Embers ji,
It's not like I announced it, but it was more a response to a particular suggestion, perhaps one regarding Sikhs being learners. Also I had said that there must be many, many motives, alternating, depending on conditions. Also if I remember right, I distinguished between learning about and from Sikh teachings. Although the latter is never the case, the former is implicit each time that I read posts here.
The point is that you appear willing to accept as 'Truth' more than one set of teachings which do not, from my perspective, point to the same thing.
That has not been my impression. But why would I want you to leave your baggage at the door? How could anyone do that anyway? Indeed I want you to be telling me the Truth; I want you to try and correct me and be upfront about it. I am not the least interested in becoming some kind of teacher, which would be dumb. I am here to challenge and be challenged. Life is too short to be dancing around.
Who is there to convince now?! No one, but conditions roll on regardless of what one thinks. Insight into non-self does not mean there will be no thinking in terms of people and things and actions in relation to situations.
But see, you just said that you are willing to become a student and immediately you are trying to teach me something.
Yes, that is my perception.
I don't understand your point. And how do you expect me to talk about life while leaving the question of truth out?
No, you have wrongly inferred this. And it appears that you are referring to Dukkha as in unpleasant mental feeling, not the Dukkha which is characteristic of all conditioned realities. The quote is not making a reference to ignorance or aversion and craving as cause for the experience of dukkha. It is describing how dukkha is intimately connected to the other two characteristic of anicca and anatta. It is stating that no reality can ever provide happiness, because of this characteristic of rise and fall. In other words it is Dukkha in and of itself and not because there is craving for objects. This is why the unconditioned Nibbana is said to be the only real happiness. Indeed this comes only after penetrating the Noble Truth of Dukkha. An enlightened person understands that all conditioned phenomena are anicca, anatta and dukkha.
The Dukkha that ends with the eradication of ignorance and craving refers to the Dukkha in the context of the Four Noble Truths where Craving or Tanha is the cause, i.e. the Second Truth. This is saying that with the eradication of ignorance and craving there will not be rebirth (hence the arising of Dukkha) anymore.
Even a Buddha experiences Dukkha as in unpleasant bodily feeling, being that he would receive the result of past kamma. And he and all the arahats would not perceive any of their experiences and the objects of the senses as anything but Dukkha, re: one of the three marks of existence.
Yes, as in being reborn again where conditioned phenomena will continue to roll on. However so long as the arahat is still alive, all his experience and object of experience (leaving out Nibbana and concepts), being that they are conditioned realities, would exhibit the characteristic of Dukkha along with the other two general characteristics.
