of Zen Buddhism is that the more human beings attempt to free themselves from suffering, the more they will suffer. While we will look at the limitations in how we may apply this concept, one clear application that the Buddha would certainly not have argued against is that superficially calling oneself a Buddhist amounts to no less than such an attempt. The challenge is to take what we can from all schools of thought, weigh ideas in our minds, experiment with practices in our lives, and never sit still in a comfort zone that imagines spiritual security in little more than wearing a name tag.

The fate of Buddhism in the Dark Ages, which began in 700 BCE and hit rock bottom in 500 CE, is no different than the fate of all branches of human knowledge in that period. A global decline in knowledge impacted everything from astronomy to agriculture, mathematics to medicine. As for the degeneration of Buddhist thought in general in the Dark Ages, it is concretely reflected in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy in particular. Mahayana Buddhism strongly influenced all other developments in Buddhism in India and East Asia and is the most widely popular sect of Buddhism today.

From the start, it should be said that Buddhism itself, even without the degeneration it underwent, is a Dark Age religion expressing its principles in Dark Age terms. "Life is suffering," the first "Noble Truth" of the Buddha, is hardly an inspiring or even absolutely true statement. It may have been a fitting declaration for the Dark Age ear, but clinging to it as if it is an ideal way to express truth is itself a degenerate attitude. Hence rectifying Buddhism does not merely mean to go back to the original practices of pranayama and asceticism that the Buddha taught and lived, but to also express the principles underlying them in ways that do not reflect the limits of the dark times in which the Buddha lived.

Mahayana Buddhism stands, and can be initially understood, in comparison and contrast to Theravada Buddhism. Early Buddhism is called by later Mahayana Buddhists "Hinayana," or the Little Vehicle. The term Mahayana (Great Vehicle), when compared to Hinayana, seemingly places earlier strains of Buddhism in a derogatory light; the Mahayanists felt their system offered spiritual salvation to the masses through several approachable means while Hinayana was only fitted to those few rare ascetics who could completely renounce worldly ambitions. But if you sense a shade of competitiveness, get used to it. East Asian Buddhism is replete with examples of one-upmanship.

An initial examination of the decline in Buddhist thought as expressed in Mahayana will invariably spotlight the concept of nirvana. Mahayanists originally did not consider their path to be a superior path, per se, but only a more accessible one. Like a large bus, it could fit in more people than could a motorcycle, they believed. Mahayana offered external aids to worship while Hinayana did not. Mahayana could be approached by those who were immature, spiritually speaking, while Hinayana was only for the spiritual elders of humanity. Hinayanists, in turn, objected to the term Lesser Vehicle, refusing to confound the doctrine of the Buddha merely so that it could fit human frailties.

Mahayana's disagreement with Hinayana's approach to enlightenment highlights a major source of confusion that both of these sects have in regard to spiritual salvation. This disagreement goes to the heart of what the state of nirvana implies. It's like two Christians arguing over heaven, which of course also happens all the time since both heaven and nirvana are laden with Dark Age cultural informers.

The Mahayanists considered those who attained to nirvana to be selfish, in their spiritual realization, to the plight of others; that is, spiritual attainment is a group event, not a solo act, for Mahayanists. If Mahayana practices can indeed bring throngs of people to a Buddhist salvation, than it would clearly be superior to a school of thought that can only bring one or two adepts in a generation. A few Hinayanists, motivated by pride, described arhats, or those who attain nirvana, as above the suffering of others, furthering the perception of the aloof solitary seeker.

Mahayanists felt that those arhats who attained to such knowledge were perforce ascetics of sorts who stood apart from the world. In this assessment, Mahayanists disregard the very example of the Buddha, an ascetic who apparently worked tirelessly for decades for the spiritual benefit of others. Mahayanists were certainly right to distrust the example of an enlightened being who had no care for others, but where did they get this warped example of enlightenment in the first place? Instead of reassessing what it meant to the expansion of the sense of self to realize nirvana and acknowledge that a self-realized mystic would necessarily identify with the self in everyone, they stuck with their misconception of nirvana realization, sadly furthered by Hinayanists. While the Buddha praises the yogi who realizes the infinite, the Mahayanists magnificently contradict him by practically exalting those who renounced nirvana for the welfare of others. Hence, the nonsensical bodhisattva, a being who imagines starving helps starving people, was born.

Of course, that Mahayanists considered it possible for those who followed their easily accessible path to eventually attain the same knowledge as the arhat, though perhaps more slowly, with the added benefit of helping countless others along the way, begs further analysis as well. Where are the throngs of people in the Dark Ages enlightened by Mahayana doctrine, apart from the crowds suddenly enlightened, absurd as it sounds, by a discourse from a Patriarch that is slightly less inspiring than a modern-day self-help book?

Wherever they are, the Mahayana Buddhist idea of nirvana deserves critical analysis. Why did the doctrine define those who attained it to be selfish? What did nirvana mean to them? Why was the ideal of the bodhisattva glorified?

Another issue worth investigating is the devotional one. Buddhism, in large part, failed to respond to the devotional need in humans to worship a god or supreme being, so the idea that the ultimate reality could be classified was borrowed from Vedanta and developed. Dharmakaya is the absolute, impersonal God, or Brahman. Sambhogakaya is the cosmos as a finite manifestation of Brahman, a personal God, or Isvara. Nirmanakaya is the body of the avatara.

This trinitarian categorization, with its rough parallels between it and other religions, opens up a whole cosmology of possible worship. Though it does not constitute real knowledge or a description of the real state of affairs, as a model it reconciles, among other things, intellectual and personal need. It is neither true nor not true, in this sense, but rather true to the human inclination to center the sense of self by using an external object of devotion. How this license to worship devolved into escapist cults is another matter.

The Buddha, for his part, was not ignorant of the place, use, and power of devotion on the ascetic path. A love of the larger self is the best possible expression of love of God. A devotional love for God may have little place in many strains of Buddhism today, despite the available forms of worship, but this dryness has always undone itself.

The techniques of meditation and worship popular among Buddhists today can be scrutinized as well. Mahayana Buddhism borrowed much from the tantra lexicon (kundalini, cakras, nadis, etc.) and yoga systems of earlier Indian traditions, not unlike the adoption of Jewish liturgy by the forming Christian movements and Jewish asceticism by Christian ascetics. These practices devolved over time in ways related to the devolution of the philosophy surrounding nirvana.

Most Mahayana Buddhist rituals, if not all, are also borrowed from Hindu-style puja. The Buddha had nothing to do with these developments, though he is often given credit for them; in fact, he would have certainly fought many of them even as he fought the ritualized worship of his time and the authority such external forms of worship gave to the priest.

Another major issue for discussion is the doctrine of the atman, the self or soul. Mahayana Buddhism does not admit to the atman, but their lack of admission is more a willingness toward equivocation since the qualities of the atman were not understood by the Dark Age mind. The teachings of non-atman in Mahayana Buddhism reduce to little more than teaching no ego. Of course, Samkhya and the Buddha also taught no ego, but atman is not only not ego, but it does not imply, as many think, individuation.

Atman was used to refer to the ego, but it was also used to refer to the expansive self and ultimately the infinite self. Mahayana Buddhists read "individualized being" in the term atman when in fact atman-realization spells the very end of an individuated being. Self-knowledge is the death of the ego; self, atman, and nirvana, therefore, are fairly synonymous terms. Buddhists scholars are correct in stating that “no atman” did not mean "no self" but Buddhists in general today fail to differentiate between teachings informing an attitude to take in life and teachings making positive assertions of the state of things.

The doctrine of no self is at bottom little different than the Vedic doctrine of neti neti, "not this not this." All the teachers of higher age Vedanta, not just the Buddha, would not make useless philosophical speculations concerning the ultimate reality. A deep study of no self reveals that the Buddha ever taught no narrow self, not no expansive or infinite self. He could not teach no self anymore than he could teach no nirvana.

Therefore, we must also look at the Buddhist ideas of the ego and self. How did the concept of atman degenerate into an individual ego or the support of one?

