Spinoza found Jesus' biological father

Embellishing historical figure by Rome

How shall Rome turn a Mizrahi Jew into a Nordic God, Son of Zeus, Yazoo, Ye'zeus, Yeshua?

Passion of Jesus (sculpture "Crucifixion" or "[A] Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus") 

Christianity (particularly the most popular form of it, i.e., Roman Catholicism) unravels; thank Goodness for Barry Spinoza.

What you need me to be, I'll be.

(Spinoza Forever) Amsterdam, 1677: Scholar and investigative researcher Benedictus de Spinoza (Baruch Spinoza) discovered multiple lines of compelling evidence for Jesus Christ's paternity and found out who his real biological father was -- not Joseph, not a deified virgin birth.

It was all documented then covered up. The Jews knew who he was and who his father and family were. Jews condemned Spinoza, and the Christian Church denounced and excommunicated Spinoza for spilling the beans of a covered-up truth.

Jewish texts because people knew him at the time before Caesar's Messiah became a Roman psyops to control the population of a growing empire, one acceptable to Gentiles as well as Jews.

• (Spinoza's philosophy) Spinoza exposes the hidden story of Jesus in Alexandria: Jesus never died on the cross
• A Roman record of Jesus's execution still exists — and it challenges three Gospel details: The earliest non-Christian historical sources include Tacitus, Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and there's archeological evidence. The Roman historical record can be compared with the Gospel narratives surrounding Jesus's torture crucifixion. There are three major details where these accounts diverge, including the historical portrayal of Pontius Pilate, the political nature of crucifixion torture under Roman law, and the absence of extraordinary events in Roman records. Let's examine multiple historical sources side by side and consider how different authors, cultures, and purposes shaped the stories that have come down to us. Inspired by Spinoza's method of reading scripture through historical inquiry, this episode encourages open-minded investigation, critical thinking, and respectful discussion.

Construction of myth of Jesus, who was born in occupied Palestine

Yeshu Ben Pantera (named in the Babylonian Talmud). Biological father: Roman Centurion Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, Roman soldier of the first Cohort of Arches, station between Years 6-9 CE. Mother: Young (15?) Jewish girl with an awkward imperial pregnancy on her hands. St. Paul never mentions any virgin birth. The great shame was that Mary was assaulted, violated by a soldier.

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I need Jesus to be the forgiver of sin

"Jesus Christ" was a human creation for power and imperial control. That is why the largest religion in the world is Universalism (spelled Roman Catholicism).

Jesus was transformed from a wise Jewish (likely JuBu) philosopher to a "God" in the Greco-Roman sense of "god" that people were accustomed to. 

This necessitated an astrotheological "virgin birth" or something extraordinary to distinguish Jesus (a "son of god" or devaputra, lit. "offspring of heavenly devas") from mere humans ("sons of men").

• Need confirmation by a contemporary biblical scholar?
• See real father of Jesus: Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera
• See work of Dr. Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (who was actually a Nazarene, an Essene-like sect, there being no historical place called Nazareth)
• "Christians" today are all Pauline Christians, following not the historical Jesus but rather the so-called Apostle Paul, born Saul of Tarsus

Transformed by Rome for the benefit of Rome

The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus

Jesus was the invention of a Roman emperor named Julius Caesar. Atwill breaks ground to reveal "Caesar’s Messiah," making him out to be the savior of the world commanded from on high so that everyone would accept imperial rule.

This is the key to a revolutionary understanding of the origin of Christianity, explaining what the New Testament is, who the real Jesus is, and how Christ's "second coming" already occurred.

The clues leading to these startling conclusions are found in the writings of the first-century Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, whose Wars of the Jews is one of the only historical chronicles of this period.

Closely comparing the work of Josephus with the New Testament Gospels, Caesar’s Messiah demonstrates that the imperial Romans directed the writing of both.

Their purpose: to offer a vision of a “peaceful Messiah” [Maitreya come again] who would serve as an alternative to the revolutionary leaders who were rocking first-century Israel and threatening Rome.

Similarly, Caesar’s Messiah rocks readers' understanding of Christian history when it reveals that Jesus was a fictional character portrayed in four Gospels written by Romans not Christians.

The Flavian Signature edition adds Atwill’s latest discoveries of numerous parallel events in sequence, which ultimately reveal the identity of the true authors of the Christian Gospels.

• Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Joseph Atwill)

Honest scholar Spinoza condemned for reporting the documented truth

Hirszenberg's Excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, 1907

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Kraków Pietà of Tubądzin (Dead Jesus)

Spinoza's ancestors, who were crypto-Jews, faced persecution during the Portuguese Inquisition, including torture and public displays of humiliation.

In 1597, his paternal grandfather's family left Vidigueira for Nantes and lived outwardly as New Christians [27], which in Spain might be referred to as conversos, eventually transferring to Holland [28]. His maternal ancestors...and his maternal grandfather was a merchant who drifted between Judaism and Christianity [30].

• Baruch Spinoza was a Jew, not any kind of atheist.
• Spinoza's expulsion from Jewish community

Ben' de Spinoza cover portrait

In 1675, a Jewish friend and possibly a former pupil of Spinoza named Albert Burgh wrote to Spinoza, repudiating his teachings and announcing his own conversion to the Catholic Church.

Burgh attacked Spinoza's findings and views as expressed in the Theological-Political Treatise and tried to persuade him to embrace Roman Catholicism.

In response, Spinoza...wrote an angry letter mocking the Catholic Church and condemning all religious superstition [117]. More

Did Jewish man (Paul) invent "Jesus"?

(Sacred Logic) "Paul" (born Saul of Tarsus) reveals that he invented a divine and anointed Jesus Christ in letters to Galatians, Thessalonians, Romans, Corinthians

• Pauline Christianity (Jewish mysticism or Roman imperial necessity on the Road to Damascus?)
• Who was Saul of Tarsus called Paul the Apostle?
• Trinitarianism if a Pauline invention
• Earlier form of Christianity: Marcionism?
• Spinoza discovered Abrahamic God was manmade

Ten documented historical facts that make "Jesus" story impossible

(Sacred Logic) The "Jesus Christ" was purposely invented by coping pagan gods (Mitras, Horus, Sol Invictus, Maitreya, Dionysus, Krishna... Astrotheology)

Who was Christianity's Saul of Tarsus?

Saul of Tarsus (Joseph Holzner)

In Paul of Tarsus, Joseph Holzner weaves together the New Testament Bible's often sketchy information about the life and mission of Saul of Tarsus, now called St. Paul by Pauline Christians, into a unified and inspiring hagiography.

With a novelist's ability to take readers into a scene and a historian's rigorous concern for accuracy, Holzner traces this Jewish Apostle's life from his early years as a disciple of the celebrated Rabbi Gamaliel through his overly zealous persecution of the Christian Assembly or "church" as a member of the competing Jewish school called the Pharisees, through his "miraculous" origin story conversion on the road to Damascus, his seemingly tireless efforts to spread the Gospel [of the newly minted Ceasar's Messiah, formerly Jesus the Nazarene not from any place called "Nazareth"], and his Christian martyr's death at the hands of his former bosses in imperial Rome.

Along the way, Holzner provides instructive background information about the religious and social situation of Saul's times and the circumstances of his New Testament letters (epistles). Here, then, is a complete and enlightening introduction to the Apostle to the Gentiles aka "the Converter of the Non-Jews" to this new much less Jewish Roman Empire-approved Universalist religion, the new opium of the masses]. More

Burn heretics for saying what we don't like!

John the Apostle with Marcion

Marcion preached that the benevolent God [the "One," the Monad] of the Gospel who sent Jesus (Yeshua) into this world as a "savior" was the true [omniscient, omnipotent] Supreme Being.

That unknowable, unfathomable, impersonal [Brahman-type GOD] is different and opposed to the malevolent Christian creator deity, the Demiurge [the "Craftsman" called Yaldabaoth], identified as Jehovah, Yahweh, YHWH in the Hebrew Bible [3, 4, 6].

He allegedly considered himself a follower of Saul of Tarsus or Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus [3, 4], Ceasar's Messiah.

Thank you, Marcion, for creating the 1st Bible

Marcion's canon, the FIRST Christian Bible (biblical canon of which books to include) ever compiled. It consisted of 11 books: the Gospel of Marcion, which was a shorter version of the Gospel of Luke, and ten Pauline epistles [3, 4, 7].

Marcion's canon rejected the entire Old Testament, the crazed Jewish compilation (Sumerian appropriation) of a genocidal henotheistic "God" called Jehovah and his jealous and unhinged exploits, along with all other epistles and gospels of what would become the 27-book canon of the New Testament, which during his life had yet to be compiled [3, 4, 8, 9].

Let's find this heretic and crucify him.

