Philosophy Now Forum

Nobody understands these questions - the wise see them as intractable and ignore them.
I call that pessimism. I'd rather live in a world of foolish optimism, where people of vision see problems as solvable, roll up their sleeves and set to work to tackle them.

Arising

Sorry we've got all out of sync because I wrote the last post a while ago and then couldn't post ot because the site was down. But onto your next questions



Yes I don't know whether he would laugh or not - but I'm sure he would consider the debates to be beside the point. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that Buddha's message has been interpreted in many different ways even within the Eastern hemisphere. You seem to think that my arguments are distinctively Western - that simply isn't the case.



I would call it merely a western label. The content of post-modernism - the 'anything goes' themes, the distrust of grand narratives, the perspectivalism have all cropped in different places across the millenia. You only have to read the sutras that were recputedly written at the time of Buddha to see that people were confused about how to arbitrate between all these arguments. Buddha's Middle Way, which is about avoiding having these views at all, is a direct response to this confusion. I happen to think that the Middle Way is a refreshing antidote to the 'post-modern' rubbish that you think I espouse.

Best, Nikolai

Hi Wootah,



In my argument I propose that sceptic philosphers, Buddhists and Christian Mystics like Meister Eckhart were all of the same type. They were all people who had recognised abstract conceptual understandings as being ultimately meaningless, and so found themselves no longer wrapped up in ultimately meaningless activities. There was nothing left for them to do but to sit, and watch and pray. This state of disinterested apprehension of reality was blissful - and this is what they are famous for writing about.

Other people thought they could achieve the same bliss by doing as they do - by imitation. And so the woo-woo aspects emerged. People naively thought that if they simply mediatated, or simply prayed very hard then it would cause them to get the same bliss. The notion of soteriology emerged - opinions about what worked better than what emerged, 'expertise' was assumed, and before you know it you have the rituals and docrtines of religion - and all of it empty imitiation. All of it was an attempt to capture in abstraction what was the incommunicable experience of the prophet.

As you've probably gathered - I see no distinction between religion and philosophy - both of them aspire to Truth, Reality, God. But the adept will not reach their goal until they have learnt the ulitimate emptiness of the woo-woo stuff. The saint must reject scripture and ritual, the philosopher must reject concepts and reason and be reality as it is.



There is a drought and it has not rained in weeks. One man is frantically devising and enacting a series of ever-elaborate raindances - absed on ill-conceived notions about reality. The other is enjoying the sunshine. Who is the wiser?

There is never anything wrong with the present moment. Enjoy the sunshine when it comes, enjoy the rain when it comes. Some people only enjoy rain after a drought. That is the opposite of what Buddha was trying to say.



When you are calmly absorbed in the scene before your eyes, your life is not wasting away - If anything, you are savouring every moment to its fullest. You are passionate about it all - so there is no passionate chasing after specific things. To view everything as wondeful, is the view of the Buddha. Most of us favour some things and not others - that restricts the amount of pleasure we end up enjoying.

I can understand how the person sat still might appear passionless - but from another perspective they are passionate about it all. So much so that they cannot tear their eyes away.



I agree that you have the intellect to see the sceptical challenge, but all too often you have suggested that you prefer to act as if the sceptical challenge isn't there. Your scepticism is shallow in that you prefer to pretend that it all makes sense really - often to preserve your faith. If you had more courage you would subject the articles of your faith to a thorough philosophical critique. This would be extremely challenging and would, I'm sure, feel like a very dark experience. But pass through it successfully and you would be able to distinguish the empty, contradictory aspects of your belief from that larger faith which cannot be denied.

Christianity has numerous examples of individuals who have passed through the 'dark night of the soul' and entered into true unassailable belief. God is the absolute ground of your being. Immerse yourself in being, know God in the here and now - not just in your thoughts and concepts but in the absolute conviction of your heart.



Taylor's approach to epistemology is extremely close to Buddhist philosophy - I consider that to be obvious. I am absolutely sure that he would agree with me on this. I know he is Roman Catholic, but there are extremely close associations between mystical threads in Christian thought and Buddhism. Thomas Merton recognised it from the Christian side, DT Suzuki from the Buddhist side.

It is for this reason that I can legitimately use Taylor's arguments to support Christianity, Buddhism and philsophical scepticism.



I'm not saying that they are uniquely Buddhist, challenging assumptions is universal. But Buddhism has scepticism about conceptual knowledge at its very heart. Scepticism is to Buddhism what Love is to the Christian. Thats not to see that Christianity is intrinsically credulous, nor Buddhism unloving. But Love is the kernel of Christianity, and the rejection of the illusions caused by belief in false concepts is the kernel of Buddhism.



The gem is transcendent, like God is and like the Truth of Buddhism is. Buddhism goes awry when it thinks that enlightenment can be achieved by doing x, y and z. Christianity goes awry when Chrisitans think that they understand who God is, what he likes/dislikes etc. Don't pretend to know this stuff, don't try and use scepticism as a tool to know it. Surrender to ignorance, dismantle your ill-conceived notions and throw them to the dogs. Put yourself in God's hand in all your simplicity and ignorance. Be as Socrates was, as Therese of Lisieux was. Know your ignorance and then you will find your gem - and that it wasn't anything like the gem you thought you were looking for.