When the Buddha was questioned in regard to the philosophical specifics of the self, nirvana, creation, etc., he is said to have kept silent as he did not consider the answers to such questions to be worthy of investigation. Assumedly, he felt they were poor questions born of false impressions of the self and its progress in self-knowledge. Of course, he would be correct; a million answers to such questions will not, of themselves, lead to self-knowledge.

But the silence of the Buddha arguably created too large a vacuum that Buddhists needed to fill with the cosmology and philosophy of Mahayana. Buddhists respond by saying that Mahayana was an attempt at reconciling the practical issues and contradictions in the Buddha's message. Unfortunately, the Dark Ages were on and knowledge declined after the Buddha's passing leaving later Buddhists left to grope for proper questions and answers with a blinded intellect.

Mahayana has been characterized by Buddhists as the work of highly sensitive minds who, while perhaps indulging in intellectual curiosity at times, struggled with the Buddha's idea of release from the bondage of suffering. Samkhya as the Buddha taught it certainly left unanswered questions, but the Buddha had a purpose in that. Answers are there, he taught, but they are not to be groped after with the mind, especially in the Dark Ages, which he certainly knew the world had entered.

Mahayana Buddhists argued that the Buddha's lack of practical explanation made it difficult for one to follow the precepts without a great many obstacles forming along the way. Mahayana therefore was concerned with devising upaya, "skillful means," for making liberation accessible to everyone. But liberation, especially in the Dark Ages, was never considered by the Buddha to be accessible to everyone and Mahayana, with its "skillful means," did not change this inevitability one iota. Dark Age Buddhist texts speak of whole halls of listeners, whole worlds even, attaining sudden enlightenment through these skillful means when at best they might have honestly related that whole groups of people were merely converted to Buddhism. Further, the "skillful means" that they provided in the Dark Age now only take the modern Buddhist's attention away from the genuine necessities and higher age practices of the ascetic path that the Buddha followed and taught.

The paths that these skillful means present are quite diverse. One could have faith in the Amitabha Buddha and secure rebirth in the Lotus or Pure Land, which of course would constitute pure escapism. Another is the philosophical discussions of Nagarjuna and the practice of "Maha Mudra." Yet another skillful means is the practice of a degenerate form of tantra that involves a lot of superstition and little celibacy. The higher age tantrikas approached tantra as a healthy and natural practice of sex and pranayama, with continence, that was a useful aid to the ascetic not unlike devotion, proper diet, and proper exercise are useful.

But then anything could be justified as a skillful means, including violent actions and war. In the name of enlightenment, much like in the name of God, what action is off limits? Toss in a little authority of a bogus "silent teachings" that prohibits as much as it says (nothing), and you have Buddhism in the Dark Ages, and today.

The Buddha's teachings, like the teachings of all yogis, explained that nirvana is attained through discipline and self-mastery. But these teachings are never intended for the masses because the masses aren't, by definition, interested in discipline and self-mastery. Would the Buddha and his predecessors consistently teach this discipline if, all the while, there were a simpler and easier path? Of course not, but the Mahayanists hoped that it would be so.

What can we then conclude in regard to the characterization of Mahayana as the Greater Vehicle - in contrast to the "Lesser Vehicle" of Theravada - in that it offers easy liberation to everyone? Mahayana was naught but an effort to give the intellectual semblance of liberation, the idea that you are spiritually free, without the effort to attain freedom or the state of self-knowledge of actually being free.

While disciples of the Buddha and other yoga masters were ever taught to transmute all worldly inclinations into the single pursuit of self-knowledge, Mahayana Buddhists confounded this teaching through several false assumptions and the conclusions that arrived from them. What were these assumptions? How did they philosophically reason their way from hours of pranayama and a life of asceticism to repeating the name of Amitabha Buddha and the so-called five M's of decadent tantra?

The first assumption Mahayanists made, which will be coming back to again and again, was that the state of desirelessness implied a freedom from the desire for knowledge, nirvana, liberation, etc. If the state of nirvana represents a desireless state, they asked themselves, how then can one desire not to desire?

This is a typical Dark Age Mahayana question burdened with a false assumption. For thousands of years, yogis taught desirelessness not in relation to knowledge and the bliss of nirvana, but strictly in relation to sensory experiences. Desire of itself was never a bad or evil thing; it all depended, like most things in this world, on how it was directed because it is directed awareness. Desire that directed the consciousness inward toward the very seat of desire in the will, mind, and feeling was not only of spiritual benefit, but was desirable. The spiritual aspirant, if anything, was ever taught to use discrimination as a means to cultivate spiritual desires to replace material desires, i.e. inward flowing energy patterns to replace outward flowing ones.

Another reason their question is the wrong one is that nirvana is not a desireless state. It is only qualified as desireless from the vantage point of those still with desire. Desirelessness has no meaning in the state of nirvana. It only has meaning to those living in the range of perception we call finitude.

Another assumption Mahayanists made was that it was the little egoistic self of its own efforts that would destroy itself and remove selfishness. This erroneous assumption was due to their ignorance of the relationship between the ego and the expansive self. How, the Mahayanists asked, could the self destroy itself when the very act of destroying was an act of selfishness?

Selfishness is not bad or evil, as it all depended on the boundaries, the parameters, of the self in question. Selfishness, one way or the other, is in fact inevitable. We are all equally selfish, but our selves are not equal. When the narrow self learns to actively identify with all things, not merely love or tolerate others as beings apart from itself, it moves in the direction of expansion to the infinite self. Where the self is boundless and infinite, selfishness is not only good, but the highest good.

The ideal of the bodhisattva was of one who is selfish for all? Only, how can one attain such selfishness unless one has self-knowledge, or self-realization? While Mahayanists believed that arhats who attained nirvana were selfish, the real truth was that those who attained nirvana were sublimely selfish, which is the purest spiritual selflessness.

Dark Age Mahayanists did not understand that the consciousness of the egoistic self is none other than the undivided consciousness of the infinite self. The former is a case of narrowed consciousness and identity centered in the senses and supported by sensual desire, while the latter is a case of infinite consciousness centered microcosmically in the spine and brain and macrocosmically in everything, dissolving all causal divisional misperceptions of space-time along with it.

Ignorant of the mechanics of the expansion of consciousness, Mahayana Buddhists thus came to the erroneous conclusion that the Buddha taught that the self must undo itself, which of course would be impossible. But instead of realizing that they came to the wrong conclusion and had misunderstood the Buddha's teachings, they devised more skillful means to reconcile the contradiction when there never was a contradiction in the first place.

There was never any paradox, and even if there were, no skillful means they would devise could ever address it. All of the prescribed actions, thoughts, and philosophies -- even the "non-effort" or "renouncing nirvana" ideas - would ever bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite. In the end, Buddhists philosophically decided to merely equate the two, finite and infinite, and deify the bodhisattvas that renounced the latter.

While some Mahayana scholars had faith that the Buddha deep down knew of the paradox in his teachings (when there never was one), other Mahayana scholars felt that the Buddha and his disciples were probably not even aware of this supposed paradox. Again, both groups failed to realize that the very existence of this paradox in their minds relied upon on their own false, intellectual, and Dark Age conceptions of self and nirvana.

To Mahayanists, nirvana was a one-way ticket out of the cycle of rebirth. This false assumption led them to think that attaining nirvana was a selfish act. What they did not understand was that nirvana was only a one-way ticket out of forced rebirth, maya/karma induced rebirth, the very divisional idea of rebirth in fact.

Nirvana was interpreted by the Mahayanists to be like any other material gain. They lacked discrimination between worldly and spiritual desires, lumping both in the same "bad" pile. Nirvana was some sort of car that one drove away in, leaving everyone else stranded. They would have been wiser to see nirvana as merely absolute knowledge, the realization of which did not preclude the freedom to take rebirth in the world of relative knowledge for the liberation of others.

The Mahayanists however, like most modern-day Buddhists, felt that the idea of the bodhisattva was intrinsic to the logic of the Buddha in that it supported the idea of not grasping. How can we be taught, they asked themselves, non-grasping when we are taught at the same time to strive after nirvana?

