Talk:Nidana

Need to clarify "transcendental dependent origination" reference ?

While I am concerned that this article perhaps needlessly condenses some information that already exists in the WP articles of Twelve Nidanas and Pratitya-samutpada, I think that an aspect of this article that needs particular help is its exposition of the so-called "transcendental dependent origination" (here most prominently associated with the jhanas).

A simpler and more direct exposition of this chain can be found at WP's Pratitya-samutpada#The_reversibility_of_dependent_arising. A good source for this information is Bhikkhu Bodhi's Wheel commentary and translation on ATI: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel277.html. In short, I don't see this as being a second "meaning" of nidana but simply a second use of the same notion of nidana -- it is simply a different chain of conditioning. (Note that also it might also be useful to distinguish between "causality" and "conditioning," etc.)

So, would anyone mind if sometime I condense this current article's middle two paragraphs to more clearly identify the "transcendental" chain and to distinguish between the singularly defined nidana with the different chains within which it is contextualized? (Relatedly, I think it might be beneficial to replace the first paragraph's reliance on a commercial Theosophical site with information from the PTS PED or MWD :-) ) With metta, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 20:57, 18 January 2008 (UTC)