"Marcion-ism" was denounced by its opponents as heresy and written against by the Church Fathers – notably by Tertullian in his five-book treatise Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion) in about the Year 208 [3, 4].

Marcion's writings are lost [banned, buried, burned, destroyed], even though they were widely read and numerous manuscripts must have existed at one time [3, 4].

Even so, many scholars say it is possible to reconstruct and deduce a large part of ancient Marcionism through what later critics, especially Tertullian, said concerning him [3, 4, 10].

I'm your creator! Worship me...or else!

The movement was widespread, which forced rival sects to begin throwing up defenses. Marcionites founded churches across the Roman Empire. Their eventual decline is attributed to state intervention by later imperial edicts banning all groups deemed heretical from assembling [11].

Marcion of Sinope (Ancient Greek Μαρκίων [2, Note 1] Σινώπης (c. 85–c. 160 [3]) was a theologian [4] in early Christianity [4, 5].

Marcion preached that God had sent Jesus Christ, who was distinct from the vengeful God (Demiurge, the misbegotten son of Sophia Yaldabaoth, Jehovah, Yahweh, YHWH) who had created this physical world [4, 5, 6] or simulated reality. More

• What would you like your Bible to say? Pick one
• The first person to compose a Christian 
• The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Gerd Theissen)

Krishnamurti: Don't become enlightened

(Mystics of India) Would Krishnamurti ever accept teachings of Osho (Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh)?

(Krishnamurti Foundation Trust) Becoming enlightened is a horrible idea | Krishnamurti

• 

  Syncretism: Theosophy

  While sounding like a madman at first, the great Krishnamurti actually has a point to make about "efforting," muscling, struggling, and striving to gain or win enlightenment. Buddhist awakening (bodhi) is far more about letting go of delusion, confusion, and illusion and instead gently cultivating allowing, radical acceptance of what is, and dispassionate (disinterested, unbiased) viewing like some kind of Taoist, being the watcher rather than the striver or go-getter.

The Great World Teacher or Jiddu?

Of course, Krishnamurti was more a Hindu than a Buddhist, having escaped the clutches of the Western Theosophists who found him, saw his potential, raised and nurtured their new Messiah (Maitreya) in hopes that he would become a "Buddha" or "World Teacher" for our time (like the promised Buddha Boy decades later).

But he burned them and instead taught a whole kind of Zen nondoing, nothing special, there's nothing to achieve approach to spirituality and spiritual (un)accomplishments. The Theosophists were not happy, so Krishnamurti went off on his own, not aligning himself with any religion but sort of incorporating them all into a syncretism.

The gymnosophist Mahavira

He's a subtle speaker and thinker, along the lines of Bhagwan Shree Rajnessh (Osho) and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, both alleged to be frauds immersed in sex and money scandals. We would not want to misrepresent Krishnamurti's views, if he holds any, as he can quite well speak for himself. Like the great Mahavira (Vardhamāna, the founder of Jainism, called the Nigantha Nattaputta in Buddhist texts), Krishnamurti must have some good qualities that he is still remembered and listened to.

What ever happened to the Hare Krishnas?

(ABC Australia) What happened to Hare Krishnas? | Compass | ABC Australia

• Leader: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
• International Society for Krishna Consciousness
• Krishnamurti Foundation Trust (video); ABC Australia; Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Two Paths to Knowledge (Bhikkhu Bodhi)

I trust the Orgy Pit's been scraped and buttered

Many of the most formidable social and cultural problems we face today are rooted in the sharp divide (schism) that has divided Western civilization between science and religion.

Science claims invincible knowledge based on testing (empirical investigation of) the natural world. Most religions do little more than call for faith in supernatural beliefs along with obedience to codes of morality and ethics that require restraint, self-discipline, and worst of all self-sacrifice.

Since most religion, as traditionally understood, often rests on no more than blithe promises and pompous threats, its appeals to our allegiance seldom win.

The ethical ideals it claims to advocate (when not being hypocritical) don't stand a fighting chance against the constant injunction — thrust in our faith by screens, radios, and signboards — to ENJOY life to the hilt while we can.

What'd you do in there? - Well, I took the butter

As a result, a most of humankind has become alienated from religion as any kind of meaningful guide to life, left with no alternative but to plunge headlong into another kind of religion: secularism, the religion of rejecting religion through mass consumerism and hedonism.

Too often, those in the religious camp, sensing the threat secularism poses to their own security, feel driven toward an aggressive fundamentalism in a desperate bid to salvage traditional loyalties.