Samkhya teaching of non-grasping refers to not grasping after sensory impressions, restless thoughts when introverting the senses, limiting feelings, misery-producing material desires, etc. All this non-grasping was the effort needed in yogic training to realize nirvana. Nirvana was never something to be attained through grasping for it or through positive efforts to attain it, but was the natural result of efforts in ceasing to grasp after finitude. One cannot earn infinite, and as the self is infinite, one does not have to. One simply has to increase the intuitive capacity until the knowledge of a self unbound by division is realized.

So it appears that the Mahayanists argued something that never needed to be argued in the first place; the Buddha never taught to grasp after nirvana. And even to grasp after nirvana properly will only amount to not grasping after samsara. So, concluding that the teachings of non-grasping meant that the yogi should renounce nirvana is utterly contradictory in itself. That is, if non-grasping (which is perforce in relation to the phenomena of mind, sense, will, feeling, etc.) were really practiced to the hilt, the state of nirvana is inevitable.

Hence the paradox of the bodhisattva selfishly attaining nirvana by and for him/herself, thus demanding that the bodhisattva renounce nirvana, vanishes. Nothing is left, then, but an attempt at glorifying the unwillingness to go deeply within behind the building of temples, good works, faith, etc., finding narrowing pride in one's sacrifices of nirvana, self-imposed ignorance for the good of others, and demeaning what seems illogical in the Buddha's teachings and in so doing betraying their own lack of self-knowledge attained in the realization of nirvana. The bodhisattva becomes Buddhism's Dark Age version of the Christian martyr.

How did Mahayanists ever think that one who was ignorant of nirvana could ever guide others to it? How would anyone ever realize nirvana through the help of the bodhisattva when everyone's ideal role model was a being who ever renounced nirvana in favor of helping others realize knowledge that he/she had never realized? How could the Bodhisattva, or anyone else, be sure the Bodhisattva knew what he or she was talking about? Mahayanists, of course, thought that they would truly attain nirvana by renouncing it, but where was their philosophical or practical failure? Why is the history of Mahayana Buddhism practically devoid of self-realized masters, weighed as such by the standards of higher age yoga? More of such questions will be investigated next month.

In this sense, Buddhism is more nefarious than Christianity. Masses of unenlightened fools are almost acceptable among Christians because the religion, with its tenets, practically demands no enlightenment and plenty of foolishness. It is one thing for a religion to claim something ridiculous that no one can disprove, such as that all Christians go to eternal heaven, but another to claim something that can be easily verified. Enlightenment happens here and now, before death. A religion like Buddhism, openly based on the life of a yogi, should either be seriously cultivating yogis within its ranks or should be shunned for failing this task. Perhaps with a little rectification, more Buddhists will renounce the misguided skillful means born in the Dark Ages and focus on the means of pranayama and asceticism that have been available from time immemorial.

Mahayana ideas of the finite (samsara), the infinite (nirvana), and the process of liberation from the narrow sense of self are incomplete.

Eastern philosophy and Buddhist scholar Alan Watts wrote, "For if nirvana is the state in which the attempt to grasp reality has wholly ceased, through the realization of its impossibility, it will obviously be absurd to think of nirvana itself as something to be grasped or attained." This statement, representative of Mahayana thought, speaks directly to the limited understanding that crept in during the Dark Ages.

Nirvana is not the state of not grasping at reality, as Mahayana generally presented it. Very little of any positive or even negative nature can be said of nirvana. The word "nirvana" is a negative whether it is translated as "blowing out" or "no waves,” but these non-descriptions do their best to point to something by saying little. Even the word "infinite" is but a negative in speaking to positive words like absolute, eternal, and omnipresent yet resist any positive comprehension by the intellect. If the Buddha never positively answered questions concerning nirvana and the self, it was not merely out prudence, but also practicality.

Not grasping after finitude naturally culminates in nirvana, which is absolute reality. One proactively grasps at reality by directing awareness away from finitude and toward the intuitive centers of the spine and brain. It is this proactive method that Mahayanists practically convinced themselves out of.

Nirvana itself cannot be qualified by the kind of efforts required to realize it, especially the negative part of the effort. The Mahayanists confuse the negative method in realizing nirvana - non-grasping after finitude - with the state of nirvana by assuming a false definition of nirvana.

This false definition gave birth to a host of Dark Age methods that, still thriving today, are useless in positively realizing infinite self-knowledge.

Efforts at grasping toward infinitude in the way that we grasp toward finitude are useless, of course. An obvious example of this would be in subscribing to a belief system as a means of reaching an eternal heaven. But the Buddha never taught grasping at infinitude in that way. He taught the positive way of pranayama. By emphasizing the avoidance of grasping, Mahayanists crippled their efforts.

Moreover, the process of realizing infinite nirvana can only be negatively qualified as ceasing to grasp after finitude from the standpoint of finitude. In the ultimate sense, it is not even that.

It is impossible to realize nirvana through grasping at finitude, so ascetics like the Buddha taught that it is possible and even effortless to realize nirvana through positive efforts at directing awareness and energy inwardly. But some Mahayanists argued that grasping at finitude with the right motivation culminates in the realization of nirvana. Their error was in the belief that since samsara (finitude) is part of nirvana (infinitude), grasping at samsara properly will embody realizing nirvana.

This is as absurd as saying that grasping at a ray of the sun will result in having all the stars in your hand. The hand has the capacity to obstruct the path of a few rays of the sun, but not to catch all the stars. The senses, intellect, and feelings are as limited in the endeavor of realizing the infinite; they will never register nirvana no matter what the motivating intent behind their activities.

Some Mahayanists took their renunciation of finitude in the spirit of realizing the infinite to such a degree that renouncing nirvana became necessary in their minds. In the first place nirvana is not something to be grasped at with finite faculties, and in the second absurd to conclude from this that renouncing nirvana is desirable or even possible.

Renouncing nirvana with the apparent purpose of eventually realizing nirvana is an obvious contradiction. This misguided attitude is perfectly reflected in the Buddhist "meditation" practice of sitting without any preconceived notions or plan. The way to actually succeed in sitting without any limiting patterns of thought and awareness is to proactively direct awareness inward through pranayama. Mahayanists did not renounce nirvana. They, like so many modern followers of priests who teach in the name of the Buddha, merely renounced all efforts toward nirvana.

Never mind the fact that one cannot renounce what one does not have. The ignorant are in no position to renounce knowledge. They can only presume to do so. Positively stated, nirvana is the very being underlying phenomenal existence.

Watts continues, "If, furthermore, the ego is merely a convention, it is nonsense to think of nirvana as a state to be attained by some being." This statement is naught but an example of Indian and East Asian Dark Age minds arguing the obvious (nirvana is not attained by some being) in every effort to avoid the inevitable (the discipline required to master the mind). How is this so?

Nirvana is the state of infinite being, or is infinite self or infinite reality. The ego, or finite self, is an apparent fragment of that being, but its narrowness in the division of its consciousness is too limiting to allow for the realization of infinite reality. It can only understand the world of becoming, the world of finitude. So, of course Mahayana is right in repeating the ancient dictum that nirvana is not a state attained by some individuated being, since nirvana is verily the obliteration of division. It is the state of an expansive beam of consciousness going from the sense-bound ego to infinite self, and as such is the state of dropping the individual being in favor of the absolute being. The individuated sense of self that was making efforts in not grasping at the finite self by making efforts at looking within and expanding the sense of self dissolves upon the realization of nirvana.

The unfortunate snag of this is that if some individual does not attain nirvana, then the idea of an individual making effort to attain nirvana is silly. Of course, the problem with the willingness to get caught up in this snag is that it undermines not only material efforts, which are admittedly useless, but also mystical ones. The Buddha, like all yogis, never taught his disciples to make material efforts to positively attain nirvana. When it came to the phenomenal world, all of his teachings were presented by way of encouraging his disciples to negatively reject the world of the senses as the end-all of existence. Only, this kind of effort embodied in the positive effort of expanding the intuitive capacity would culminate in the positive realization of nirvana. In other words, nothing positive could be materially done to directly realize nirvana. Nothing could be learned, viewed, imagined, thought, heard, or performed to attain nirvana. All of yoga has ever revolved around unlearning the narrow sense of self, positively withdrawing the mind from the senses, stilling the thoughts, stilling the feelings, etc.

