<p><center><h1>The Positive View In Buddhism</h1></center></p>
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<p>Buddhism was originally not a negative [in the sense of negating what we are truly not, and not in the sense of pessimism] teaching as we see it in the Pali Nikayas today, redacted and schematized into a negative formula of suffering, without having an established positive aim as a true goal to be attained. Nibbana as the goal is simply said a negation of all affirmations of the negative, without having a positive narrative that establishes importance of the positive.</p>
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<p>A large part of this moving towards a negation-style teaching is the rise of the abhidhamma schematic constructionist formulas of puzzling all the elements or dhammas that constitute a quasi-psychological investigation in the body and mind. This type of mind-analysis moved away from the positive affirmation and put more stress on the negation-style of all the particulars that we are not and should be abandoned through Buddhist practice in the daily life and during meditation. In this move towards negation, the positive affirmative ‘deathless element’ became pushed towards the background and eventually being pushed aside by making the process of Nibbana the goal of the path.</p>
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<p><strong>A common analogy of Nibbana in the Buddhist teachings is the reaching of the ‘other shore’ and ‘going beyond’. This in contrast to the ‘near shore’ that pertains to mundane living in the cycle of birth, death, and suffering. The near shore is considered wrong liberation, and the other shore being Right Liberation, while the noble Ten-fold Path is the raft to take one from the near shore to the other shore. Nibbana is the process, literally the unfolding, crossing the river of suffering towards the ‘other shore’:</strong></p>

<p><i>“Wrong liberation is the near shore, right liberation the other shore.</i></p>

<div>Few are those people who go beyond.</div>
<div>The rest merely run along the [near] shore.</div>
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<p>When the Dhamma is rightly expounded, those people who practice accordingly,
are the ones who will go beyond the realm of Death so hard to cross into the deathless.” — AN V.232</p>

<p>One of the first scholars to study Pali Buddhism, Theodore Kern, wrote about the difficulties of accounting for particular doctrines that did not seem to fit into the schematized and negation-formulated system of the Pali Nikayas. The conclusion of this scholar created suspicion that original Buddhism wasn’t exactly what we can ascertain from the current English translations of the Nikaya books.</p>
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<p>It used to be imagined that a more ‘original’ recension of the Pali Canon of the Three Baskets (pitakas) may yet be found that would include the ‘original teaching’, freed from the scholastic and monastic schematic and structured formula in which it is now presented. To find the earliest portions of the teachings, is to find the more affirmative teachings that still survive in the Nikayas.</p>
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<p>“Monks, possessing six qualities, the householder Tapussa has reached certainty about the Buddha and become a seer of the deathless, one who lives having realized the deathless.</p>

<p>What six? Unwavering confidence in the Buddha, unwavering confidence in the Dhamma, unwavering confidence in the Sangha, noble virtuous behavior, noble knowledge, and noble liberation.</p>

<p>Possessing these six qualities, the householder Tapussa has reached certainty about the Buddha and become a seer of the deathless, one who lives having realized the deathless.” — AN III.451</p>
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<p>One can’t deny the fact that there is evidence that all repeating parts of the teachings in the Pali books show a heavy reliance on oral tradition of ‘remembering’ the teachings by the repeaters (petaki). Once these oral renditions were transferred to written text, it is no big imagination that they needed rectification from time to time. And the rectifying most likely was painstakingly done, but we have to acknowledge that the rectifying editors, as capable and influential as they might have been, in matching together the various spoken versions, put in adaptations and structures to fit and express the view they themselves had come to understand of a given doctrine.</p>
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<p><strong>Considered a ‘left-in’ of positive affirmative teachings, a great reference in the teachings that point at the aim of Buddhism, as such shows that Nibbana is not the goal of Buddhism — Nibbana is the process that leads to it, and showing the spiritual aim:</strong></p>

<p><i>“There is, monks, an Unborn (ajatam), Unbecome (abhutam), Unmade (akatam), Uncompounded (asankhatam).</i></p>

<p>If there were not this Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Uncompounded, then there would be no liberation here visible from that which is born, become, made, compounded.</p>

<p>But since there is this Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Uncompounded, therefore a liberation is visible from that which is born, become, made, compounded.” — Udana 8.3</p>
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<p>In the evolution of the negation-style emphasis in the teachings, the characteristic of an-atta (not self), or denial of the spiritual ‘element’ as ultimately real, was important. In the teachings ascribed as earliest  of the Buddha, we find advice given to find the spiritual ‘aim’, with the caveat that “the body is not the ‘aim’, the mind is not the "aim."</p>

<p>“Friend Anuruddha, when you think: ‘With the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I survey a thousand-fold world system,’ this is your conceit.</p>

<p>“And when you think: ‘Energy is aroused in me without slackening; my mindfulness is established without confusion; my body is tranquil without disturbance; my mind is concentrated and one-pointed,’ this is your restlessness.</p>

<p>“And when you think: ‘Yet my mind is still not liberated from the taints through non-clinging,’ this is your remorse.</p>

<p>“It would be good if you would abandon these three qualities and stop attending to them. Instead, direct your mind to the deathless element.” — AN I.282</p>
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<p>The teachings might be better explained in the differentiation between becoming and truly being. Becoming meaning the clinging and grasping towards what is ever-changing and mere embodiment material, and truly being explained as the real ‘aim’ in a positive affirmation of true being, the ‘more’ that we have forgotten by only paying attention to the ‘becoming’ of the body and the analytic mind.</p>

<p>“When the wise man is in the midst of fools, they do not know him if he does not speak. But they know him when he speaks, teaching the deathless state.” — AN II.52</p>

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