The quest to establish a sound basis for proper conduct in today's world has been made particularly difficult. Why? A consequence of the "scientific" worldview has been to banish values from real life.

While many scientists, in their personal lives, are staunch advocates of such ideals like world peace, social justice, and greater economic equality (parity), the worldview promoted by modern science gives values no objective grounding, not in the grand scheme of things. Thinking like this, values' root and basis is purely subjective. So they bring along all the qualities that subjectivity suggests: being

• personal,
• private,
• idiosyncratic,
• relative,
• not to be talked about with others
• and sometimes even arbitrary.

The overall effect of this is that, despite the best intentions of many of them, scientists give a green light to lifestyles founded on a quest for personal gratification. Not only that, it's also based on a power drive aimed at exploiting others.

The Buddha's Teaching

"If there's any religion...it would be Buddhism"

In contrast to the classical Western antithesis of religion and science, Buddhism shares with science a common commitment to personally test and uncover the Truth about the world.

Both Buddhism and science draw a sharp distinction between the way things appear and the way they really are. And both offer to open our minds to insights into the real nature of things normally hidden from us, sometimes in plain sight as falsified ideas based on distorted sense perceptions and "common sense."

Forget science-school and meditation. Let's dance!

Still, despite of Buddhism and science's affinity, it is necessary to recognize the great differences in the aim that separates Buddhism and science. Both may share certain conceptions about the nature of reality, but science is essentially a project designed to provide control and objective, factual knowledge, with information about the public domain. Buddhism is a spiritual path intended to promote inner transformation and the direct realization of the highest good, called awakening, enlightenment, liberation, or nirvana.

In Buddhism, the quest for knowledge is important but not as an end in itself or to control others. The main cause of our suffering and bondage is ignorance.

What does that mean? Ignorance (avijja) is not understanding things as they really are. Instead, we distort things even as we perceive them, judge, and label them. So the antidote needed to heal ourselves is knowledge or liberating-insight.

The type of knowledge acquired by practicing Dhamma differs from that sought by science in several ways. Most importantly, the knowledge sought is not gaining objective information about the physical world. It is about a deep personal insight into the real nature of our personal existence.

The aim is not to understand reality from the outside. It is to understand it from the inside, much as psychology originally intended to do. Knowledge from the perspective of one's own living experience is the key -- as it is to shamans, Gnostics, and experimenters on a quest in this lifetime.

We seek not debated "facts" and "opinions" as knowledge, but insight, wisdom, personal knowledge that is inescapably subjective. That's the point. The whole value of it lies in its transformative power and impact on our own life.

Concern with the outer world as an object of direct knowledge arises only insofar as the outer world is inextricably implicated in personal experience.

As the Buddha says, "In this body, with its perception and thought, I declare

• the world,
• the origin of the world,
• the cessation of the world, and
• the way to the cessation of the world."

First, I'll be born as a prince then renounce it all

Buddhism takes personal experience as the starting point, without aiming to use experience as a springboard to an impersonal, objective type of knowledge. Buddhism includes within its domain the entire spectrum of qualities disclosed by personal experience.

This means that Buddhism gives prime consideration to values. But even more, "values" for Buddhism are not merely projections of subjective judgments fashioned according to our personal whims, social needs, or cultural conditioning.

On the contrary, they are written into the texture of reality itself just as firmly as the laws of motion and thermodynamics. So values CAN be evaluated: rated in terms of being true or false and ranked as valid or invalid.

And part of our task in giving meaning to our lives, which means unearthing the true scheme of values. To determine the true gradation of values, we have to turn our attention inward and use subjective criteria of investigation. So what we find, far from being private or arbitrary, is an integral part of the objective order.

This order is permeated by the same lawfulness that governs the movement of the stars and planets.

Science says it's for something

Natural science (wiki)

Affirming the objective reality of values implies another major distinction between Buddhism and science. For liberating-insight or knowledge of enlightenment to arise, an investigator has to undergo a profound personal transformation guided by the inner perception of genuine values.

While natural science can be undertaken as an intellectual discipline, the Buddhist quest is an existential discipline. That can only be implemented by regulating and restraining our conduct, purifying our mind, and refining our capacity for attention.

What is there to pay attention to? To our own physical (bodily) and mental processes.

This kind of Buddhist training requires ethics all the way through. Ethical guidelines support and pervade the entire training. The starting point is right action, and the culmination is the highest liberation of the heart/mind.