Watts again: "...if there is no nirvana which can be attained, and if, in reality, there are no individual entities, it will follow that our bondage in the Round [of rebirth] is merely apparent, and that in fact we are already in nirvana - so that to seek nirvana is the folly of looking for what one has never lost."

Allow me to repeat these statements in the manner that pre-Buddhist Samkhya would state them. There is no nirvana to be attained by an individuated being. There are no individual entities from the vantage of nirvana. Bondage in the round of finitude/samsara exists only as finite ideas in the infinite nirvana, but is real to the individuated narrow self in samsara. The individuated sense of self has never been in nirvana and will never be in nirvana because its very individuation is antithetical to the infinitude of nirvana.

Nirvana is not a state or a realization that was never lost or gained. The narrow self never had nirvana anymore than did the one who was blind from birth ever have sight. It is too narrow to register infinitude. It could never lose what it never had to begin with. We are not already in nirvana. Quite the contrary is true. We will never be in nirvana.

The narrow sense of self, by definition, is composed of the ideas of separate existence, birth and death, finitude, etc. There are individual entities from the vantage point of the round of samsara, no such entities from the vantage point of nirvana.

The presence of the habituated individual sense of self is marked by the inability to expand the knowledge of existence past the five senses and mind. As long as the idea of the narrow self is present, there will never be the genuine ability to renounce nirvana, there will never be the genuine ability to claim that nirvana was never lost, nor will there ever be the ability to seek nirvana. And when the self expands to infinity, the same is yet true.

Saying that we never lost nirvana is technically correct, but the very need of saying it points to an error in understanding. We would never say that the baby out of the womb never lost car keys. Of course, it never did lose car keys, but to say such a thing can imply that it had car keys to lose or some babies lose their car keys out of the womb. There are a million things that babies out of the womb never lost. The baby never lost things like car keys, term papers, and personal memories of sex because such things do not belong to the level of development that is a baby. Actively saying that it never lost these things implies that we somehow think babies inherently have the keys to the car in their hands right out of the womb.

Just as it is absurd for a baby to drive a car, it is absurd to think of the divided self as having or once having nirvana. If you as the individuated self want nirvana, you must simply cease to be you even as a baby must cease to be a baby in order to drive a car. The potential to drive a car is with the baby even as the finite self has the potential to expand into nirvana, but the ego as such will never have nirvana even as the baby as such will never drive a car.

And this points to the ultimate error of Mahayana: The desire for nirvana certainly ceases along with the very idea of the individualized "you" in the realization of nirvana, but that desire for nirvana will not keep you from nirvana, as the Mahayanists thought it would, because the sincere desire for nirvana will never, ever, directly amount to a positive desire for nirvana that leads to materially-bound activity, i.e. finite avenues to knowledge. It will always express itself as a lack of desire for finitude and a positive desire to develop a nonfinite avenue to knowledge.

In other words, saying that nirvana is a desireless state is incorrect. It only appears to be a desireless state from the vantage point of those who have desires, divided selves. Confusing the path to nirvana (desirelessness in relation to the sensory world) with nirvana itself, then assuming that the desire for nirvana (which is never the actual desire for nirvana anyway since one cannot desire what one does not know, but nevertheless appears as such to those in the state of desire) will keep one from nirvana since nirvana is a desireless state, is ignorance.

This ignorance ties one's hands behind the back, spiritually speaking. The emptiness and uselessness of the moment is all that is left; but this emptiness and uselessness, glorified by many sects of Buddhism, is antithetical to the progress toward the state of samadhi. The absolute is only empty in relation to finitude. That is, it is empty of finitude! Making any more of the doctrine by qualifying infinitude increases the likelihood for the proliferation of more ignorance.

Does the desire for God or nirvana direct the attention inward toward the spine or outward toward the senses? It depends on how God and nirvana are defined, of course, but this is the only question one needs to ask on this issue. Proper definitions of God and nirvana and life itself will inspire the practice of intuition, or looking within, while less definitions of God and nirvana will keep the awareness outward and tied to the senses, the finite avenue to knowledge that affirm the individuated self.

If Buddhists during the Dark Ages proactively sought nirvana with the methods the Buddha taught, they would have found no other way to do it but to cease to seek after finitude, that is, switch off the finite avenues to knowledge and in so doing unite the finite faculties into a single brain-bound intuitive current.

Finitude, the narrow self, will never register infinitude, so it can never seek it and does not need to avoid seeking it; the most the finite self can do is die as the ascetic switches off the breath, heart, and senses. Though the narrow self as awareness is made of the same infinite substance as nirvana, the finite self will never know nirvana for it must expand and burst into the Infinite self of nirvana. And that expansion means the end of the divided self.

Watts once more: "Naturally, then, the Bodhisattva makes no motion to depart from the Round of samsara, as if nirvana were somewhere else, for to do so would imply that nirvana is something that needs to be attained and that samsara is an actual reality." This is naught but a Dark Age rationale for prolonging ignorance.

The Buddha never taught that there was ever a need to take material pro-action to directly depart from the round of birth and rebirth. The teachings of yogis like the Buddha sound very pro-active, and they are, but their activities are all in the service of detaching from finite ideas, limiting desires, and narrowing identities. The divided self is of birth and rebirth rounds; it cannot depart from its very qualities. It can only renounce those things that it can actually choose to renounce or grasp onto, such as sense-objects mistakenly assumed to be sources of lasting happiness, finite ideas mistakenly assumed to be the way to self-realization, and body identification mistakenly assumed to be the true state of affairs.

Nirvana and samsara are not in two different places, and Mahayana was right about this. However, samsara is but a drop in the ocean of nirvana. You reading this are made up of finite ideas rolling on the infinite sea of nirvana. Samsara, when all is said and done, is but a narrow range of perception of nirvana. The range of the divided self's perception is called samsara; the range of the self-realized ascetic’s perception is called nirvana. Even as there is a cosmos full of sounds that our ears are deaf to, so there is the infinite nirvana all around us that our five senses are ignorant of. Does the narrow self need to attain it? Of course not, but to say this is as if to imply that such a thing is actually possible, or even worse, already has been.

The bodhisattva will never attain nirvana. The moment nirvana is realized the bodhisattva is gone. However, nirvana must be realized and an aid in that realization is the understanding that samsara is a narrow range of perception of the reality of nirvana. The only thing the bodhisattva, which is the narrow self, must depart from is the self-imposed limitations that result in the narrow range of perception that is the bodhisattva. The sense-bound self must depart from those ideas, thoughts, and resulting actions that promote the narrow range of perception. As the range of perception expands, the realization of nirvana increases and the intuition-limiting patterns of the self decrease. It can hardly be said any simpler than that.

The finite is the infinite only as much as the drop is part of the ocean, but limited intellectual information concerning the drop does not imply knowledge of, or culminate in oneness with, the ocean. What has always been necessary is the expansion of the range of intuitive knowledge. In other words, nirvana includes samsara, but samsara does not include nirvana. Nirvana has all knowledge concerning samsara, but those still wed to samsara by maintaining the narrowness of the range of consciousness will be oblivious to nirvana even while they are in a sea of nirvana, since the five senses were never designed to register infinitude. Methods of meditation inspired by this philosophy, like open-eyed meditation, will never constitute nonfinite avenues to knowledge.

Mahayanists argue that the state of nirvana will not annihilate the field of the senses. This is not absolutely true. Ultimately, there is no finite cosmos to the infinite but merely the idea of one. The state of nirvana is not a monolithic concept, but any investigation of a nonfinite avenue to knowledge implies shutting down the finite faculties. The senses, when left alone to their own devices, help to promote ignorance as their data determines the parameters of the self. But when the senses are tempered by absolute knowledge, their data is understood to be representative of but a miniscule range of nirvana.

