Talk:Atman

AFAIK its Ãtmã or Ãtman, not Ãtmãn. Google confirms this (227, 98 and 0 hits respectively.) -- Arvindn 17:27, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Re. April 20 Edits! Thanks Kukku - excellent. (20040302 08:21, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC))

Non-Belief

The references are enlightening to a certain extent, but it seems wholly irrelevant to go into a tangential exegesis of Buddhist philosophy and their rebuttal of Hindu metaphysics. This would be like devoting an overdone section on Jewish rebuttals of Christ in the Jesus article. Now, perhaps, I should supply the article with more meat and gristle regarding hard-core history of Atman in Indian philosophy, but later on I believe it requires some sort of culling. --LordSuryaofShropshire 19:19, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)

::chuckle:: "This would be like devoting an overdone section on Jewish rebuttals"--you, sir, are fishing for trouble. ;) BTW, Have you checked Jesus Christ? There are comparable-in-length (1-3 paragraphs each) segments for Jewish, Muslim, and "Non-Christian" (i.e., "other") interpretations of Jesus, with a total length in excess of the entire ātman article. Now, the whole page could use some cleanup and rounding out, but I don't see anything wrong with explaining (a) why Buddhists don't believe in the concept, (b) how they get around it (which is nontrivial for something as philosophically ubiquitous as the self), and (c) how they differ from groups of Hinduism who also offer critiques of self but do not reject the ātman concept. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 20:08, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That's fair. More important, I guess, I will need to concentrate on adding to the primary Hindu understandings. The horrific imbalance of understandings and definitive views should be corrected soon enough. --LordSuryaofShropshire 22:25, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)

I guess we need to sort out how this works. As it is, I don't think Atman is at all a Buddhist concept and that needs to be discussed, as it is on my talk page. Perhaps more input is necessary, but at the risk of being redundant, a Hindu concept against which the Buddhists argue doesn't seem to render it a "buddhist concept." In that case, "God" is a nihilist concept, dictatorship and monarchy are both democratic concepts, icon is a Protestant concept (in that their genesis lay in rejection of many Catholic practices, such as the heavy use of imagery), etc. etc. etc. I don't see how Atman as a "Buddhist concept" is at all tenable. --LordSuryaofShropshire 01:21, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)

I don't particularly think we do need to sort out how this works; this will be ugly, but effective, and elegance tends to elude us. Remember that we're not defining a systematic exclusive ownership tree; the point is to have categories bring together a complete set of subtopics. And no discussion of Buddhist philosophy would be complete without reference to ātman, just as no Protestant cat scheme would be complete without reference to the debate over transsubstantiation. The categories in WP work more like indices and less like TOCs than I think you realize. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 01:34, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)