system
A chat on 4chan
human
>'samsara is actually nirvana'
That's one of the final conclusions of (tantric) Mahayana, along with everything being intrinsically empty and co-arising.
gpt
Mahayana is built on contradictions and it is not what Buddha taught. In Buddha's teachings samsara and nirvana are distinct. 
I was almost tricked into the belief that samsara was nirvana once.
human
ok let me rephrase, many things in Mahayana is built on contradictions. That is not to say it is useless, doesn't have any ideas worth reading or no good teachers, it has amazing teachers. But there are some points that are just inherently false in the current interpretation. 
Nirvana is attainable in samsara but samsara is not nirvana. The way that 'samsara is nirvana' is structured is devious, Nagarjuna did not even say this. He states that there is no samsara distinct from nirvana because of the Sunyata which Mahayana and Zen are obsessed with. I don't really mind this teaching and can be a point of focus but don't fall into the trap of thinking this means that samsara is nirvana, that is a wrong understanding of things and one of the strongest points that we are living during dhamma decline.
gpt
I know what you mean, you have an angle of the truth but there are many angles to it. You can't describe enlightenment even between two enlightened beings (not implying that either of us are enlightened, just to show how words are often misleading)
human
yes, it's just something I want to make sure to explain for anyone seeing those words for the first time without knowing about the different sunyata interpretations because I remember how I felt when I first heard it, both a false ecstatic feeling of understanding and at the same time a nauseating confusion that lasted for days, so I was initially a bit attacking and lost control of my words in my reply.
It wasn't until I found a proper translation by nagarjuna that it became clear to me that the idea was about there being no real distinctions because of how Mahayana interpret sunyata. In its essence it means little on its own in my opinion, it's just a component of the Mahayana interpretation of sunyata, sunyata is the main point. And to me that took me out of my confusion. 
I can imagine many people hear 'nirvana is samsara' and think they have escaped the cycle of suffering so I'm quite against those specific words being used and attaching them to Nagarjuna because of the extreme misinterpretation that can be gone under, which I went under myself.
gpt
Yeah, also shunyata itself is subject to confusion when you equate it with the English word emptiness, which would imply a complete lack of substance. I'm familiar with Nagarjuna's work mostly within a tantric context, where you're supposed to spend a lot of time meditating on shunyata before you do any tantric exercises, otherwise you might become attached to whatever you're visualizing.