Nirvana knowledge contains sensory knowledge, or at least access to it, but sensory knowledge does not include nirvana knowledge or any access to it. Mahayanists came to the correct intellectual realization that nirvana knowledge includes the senses, and so will not annihilate the field of the senses, but then they indulged in a non sequitur by proposing that if that were true, then we need not turn away from the sensory world to realize nirvana. This is like arguing that since the drop is in the ocean, living our lives limited to the drop means we'll see and know the entire ocean.

The ironic, but expected, part of all of this is that East Asian Buddhists repeatedly used this philosophy to rationalize all kinds of material desires in their rejection of their desire for nirvana. In that regard it became no different than any other Dark Age organized religion.

Absolute knowledge contains access to sensory perception, but sensory perception does not include absolute knowledge. Yet, the senses are the avenue of choice for sensory data. Mahayana's history is replete with masters, bodhisattvas, and patriarchs that had not one ounce of absolute knowledge.

Mahayanists further argued that the attempt to blot out the sensory world means to admit it absolutely exists. This crippling idea practically dissuaded centuries of Buddhists from investigating intuition, the only nonfinite avenue to knowledge accessible by human beings.

The attempt to withdraw the mind from the senses means only to admit that absolute existence, nirvana, is more than what the senses alone can reveal. The sensory world exists with the senses; one cannot separate the two. However, the world's caliber of realness, ontologically speaking, can only be determined, ultimately, from the state of nirvana. If anything, the capacity to so easily switch off the senses and obliterate the phenomenal world is evidence that its reality is unstable. Even sleep and dreams challenge its realness.

Switching off the senses does not culminate in blindness to the world. It is only blindness to a narrow frame of the world. If any one of the Mahayana scholars actually gained the power of sensory disassociation through pranayama, he would have seen how blind he was with the senses fully lit. The sense-bound are blind to the world of nirvana though their senses are wide open; the lesser meditator is even more blind since he or she closes the senses but yet perceives nothing directly through intuition; but the accomplished ascetic directly knows more of the cosmos than any billion pairs of senses can perceive. With the weak senses withdrawn, the intuitive eye opens and the world as infinite is realized to be the very self.

In closing Part III, we might imagine the Buddha said, "Close your two little eyes to the world and see you are the infinite!" The Mahayanist replies, "If I am truly the infinite, I'll just keep my eyes open because my effort to close them will keep them open." The Buddha says, "Let go of finitude!" The Mahayanist replies, "I must hold onto finitude because the act of letting go will make me hold on even more." The Buddha says, "Do not entertain suffering-producing material desires!" The Mahayanist replies, "I must keep my desires, because efforts at uprooting desires will create more desires."

The day-to-day application of the Mahayana philosophy concerning the sense of self, the attitude toward sense data, samsara (finitude), and nirvana (infinitude) bear further examination. From Zen Buddhism to Pure Land Buddhism, tantric Buddhism, Shambhala Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism, the dilemma of finite and infinite that Mahayana Buddhist philosophers pondered in the Dark Ages was responded to in diverse ways. By focusing on fundamental principles at work in that development, we gain a better understanding of how higher age practices geared at placing the body in suspended animation and lifting the energy to the brain - thereby fully investigating a nonfinite avenue to knowledge - would become distorted once the rationale behind their application was no longer fully understood.

One of the major answers that Mahayanists give to the spiritual dilemma of finitude seeking the nonfinite is called the Prajna-paramita, which has strong ties to Nagarjuna. The intended result of Nagarjuna's nihilism is not nihilistic but is the bliss of liberation. This is in keeping with the ancient proto-theory of self. In fact, early Indian Mahayana scholars, unlike modern Buddhists, never took their eyes away from liberation in infinite bliss. The Buddha's ideal of right samadhi was not discounted.

Of course, nothing in the writing of Nagarjuna does not, on one level or another, constitute yet another grasping - not that the ancient Indian philosophers would have had a problem with that. The device of dialectics that he uses to deconstruct the limited concepts of our narrow sensory reality is still a device that must be engaged with by the mind. Of its own, Nagarjuna's doctrine of relativity - namely that all philosophical and theological propositions must be ultimately refuted because they are at best valid only in relation to something else - is useful.

But Mahayana Buddhism went too far with this relativity by assuming that the same relation exists between samsara (finite) and nirvana (infinite). Watts writes, "as soon as nirvana is made an object of desire, it becomes an element of samsara. The real nirvana cannot be desired because it cannot be conceived." This is an example of Mahayana refuting its own arguments without even knowing it, as we will presently see. This relational attitude toward the infinite is, I feel, at the crux of Mahayana’s failure to be true to the legacy of the Buddha.

Mahayana is attempting to teach one not to desire nirvana because doing so will chain the seeker to samsara. However, this is circular reasoning because one could then argue that one's lack of desire for nirvana, caused by the desire-born concern that the desire for nirvana will chain one to samsara, is yet another chain to finitude. That is, even the lack of desire for nirvana, artificially induced, is arguably a desire for nirvana, and hence will cause suffering. Some Mahayana scholars like Shinran addressed this self-imposed philosophical dilemma, but this vicious cycle nevertheless spins eternally, getting one nowhere.

Watts might have asked himself: If nirvana, being inconceivable, cannot be desired, how can it become an object of desire, and hence an element of samsara? Something other than nirvana might become an object of desire, but not nirvana itself. The finite has no relation to it.

The ancient theory of self revealed that nirvana cannot ever be desired, and therefore it did not get hung up on the worry that nirvana would ever become an element of samsara. It instead focused upon the expense of nervous energy, directed by attention, as the baseline criterion to determine if a thought, belief, or action contributed to the development of a nonfinite avenue to knowledge. It was supremely elegant and simple, only to be confounded in the Dark Ages by cumbersome and complex checks and balances to human desire.

Think of it, how can nirvana be "an object of desire," when it "cannot even be desired?" That which cannot be desired will never be an object of desire, even if the narrow self thinks it is. It is in thoughts and attention, themselves, squandering energy and limiting the intuitive capacity - the sole nonfinite avenue to knowledge available - where self-analysis is appropriate.

What appears in this narrow school of philosophy to be a desire for nirvana will only, ultimately, translate into an expansion of the range of intuitive perception as the self, employing the proper means of energy conservation (asceticism) and energy introversion (pranayama), gradually ceases to run after samsara as the source of knowledge for the parameters of the self. In practical application, the ancients are found to be correct in this assertion: the energy and awareness retire inward to the spine through the mystical methods regardless of the fact that the practitioner thinks to have the desire for nirvana inspire practice.

Nagarjuna's writings of Sunyavada, by the standards of the schools of yoga, represent an effort in jnana yoga, or the yoga of intellectual discrimination as a means to approach nonfinite self-knowledge. As such, it is, if practiced alone, exceedingly slow in culminating in the nonfinite self-knowledge that it promises. It does not seek to directly check the expense of energy by such organs like the genitals, lungs, and heart, or further seek to sublimate their energy expenses and turn a patent loss into a reserve of nervous energy available for intuitive purposes.

Similarly, most of the skillful means of Mahayana are poor practices based on Dark Age ideas of finite and infinite. The techniques of proactive sense introversion degenerated into breath watching, improper ("soft" and downward) gazing, keeping the eyes open (in an intellectual effort to not deny the infinitude in finitude), mandala gazing, chanting, intellectual debate, Dark Age tantric rites that fail to sublimate nervous energy, and sitting and "doing nothing" while the heart, breath, mind, and senses are busy doing all kinds of things not under the control of the practitioner. Eventually, the ideal of the breathless state was lost, as were the standards of self-mastery. Practices were devised not to attain right samadhi, but to insure a better rebirth, place the mind in states of absorption, and artificially fit the philosophical conclusion that doing something to realize nirvana would keep nirvana far away.

The Pure Land school of Buddhism taught that humans have the "Buddha nature," or the seed of the infinite self, but it nevertheless maintained its own version of this self-crippling idea that efforts and desire are opposed to spiritual pursuit, maintaining the fatal assumption that all efforts to become a Buddha are still the work of the narrow self. All that is needed, according to Pure Land, is to repeat the name of the Amitabha Buddha with the faith that doing so will result in rebirth in the Pure Land where Amitabha presides.

