tiltbillings wrote:. . . known to him those states arose, known they were present, known they disappeared . . . . - MNiii 25 Ven Bodhi's trans., MLDB 899. This give a slightly different take. Feelings "persist," but anyone who has attended to feelings with a concentrated/mindful mind knows they do not persist as an unchanging some-"thing."
I agree that does seem to be a good translation. ("Present" is similar to "stand.") How long does it stay present though?
I'd say that it varies... the earth is present for a very long time; this body is present for a shorter time; and thoughts are even shorter. It's not my fault if you confuse between all of these. (That's probably a sign of a poorly-developed dhamma vicaya.)
I never said anything about "unchanging"... I thought that anicca would've been assumed (on this forums, no less) about the so-called "stable thing-ness"; a dhamma (with the lower-case d) that is observed as standing, upaṭṭhahati, for x amount of time, before it falls away. This stablity is an observable dhamma, and
the flux is also an observable dhamma. Both of these are anicca. (Which has nothing
to do with flux.)
You can debate about the existence/non-existence of "total flux", the existence/non-existence of "total stability" as much as you'd like... much like a saṃsāra-bound, ordinary worldling would've compared to a tathāgata.
Shonin wrote:The perpetual flux of the physical world (which we know to be true from science) then has no bearing on the statements 'exist' and 'not exist'. An analogy would be the emergence of predictable 'Newtonian' physical laws and appearances at a macro level out of the instability and fundamental indeterminacy of the physical world at an atomic level (as revealed by quantum physics).
Science does not say that the physical world is in a perpetual flux. It's a fallacy to say that everything is in flux because of what's been developed in the quantum physics. Its model applies only to the behavior at an atomic level... in fact, it was developed (initially) to study just that.
Here are some quotes from Wikipedia:
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic scales, the so-called quantum realm.
Quantum mechanics is essential to understand the behavior of systems at atomic length scales and smaller. For example, if classical mechanics governed the workings of an atom, electrons would rapidly travel towards and collide with the nucleus, making stable atoms impossible. However, in the natural world the electrons normally remain in an uncertain, non-deterministic "smeared" (wave–particle wave function) orbital path around or through the nucleus, defying classical electromagnetism. Quantum mechanics was initially developed to provide a better explanation of the atom, especially the spectra of light emitted by different atomic species. The quantum theory of the atom was developed as an explanation for the electron's staying in its orbital, which could not be explained by Newton's laws of motion and by Maxwell's laws of classical electromagnetism.
Nothing about "flux" here... only a working description of what makes a stable