I love your admonition, “beware of anybody selling eternal states of bliss.” I would add, “ESPECIALLY, if they can’t introduce you to a statistically relevant group of people who have achieved the goal!”

You would never invest money with a financial planner who says “While I have no track record to substantiate my next comment: I can make you millions of dollars if you simply do what I say!” Or, you would never go to a doctor who says, “I don’t have any survivors of this surgery, but I’m sure that it will work.”

Yet, people fork over money and time to teachers who promise some future state of attainment, with nothing to back it up (and one or two students who ostensibly “got it” out of thousands who haven’t does NOT prove that “it works”).

Thank you alot for this forum……..it’s nice to have a critical mind as appossed to an open one.

I agree that many stories make the “it” seem not worth striving for. But that’s always the way of it: We hear about something we think will make us happy and we go after it regardless of the evidence that it didn’t necessarily give that result to those who got what we think we want. And the real kicker is that if we found a million people who got what we want, and didn’t win the happiness prize along with it, we would think that we’re special! “Oh, well that million people didn’t get happier along with the Big-E, but if *I* got it, I’d be different!”

And while Buddhism does have much to offer, it’s BUDDHISM itself that holds enlightenment out as the goal.

With regard to the “egotistical” part… well, that’s been a comical debate for 1000+ years. The Mahayana claim that the Theravada approach is egocentric, while simultaneously saying that “ego” is only a concept. So, their own teaching invalidates the argument they use to justify the “Maha” in their “yana.” (That and the idea that what one realizes when they vow to enlighten all beings is that everything is in the mind, and therefore there are no beings to enlighten and/or all beings are always enlightened).

Suffice it to say, the enlightenment thing has been a big sales pitch without a lot of evidence that the E-store is open, or has what you want in stock.

That said, Buddhism is richer and has more to offer than the mere and usually isolated, egotistical quest for enlightenment, and its success as a practice should not be judged solely on that one criteria.

Point well taken. And my math still holds. The “500″ are, according to the Pali scriptures the number of Arahants who achieved awakening as a result of the direct teaching of the Buddha (though, Ananda, the 500th, got there after the Buddha’s death and on the morning of the meeting of the Arahants).

My first point is simply that the person who is held out as the greatest teacher (one of the names used to refer to the Buddha is translated as “greatest teacher”) had such a small percentage of “success stories” … so small in fact, as to be statistically meaningless. And small enough to wonder about the cause-and-effect relationship in “getting it.”

I was mostly exploring the direct effect of the master teacher.

Now, regarding the indirect effect, to say that the total number of people who “got it” (as a result of the continued passing of the teaching) is “large” only has meaning in relation to:

a) The total number of people who received the teachings. That is, 84,000 is a small number if 1000x or 1,000,000x that number were practitioners, and/or if the total population since the time of the teachings is approximately 112 billion (which it is), and;

b) The number of people who “got it” WITHOUT having received the teachings is commensurately small. That is, if there are 84,000(or 84,000,000 or 84) who got it without “practice” or without Buddhist teaching, each different result suggests something about the efficacy of the practice.

I would hope that given the number of practitioners today and the number who claim to have, or are attributed to have, “gotten it”, the meditative community would engage in an active debate about how reliable the techniques for “getting it” actually are… and, perhaps, discover that there are other factors that do/don’t lead to the pinnacle realization.

Recalculate your math based on exponential growth and I think you will far surpass 84,000.

At first, given the size of DC’s name, I thought it was the Buddha writing about Deepak!