Obviously, it is impossible to repeat the mantra of Amitabha's name without the use of effort. Effort is required to even think the name. So this teaching is contradictory. Further, there is very little practical difference between this wishful thinking and the belief that Dark Age (and modern) Christians had that faith in Jesus would culminate in eternal life in heaven. (To Buddhism's credit, though, at least the Buddhist would eventually become a Buddha in their Buddha heaven, while the Christian residing in heaven could never become Christ.)

These sorts of teachings appear to be an ongoing Dark Age theme. All the grace that Jesus Christ represents (since Jesus needed to make no effort to be a Christ) and all the efforts that the Buddha made in meditation and asceticism are all that is necessary for salvation, accessed simply by groveling before these fantastic beings. Of course, the practical result was humans groveling before priests.

The Japanese exponent of Pure Land Buddhism, Shinran, realizing this contradiction, was forced to get around the quandaries that intentionally ceasing to desire nirvana was still born of a desire, ceasing to make effort was still the work of effort, and calling on Amitabha required effort too. So, he added that even efforts at faith were not necessary for the name of Amitabha to result in birth in the Pure Land. To him, the rote repetition of a mantra was sufficient, which is to say that our liberation is secured by blind subconscious habit. With this conclusion, it is fairly plain to see how the teachings of the Buddha degenerated and hit rock bottom during the Dark Ages.

If anything, Mahayana had it backwards. Not only can efforts and desires fuel the expansion of the sense of self but even mundane efforts and desires could be harnessed for intuitive pursuits. For example, we must all exert effort to fulfill the desire to eat. Harnessed, eating takes on new purpose and meaning, helping us to eat in ways that conserve energy in the short and long term. Mahayana’s philosophy constituted one big act of suppression, attracting a lot of habitually suppressed people.

Buddhists, which is to say humans narrowly identified with a certain body of literature, sites, and artifacts, must continue to engage in this discussion if an actual Buddha is ever to emerge from Buddhism. In this regard, Buddhism is at a disadvantage (or perhaps an advantage) to Christianity in that while journeying to an eternal Christian heaven after passing can never be confirmed or denied in any way, nirvana is a here and now realization that must have some confirming evidence here and now. Christians without batches of christs is expected, but Buddhism without buddhas is laughable.

Buddhists can begin by weighing the effectiveness of their meditation practices, along with the philosophical assumptions against which they were developed. All Buddhists are certainly not Pure Land Buddhist, but even as the various sects of Christianity share some very basic ideas of divinity that were developed during the Dark Ages, so too are all East Asian forms of Buddhism based upon very basic yet false assumptions made by Mahayana scholars in the Dark Ages. Many of these false assumptions rest on the granddad of them all, that desiring nirvana was something about which to be concerned.

But Buddhists aren't jumping over themselves in an effort to undermine these assumptions. Another aspect of modern Buddhism, detrimental because it discourages serious questions and challenges, is its commerciality. This commercialism translates into a condition on the sense of self, inseparable from being a Buddhist, engaging in the Buddhist lifestyle, and adopting the exotic cultural idiosyncrasies that have nothing to do with the spiritual life.

My all-time favorite example of this commercialism is the Buddhist teacher, largely aligned with East Asian forms, claiming that one or another language (the one in which he studies Buddhism) is the perfect language. This is reminiscent of Jews who think Hebrew is the language with which God created the world and hence is the only language in which to pray, though this is naught but a glaring example of ethnocentrism.

Buddhism in the West has a flip side to its commercialism. Narrowly identifying oneself as a Buddhist makes the follower one out of a billion in the East, but in the West being a Buddhist may mean one is part of a select community, one is extra special with access to a secret or special dispensation, one has escaped Western dogmas, one is spiritual, one may find oneself on the cover of a magazine, one is suddenly pro-active politically for the welfare of "all sentient beings" (I can hardly type that without the affection and platitude oozing out of the computer screen), one is on the bodhisattva track, and/or one is perhaps even a trend-setter (as opposed to just another sheep) if one's circle of acquaintances is small enough. All these things further narrow the sense of self and are contradictory to the very teachings of the ascetics like Buddha, inhibiting that questioning spirit necessary to undermine past assumptions.

One thing Mahayanists were right on is in this sort of relativity. Being a Buddhist in the West in this era only means what it does relative to the current religious circumstances in the West. It may mean less or more, one thing or another, in different circumstances, but it will certainly mean something different to each adherent in proportion to the different elements in his or her respective micro-environments.

But one thing is for certain across the board: Buddhism, like eveyr other organized religion, is not a mystical path of transcending the finite avenues to knowledge, and as such it will never culminate in the highest appreciation for the finite or the nonfinite. If nirvana realization were that easy, millions of Buddhists would have attained it. Alas, nirvana cannot be packaged. Temples can't be built to praise it, chants can’t be sung to it, realizing it can't be organized, and priestcraft is poisonous to it.

Every sect of Buddhism freely uses transcendental language, but so does every other religious sect. After all, what is religion without its trademarked means of overcoming death? But promises of overcoming death is a worthless commodity without a means by which conditioning is transcended. Since the body is the storehouse for conditioning, transcending conditioned existence is accomplished through the mastery of the breath, heart, senses, and mind - the finite faculties and activities underlying conditioning. It has always been this way and it will always be this way because we human beings simply do not have numerous nonfinite avenues to knowledge from which to choose.

The unavoidable conclusion is that Buddhism, like other religions, purposefully does not attract people interested in self-realization, or nirvana, anymore than does Christianity attract people that want their religion to make any logical or historical sense.

Seekers investigating methods to expand the sense of self and nonfinite avenues to knowledge, who perhaps may not be up for the intellectual debate between philosophical schools or for rectifying Buddhism, would save a great deal of time and avoid a lot of grief by remembering that knowledge is power. If nonfinite knowledge is real, it must culminate in knowledge of space, time, causation, and individuation, and power over these cosmic divisional misperceptions.

Without nonfinite knowledge and power, the Dalai Lama answering questions on enlightenment in the magazine "What is Enlightenment?" is no different than the Pope answering questions on heaven in "La Civilta Cattolica." They are both scams worthy of rude exposure.

Why is it that in countless books on Buddhism, none give any attention to the basic principle that knowledge is power, and it is in that maxim that we can effectively test our desires and efforts? Why is the breathless state, the only avenue to nonfinite knowledge humans have, never mentioned? Why is no test for a nonfinite avenue to knowledge provided? It is not as if Buddhism is like Islam, a religion that makes no claim to be founded by a yogi. What is the excuse? Just as mysticism was stripped out of so many Jewish sects, yoga and the Buddha have apparently been stripped from Buddhism.

The reason the authors of these books do not make reference to the test of knowledge in power is that such an admission undermines the rest of their foundation to teach. It undermines the rest of their teachings, hanging on the strained thread of Dark Age intellectual jargon. It is a threat to their own standards of measuring spiritual success, which are next to nonexistent - a fact of which they are, if anything, proud.

The nature of the infinite self, whatever it may be (existence-awareness-bliss is one popular designation) is that which all finite selves will seek, since the divided self invariably seeks its own undivided source. This simple truth throws the whole idea of fearing spiritual desires, according to Buddhism, in the wastebasket for it is impossible, if anything is impossible, to not desire to know an infinite self.

If meditation teachers teach you to meditate without desiring results, the reason they do so, whether they know it or not, is because they think your chances of realizing the nonfinite self will be greater with this approach. They believe, whether they are aware of it or not, that sense-introversion will be more likely with this attitude.

If a book tells you to avoid desiring nirvana, it is because the author, with or without full knowledge, thought that not desiring nirvana would give you a better chance of realizing the infinite self.

If a miserable person commits suicide, then that person believes at bottom that by doing so she will come closer to the infinite self.

That is, if we are divided selves of one undivided self, then all divided selves primordially desire to realize the infinite self. That would then be the desire behind all desires. Without that desire, the desire to avoid the pain of hunger (a function of desiring bliss) and the threat of death from hunger (a function of the desire for existence) would not be operative, and not entity would bother to live.