OK, there's escape from this lack-of-fulfilment?

What is noteworthy is that the ethical thrust of Buddhist training and the mental thrust of it converge. Where? They converge on the realization of the ultimate truth of selflessness (anatta). [This is an advanced notion, but it is the gateway to stream entry, the first stage of enlightenment.]

It is just here that contemporary science approaches Buddhism in its discovery that "nature" is a process actually. It reveals the lack of any ultimate substance hiding behind a sequence of events. There are events. But this correspondence again points to a fundamental difference.

In Buddhism the impermanent, unsatisfying (unfulfilling), and impersonal nature of reality is not just some factual truth to apprehend (or believe in). It is above all an existential truth. It is a transformative principle.

It offers the key to being able to stop clinging to the false and to let go as we gain right understanding.

Right understanding (seeing things as they really are) leads to right liberation. To use this key for its sole purpose, which is to open the door to spiritual freedom, we must govern our conduct on the premise that the false idea of a substantial self is a delusion.

It is insufficient to merely intellectually grasp this selflessness as some idea or to turn it into a plaything of thought. The principle must be penetrated by training ourselves to discover the absence of selfhood in its subtlest hiding place, the deep recesses of our own bodies and minds.

• 

  Knowing and Seeing: True...

  [HOW? How can this ever be accomplished? Buddhist Meditation Master Pa Auk Sayadaw explains. By mastering "meditation" (the absorptions or jhanas), the mind/heart is purified and able to see. What does it look at? It breaks down this body, this materiality, into its components, the smallest of which are "form particles" (rupa kalapas). The body is not "body," but rather countless constituent elements constantly built up and torn down, rising and falling away. The mind is not "mind," but rather countless constituent elements (a stream of "mind-moments" called cittas) constantly built up and falling away. This is what's really there, if only we could ever see it as it truly is.

• 

  Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw of Burma

  We can see it. That is to say, we can know-and-see directly. How? First, we settle the mind into absorption, emerge and move to a deeper absorption. With practice, this comes at will. Then we turn our attention to the "fourfold setting up of mindfulness." This is just a fancy way of saying we give systematic attention to body, feelings, the mind, and various phenomena. With exercises to directly perceive the Dependent Origination of things (the fact that everything that arises arises dependent on causes and conditions), the mind is made ready to see things as they really are. And in doing so, it naturally lets go of ignorance, illusion, and falsehoods. It thereby gains light, knowledge, wisdom, and liberation.]

Buddhist thinkers and open-minded scientists, if they were to share insights and reflections, could show us an effective way to heal the divide. What divide? The rift between seeking "objective" knowledge and spiritual wisdom. We could bring about a reconciliation of science and spirituality.

In this way, spiritual practice could become an integral part of the discipline that aims at knowledge. Spiritual practice and knowledge combined could become the tools for achieving the highest good stuck in the world and breaking beyond limitations to enlightenment and spiritual freedom.

Hedonist Stephen Hawking in Epstein Files

This has always been the position of Buddhism. The evidence is in the most ancient texts. The Buddha, the "Enlightened One," is not only a kind of scientist, a lokavidu or "knower of the world." He is also, above all, "one complete in both knowledge and conduct" (vijja-carana-sampanno). Could a scientist say that? Could one ever get to that through science? Source: Two Paths to Knowledge

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

American Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi

Bhikkhu Bodhi (born Dec. 10, 1944) is an American Theravada scholar-monk and prolific translator of ancient Buddhist texts from the Pali canon. He was born in New Jersey and moved to California to get his PhD from Claremont before heading to Asia to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He went in search of a teacher and found one in Sri Lanka, Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Thero, along with many fellow Jewish Buddhists from Germany in and around the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS). He now teaches at the Buddhist Association of the United States (BAUS) in Upstate New York (Chuang Yen Monastery) and in New Jersey (Bodhi Monastery, which is not named after him). He is a Buddhist author, translator, and commentator, who was Wisdom Quarterly Dharma Editor Dhr. Seven's first theoretical Dharma teacher [who himself studied at Berkeley and UCLA before journeying to Sri Lanka in Bhikkhu Bodhi's steps and onto India, Nepal, Thailand, and Burma to meet his practical teacher, the great living Buddhist meditation master Pa Auk Sayadaw]. Bhikkhu Bodhi was appointed BPS's second president [2] after its founder, Ven. Nyanaponika, following in the footsteps of the great Western maverick Ven. Nyanatiloka. He is currently president of BAUS and the founder of the Buddhist feminist charity Buddhist Global Relief [3]. More