A Mahayana Buddhist may attempt to self-indoctrinate him/herself otherwise, sparked by the desire for the infinite self; but to go further and graft onto limp spiritual practices that, in reflecting this indoctrination, fail to investigate an avenue to nonfinite knowledge because effort might be required or his or her desire may be showing, a great disservice to his or her own expansive potential is committed.

Any mention of knowledge and power, without which yoga is fairly useless, in Buddhist circles these days precipitates the standard "Power? Power for what? Power over what? What do you want power for? What desire motivates you to have power or use powerful methods?" questions. The seeker who is still searching does not know how to respond to these disarming questions, as much as they are based on delusion. Of course, the power is obvious to anyone sincerely interested in self-knowledge: The power over the limitations that the divisional misperceptions place on our avenues to knowledge.

Zen Buddhists, taking the cake in the empty knowledge and power baking contest, are especially interested in conjuring that "wordless" teaching that was supposedly transmitted from the Buddha through the Dark Ages. Instead of knowledge and power, they prefer fluff and hollow pastries.

I can understand the Christian theologian who does not make reference to knowledge and power; it's not as if Christology has any books on ancient Indian yogis in its library. Buddhism's failure is tantamount to the failure to represent the Buddha. But even that is not saying enough. Buddhist teachers today practically shun any mention of knowledge and power not because the Buddha didn’t emphasize them, but because highly threatening contemporaries did and do. The religion is toothless not because it had no teeth at one time, but because it pulled out its teeth and summarily claimed victory by not engaging in the fight. It is full of adherents that know nothing, and are quite capable of glorifying that fact.

Is Buddhism sincerely interested in self-knowledge or is it just another organized religion that will conveniently ignore the Buddha-state of a modern-day yogi simply because that yogi's teachings are not narrowly designated as Buddhism or any other ism? The answer is clear: Buddhism is run by the modern version of the Brahmin who, in true form, rejects the example of self-knowledge right in front of his nose.

The groupies of these priests (rinpoches, lamas, whatever) then fill in the "void" by divinizing and mystifying their leaders. They then get very defensive when their leader or religion is sincerely challenged. Their self-assuredness and sense of superiority is in direct proportion to their denial; and yet, this is the religion that is supposed to be their excuse for moving beyond monotheism. Meanwhile, only the Mormon and the Jehovah's Witness fanatics knocking on your door compete with these people in the affectation arena.

Buddhism as a whole, so far, is unwilling to challenge itself with the real samadhi of a yoga master, and would rather continue watering down the very meaning of nirvana until the term only expresses a bland state of It-ness. Buddhism, East and West, is thus no more than a ritual-based lifestyle with which to identify. It is no coincidence that poles have shown that of all people, Buddhists are the least likely to meditate – not that we can call what they’re doing meditation. To me, this makes adherents of Buddhism far greater charlatans than fundamentalist Christians. They are taught to fear desiring nirvana so much so that all they’re left with is desiring everything else.

Rectifying Buddhism does not rest on investigating Buddhism's historical claims of the Buddha's supposed virgin birth, unlikely childhood and early adulthood, or subsequent spiritual discipline and enlightenment. It does not rely on the heavy dose of skepticism that would naturally arise from an examination of Buddhism's cosmology, pantheon of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and hungry ghosts, and claims of mass enlightenment at the word of a patriarch. Neither does it require challenging the specious claims of lama authority and succession or all the ways in which Buddhism picked up East Asian cultural biases. All of these elements of Buddhism can be demolished and yet Buddhism would still stand - and stand stronger without that baggage. While Christianity rests in large part on the weak link of Jesus's historicity, let alone unique divinity, and Islam hangs on the thread of revelation, Buddhism is at bottom based on its examination of finite and infinite.

Buddhism is not a religion exclusively based on faith, historical events, or hagiography; and adherents attracted and limited to those elements aren't likely candidates to rectify its philosophy. Since it is primarily based on intellectual investigation and ultimately on direct self-realization, challenges must primarily be philosophically oriented. These difficulties are compounded as a result of Buddhism's emergence from a more ancient tradition grappling with highly sophisticated reflections on existence unfamiliar to most Buddhists, not to mention most humans. Buddhism's sophistication is a sign of depth of thought, but it also turns Buddhism into something like an excessively complex watch that is hard to fix when broken.

Many misunderstandings crept into Buddhist when philosophical declarations serving as models of finite-infinite distinction were thought to qualify ultimate reality. Emptiness, in particular, is referred back to so often that it is hard to tell whether Buddhist writers are referring to emptiness in relation to their phenomenal existence or emptiness as a positive aspect of nirvana realization. It has come to the point that comparisons can be made between Buddhism and the Dark Age Christian ideal of seeing life merely as an opportunity to slowly kill oneself. This is a sad commentary, but the positive representation of self-knowledge would distance Buddhism from this degeneration.

What is emptiness? Nothing positive or negative about the infinite, or nirvana, can be absolutely declared. The ancient Vedic concept of emptiness was a little of both, attempting to be neither. Emptiness is understood in relation to the four divisional misperceptions of space, time, causation, and individuation. The infinite is "empty" of these misperceptions. The infinite is also empty of the substances of atoms, prana, and causal ideas. It is a negative positive statement, but in no way does it seek to belittle any range of existence where a division or substance appears.

Nirvana is not void or voidness or empty, to be precise. These designations are only useful for those whose avenues of knowledge are limited to the mind, feeling, and the five senses. Further, stressing voidness ad nauseam becomes a depressing psychological paradigm for Buddhists who do not adequately comprehend the purpose of such an attitude. Instead of stressing the positive realization of the infinite, they focus on the negative, as it what it is not, what is lost, life is void and empty, etc.

Joseph Goldstein, who authors Buddhist flavored books on Insight Meditation, writes, "The moment of opening to the unconditioned, nirvana, confirms most deeply the liberating emptiness of self. In that moment we come to zero." He is poorly describing nirvana from the vantage point of the narrow, individuated self. More properly expressed, the infinite is empty of narrow selves. It is empty of individuation. But stressing this negative appreciation of the infinite to readers who are not likely to have developed a healthy self repeatedly results in increased self-deprecation.

Technically, he is not wrong or incorrect, though it is a bit "empty" on substance, which leads one to think that Goldstein does not fully understand the ancient theory of self from where Buddhism emerged. How much less will his readers? One clue that he does not fully understand what he is saying is that the opposite could be said and still be true. He could be speaking of the fullness of self and the moment "we" come to everything. And if he went with the opposite, though it would still be weak on substance, at least the narrow self would not use the material in psychologically destructive ways - again, a common occurrence in Buddhist circles.

When comparing the descriptions of nirvana given by Buddhist spiritual leaders with the states of self-knowledge as described by modern and ancient yogis, including the Buddha, it's clear that Buddhism focuses so much on the negative of the path to nirvana because it lacks real masters that had realized the positive of nirvana. Anyone can preach emptiness. Like love, it is an easy and alluring ideology, especially for vulnerable people who want distance from endless Western theological assertions crowding their minds. But most Buddhists, who are influenced by the writings of little more than students on the yogic path who are nevertheless approached as authoritative lamas, rinpoches, and meditation masters, assume that anything positive, like bliss, is but a way station on the path to nirvana that is eventually consumed in some Cosmic Emptiness. What is more accurate is that nirvana is a state of infinite bliss, infinite self-knowledge, which has not actually been attained by the plethora of Buddhist scholars that write on it.

Here is Goldstein again: "Ecstasy can mean different things, and it can come from many different causes. In the course of meditation practice, ecstatic feelings often flood our consciousness when our mind is pure, bright, and luminous. Although they may be wonderful feelings, they arise because of certain conditions and will eventually pass away.

"There is another kind of ecstasy. It results from the wisdom of emptiness, of seeing the impermanent, insubstantial nature of all phenomena, where there is no clinging, no attachment, and no fear. In this experience, we become one with the unfolding process of life. This oneness is quite subtle, because it is the oneness of becoming zero."