• Online Dharma Lectures | BODHI MONASTERY
• Bhikkhu Bodhi (accesstoinsight.org, 2005) clarified and expanded by Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

Ksitigarbha: guardian of the dead, savior

(Buddha's Wisdom) Who is KSITIGARBHA? The bodhisattva who refused nirvana to enter hell

Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva

Kṣitigarbha [Sanskrit क्षितिगर्भ, Chinese 地藏, Pinyin Dìzàng, Japanese 地蔵, Rōmaji Jizō, Korean 지장 (地藏), Romaja Jijang, Vietnamese Địa Tạng (地藏), Standard Tibetan ས་ཡི་སྙིང་པོ་, Wylie sa yi snying po] is a bodhisattva (being bent on supreme buddhahood) primarily revered in East Asian Buddhism and usually depicted as a Mahayana Buddhist monk.

 

His name may be translated as "Earth Treasury," "Earth Store," "Earth Matrix," or "Earth Womb." 

Kṣitigarbha is known for a vow to take responsibility for the instruction of all beings in the six worlds [a condensed grouping of the 31 Planes of Existence the historical Buddha outlined] between the final nirvana of the historical Gautama Buddha and the future rise of Maitreya Buddha, as well as a vow not to achieve buddhahood until all hells are emptied.

He is therefore often regarded as the bodhisattva of hell-beings as well as the guardian of children and patron deity of deceased children and aborted fetuses in Japanese culture.

Usually depicted as a monk with either a halo or a crown bearing images of the Five Tathāgatas around his shaved head, he carries a staff to force open the gates of hell and a wish-fulfilling jewel to light up the darkness. More

Jigten Choto: Wrathful Kṣitigarbha

Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva

STATUE: Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva (Jizō Bosatsu, 地蔵菩薩) is a Japanese wood and bronze statue of about 1175 in the late Heian period, which is now in the permanent Asian collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The statue depicts Jizō (Sanskrit Ksitigarbha), who in Japanese Buddhism is the bodhisattva of the earth and is considered a protector of children and travelers.

He is also a rescuer of beings in all hells and is considered a guardian of spirits for children who have died before their parents [1].

Description: Jizō is garbed in traditional Buddhist monk's attire, lacking ornate jewelry or adornments typically seen on images of bodhisattvas [2], many of which represent the historical Buddha before his great enlightenment, at which time he became the Buddha, and the Future Buddha Maitreya. More

All is mind, mind is all: Yogachara

(SEEKER TO SEEKER) How the mind creates reality | Buddhism

Nagarjuna advocates "Middle Way"

Yogachara (Sanskrit Yogācāra) is an influential tradition of Buddhist philosophy and psychology emphasizing the study of cognition, perception, and consciousness through the interior lens of meditation and philosophical reasoning (hetuvidyā) [1, 2].

Yogachara was one of the two most influential traditions in Mahayana Buddhism in India, along with Madhyamaka [3].

The compound Yogā-cāra literally means "practice of yoga" or "one whose practice is yoga." Hence, the name of the school is literally "the School of the Yogins" [4, 3].

Shanta Rakshita (Khenchen Bodisatva)

Yogācāra was also variously termed Vijñānavāda (the Consciousness Doctrine), Vijñaptivāda (the Ideas or Perceptions Doctrine), or Vijñaptimātratā-vāda (the "Mere Representation" Doctrine), which is also the name given to its major theory of mind that seeks to deconstruct how we perceive the world.

There are several interpretations of this main theory, which include various forms of idealism as well as phenomenology or representationalism.

Aside from this, Yogācāra also developed an elaborate analysis of consciousness (vijñāna) and mental phenomena (dharmas, "things"), as well as an extensive system of Buddhist spiritual practice, namely, yoga [1],

Tibetan thangka of Dolpopa

The movement has been traced to the first centuries of the common era and seems to have evolved as some yogis of the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika traditions in North India adopted Mahayana Buddhism [5, 6].

The brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (circa 4-5th century) are considered the classic philosophers and systematizers of this school, while it is also traditionally attributed by Buddhist believers to the figure of Maitreya-nātha [7].

Yogācāra was later imported to Tibet and East Asia by figures like Shantaraksita (8th century) and Xuanzang (7th century).

Today, Yogācāra ideas and texts continue to be influential subjects of study for Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and East Asian Buddhism. More