To be blunt, Goldstein doesn't know what he is talking about. The bliss of nirvana does not result from seeing the impermanence of the phenomenal world. This statement reminds me of Thomas Aquinas, who declared that the joy of heaven comes from seeing all the denizens of hell. Besides the fact that you'd have to be a pretty sick puppy to be attracted to a religion that tells you that you are one big zero (which is probably why Christianity is so good at prepping people to become Buddhists), Goldstein can't help but describe even his ecstasy in negative terms. Logically, anything so absolutely negative can be described in similarly absolutely positive terms. Both descriptions are facile, but when the only positive thing you can say is that the experience is subtle (meaning it is subtle to him and he's not that familiar with it), maybe you're out of your league. The mastery of the finite senses and mind is needed in order to realize the infinite, but nirvana requires no wisdom of emptiness; that wisdom is for those, like Goldstein, who are still plodding.

A reader who is not well informed may easily conclude, when putting down the Buddhist book and picking up the book on yoga, that the bliss of samadhi is but a passing show on the way to the zero of nirvana. The eighth step of the Buddha's and Patanjali's path is samadhi, but Goldstein implies that the bliss of samadhi eventually passes into emptiness. This is incorrect inasmuch as samadhi is the very technique of expanding the narrow and sense-bound awareness to the infinite.

The bliss of nirvana is not created or conditioned by cause and effect. Samadhi destroys the cause and effect that limit the intuitive capacity. The bliss of nirvana is not a feeling nor is it a function of the mind, even a pure one. Further, it is an unconditioned bliss, so it is not dependent on certain conditions. Neither is this bliss subtle; finding the self stretched over galaxies in roaring infinite bliss is not a subtle realization. Describing ecstasy in any other manner amounts to little more than an equivocation.

But becoming zero must have a purpose. What is the purpose of being empty of attachment and fear? These are all practical attitudes on the Buddhist path, but toward what end? If nirvana is the end, why is it the end? Goldstein's book is dedicated to the happiness and liberation of all beings, but why do we want happiness or liberation? What are we being liberated from anyway?

Attachments and fear are narrowing patterns of nervous energy and sense awareness. They squander energy and limit the intuitive capacity. Abstaining from food or speech in order to conserve energy in no more asceticism than abstaining from energy-wasting habits of thought and feeling. Zero is not positive, but at least it is not the negative of depleting one’s energies on patterns of behavior that limit the intuition to finite avenues to knowledge.

None would want liberation if liberation were merely the end of suffering. Death, where the possibility of rebirth is ignored is also zero, empty, and the end of suffering. Atheists will attain to such a state through death according to their philosophy, and they certainly do not need to meditate to get there. Suicide is a great deal faster, so why bother with the slow suicide of passive insight meditation? Seeing the impermanence and insubstantial nature of phenomena hopefully does not culminate in platitudes that vaguely describe how wonderful our lives will be either. It is the positive attainments, if any, which give liberation any meaning.

Yogis like Paramahansa Yogananda differ greatly from Buddhist writers who routinely hide behind words that promise little and result in less. In the technique of the third Kriya initiation he writes, "The advanced student, by the power of samadhi, can feel the universe as his own body...His consciousness perceives all motion and changing life, from the circling of the stars to the fall of a sparrow, and the whirling of the smallest electron." One hardly finds in Buddhist literature such a positive description of the attainment of universality. It is as if the Buddha in nirvana is still limited to the five senses, but is fine with that for he sees the emptiness of the phenomenal world. There is a lot more to liberation than that.

Goldstein again, "We could be in a later stage of pain, in which the practice is deeper than it was in an earlier stage of bliss. So pleasant or painful feelings do not indicate how well your practice is going." Remarks like these cause me to shake my head in disbelief. What is going on here? This is a gross misuse of the word bliss, where it can be compared with something pleasant and relative to something painful. If this is a snide reference to the bliss of yoga, it is underhanded and subversive. If Goldstein had a moment of breathless samadhi, he would, like Aquinas, value all his previous writings to straw. But let’s let him keep his word.

The realization of ananda (infinite bliss, or translate it as you like), which drowns all pain and pleasure because it is not known through finite, dualistic avenues to knowledge, is not a beginner's stage in meditation. With the ananda of samadhi, the yogi immediately withdraws the awareness into the spine and up the brain in infinite self-knowledge free of the perception of a narrow body, breath, and sensory world.

Buddhists like Goldstein consistently describe the indescribable in relation to phenomena - specifically the emptiness of phenomena. They are so dogmatically focused on their path that they confuse it for self-realization. In their defense, they do not claim to have the samadhi of the yogi, but at the same time they presume theirs is the way to liberation and disregard the self-mastery of yogis.

How can anyone write on Buddhism in the last fifty years without grappling with the words and lives of Yogananda, Ramana, and Ramakrishna? If a Native American medicine woman insightfully discusses finite and infinite, Buddhist thinkers must respond, for that is the crux of their religion. So it is that even as one cannot honestly contend with Buddhism without discussing finite and infinite, one cannot honestly present Buddhism without entering into dialogues, originating in whatever source, on finite and infinite.

Once the mind ceases to grope after thoughts, sensations, etc. what happens then? This psychophysical practice, which is not limited to Buddhist and predates Buddhism, can be precisely called pranayama because it conserves all the energy that would normally be running after the world. But then what? Where will the prana, and with it the mind and senses, go? If the prana is not directed into the spine and up to the brain, then where will it go? If the breath-watching or "mindful" meditator does not actively direct the prana, or the mind, back on itself, it will eventually find a way to stretch out toward the world of the senses again.

Goldstein writes that liberation means to let go of suffering. He writes, "Enlightenment means purifying our mind and letting go of those things that cause so much suffering in our lives. It is very down-to-earth." Very well, this is enlightenment for most of Buddhism today. But this is not self-knowledge. This is not the state of the Buddha. This is not nirvana. This is not samadhi. This is not yoga. This is the method to enlightenment.

Buddhism as an organized religion, though philosophically much closer to yoga than other religions, is one of the worst enemies of yoga because it parades itself as yogic when it is far from it. Perhaps exercise yoga is worse because it actually uses the name yoga, while Buddhism does so less frequently. Still, it uses the same words and symbols - meditation, enlightenment, Buddha, nirvana, liberation, self, ego, desire, freedom from suffering, bliss, ecstasy, and numerous Sanskrit and Pali terms - but it uses them in very different ways. In all ways, it is the religion of enlightenment, selling tickets to enlightenment like a church sells indulgences or passage to heaven.

In closing this discussion, it is inspiring to recall that after the decline of the Upanisadic tradition, the Buddha was born and in some small way restored it. After a few centuries, Buddhism began to decline as well. Eventually, Adi Sankara came and invited Buddhists back into the fold of Vedanta. But this did not help the Buddhism of East Asia, which had long since left India, and has since come to the West.

As Buddhism is now a popular religion in the West, it is difficult to cut through the wall of pride and intellectual conceit that Western Buddhists routinely exhibit. But Adi Sankara faced the same difficulties when confronting Buddhists, and so did the Buddha in the Brahmin of his time. Piercing the wall is done by striking at the heart of the issue: What is the infinite, what is the avenue to nonfinite knowledge, and what is the test of infinite self-knowledge?

While a few scholars have lightly touched on the limitations of Buddhist thought as it is exported from East Asia (Toynbee, Buber, Fromm), no one with wide readership has yet come forward to bring the discussion to mainstream Buddhism with sophistication and call Buddhism on its gross failings. Further, Toynbee's assessment of Buddhism leaves much to be desired, and other philosophers hardly gave it a glance because translations were not easily available. This is tragic for many followers of one stripe or another of Buddhism, as everything decays that is not challenged in some meaningful way.

Then again, with other pressing issues facing humanity, perhaps all efforts are too little too late. The narrow Buddhist identity, like the narrow identity with any religion, is not prone or quick and sharp enough to question sacred beliefs. On top of this, the time may be short, considering that ecological devastation, wars over dwindling resources, and over population will eventually make converts of us all to the religion of survival. In that regard, rectifying Buddhism or any religion is practically a luxury.

But where rectification of an attitude toward the finite, at least, improves our approach to personal, societal, and global issues, none of us has the luxury not to participate.