I'm not sure what you make of this sentiment - but there are many Christians who have inspired me to make it. It goes without saying that people are wrong to think of Buddhism as some sort of heathen rival to Christinaity (I'm not saying you are doing this). They are extremely complementary with each other - and also to much 'secular' philosphy.

Best wishes, Nikolai

The sceptic in me likes this because it is so devastating to Buddhism. The Buddha would say: 'Yes, but it is the seeing the problems as solvable that makes life so unsatisfactory!'

And Mick would say: 'Even if I never solve them, and the failure makes me suffer, I would rather have chased than not have chased at all.'

Call it folly, or noble heroism, you can't argue with it. It was this recognition that made the Buddha prevaricate about bothering to spread his message. Then he looked in to a pond of lotuses. He saw that there were all at different stages - though each perfect in themselves. He saw that it was fine that his message would be heard by some, though ignored by others. He was able to view things from the aspect of eternity, and didn't try to place some things above others - even his own message. Unfortunately many Buddhists are prone to forgetting this, just as Christians are prone to forget Jesus's Parable of the Sower.

I think Christianity is an entirely skeptical enterprise. You ask anyone to believe a man rose from the dead and the first impulse is skepticism, the second impulse is skepticism and heck even now I'm skeptical. I focus on that because the other aspects of the faith are metaphysical, God, the devil, love, heaven, we don't know those things like we know a chair or grass.

As I said briefly, I regard it is a path and on one side is materialism and on the other side is spiritualism. Christianity is the 'just right' religion, focusing on this life and the next, whereas Buddhism, I won't say is focusing on the next in the way you describe it but it certainly isn't focusing on this one.

Wootah



I'm not sure I understand this. If you are sceptical about the resurrection then it would seem to me that your whole faith must be quite tenuous at times. Isn't the resurrection rather a sine qua non, up there with Jesus dying for our sins.



The Buddhist would say that our knowledge of a chair is as uncertain as our knowledge of the devil - as I argued in The Practice of Philosophy thread. This is a very hard statement to understand, but is a theme that has constantly recurred in western philosophy also. Needless to say, one who takes this view sees the real and the metaphysical as a somewhat false dichotomy - define the chair in its entirety, including all its causal ancestry, and you will find yourself with a concept as vast as the cosmos - and perhaps with the hand of God crafting the merely physical chair - if thats what you believe.

Conversely, if you believe in the devil then the devil can be present in the most quotidian, most physical of events. Maybe he is behind the wobbly leg on the dangerous chair.



That the distinction can be made is probably an assumption where your scepticism has not reached. You believe that two poles exist and that Christianity sits just right between them. You do not see that your Christianity sets up the two poles in the first place. A circular argument in other words.



This life and the next are more Christian conceptual poles. Buddhism is unlikely to sit comfortably between them so it is unlikely to feel 'just right' to you.

You are always going to be a weak philosopher unless you are prepared to submit your Christianity to a rigorous critique and stop viewing it as sacrosanct. But on the other hand, you might prefer to pretend that what the Bible said is true - to be a dutiful Christian. And I've said before - I can never quarrel philosophically with belief - after all why should we always be rational?

Best, Nikolai

Actually, I'd say "Even if we only solve some of them, the pain of failing to solve others will have been worthwhile". I think that makes a difference.

Hi Nick,

The following is from Suzuki:


It may not be altogether out of place here to make a few remarks concerning the popular view which identifies the philosophy of Schopenhauer with Buddhism. According to this view, the Buddha is supposed to have taught the negation of the will to live, which was insisted upon by the German pessimist, but nothing is further from the correct understanding of Buddhism than this negativism. The Buddha does not consider the will blind, irrational, and therefore to be denied; what he really denies is the notion of ego-entity due to Ignorance, from which notion come craving, attachment to things impermanent, and the giving way to egoistic impulses. The object the Buddha always has in view and never forgets to set forth whenever he thinks opportune is the Enlightenment of the will and not its negation. His teaching is based upon affirmative pro­positions. The reason why he does not countenance life as it is lived by most of us is because it is the product of Ignorance and egoism, which never fail to throw us into the abyss of pain and misery. The Buddha pointed the way to escape this by Enlightenment and not by annihilation.

The will as it is in itself is pure act, and no taint of egoism is there; this is awakened only when the intellect through its own error grows blind as to the true working of the will and falsely recognizes here the principle of individuation. The Buddha thus wants an illumined will and not the negation of it. When the will is illumined, and thereby when the intellect is properly directed to follow its original course, we are liberated from the fetters which are put upon us by wrong understanding, and purified of all the defile­ments which ooze from the will not being correctly inter­preted. Enlightenment and emancipation are the two central ideas of Buddhism.

The argument Asvaghosha puts into the mouth of the Buddha against Arada (or Alara Kalama), the Samkhya philosopher, is illuminating in this respect. When Arada told the Buddha to liberate the soul from the body as when the bird flies from the cage or the reed's stalk is loosened from its sheath, which will result in the abandonment of egoism, the Buddha reasons in the following way: 'As long as the soul continues there is no abandonment of egoism. The soul does not become free from qualities as long as it is not released from number and the rest; therefore, so long as there is no freedom from qualities, there is no liberation declared for it. There is no real separation of the qualities and their subject; for fire cannot be conceived apart from its form and heat. Before the body there will be nothing embodied, so before the qualities there will be no subject; how, if it was originally free, could the soul ever become bound? The body-knower (the soul), which is unembodied, must be either knowing or unknowing; if it is knowing there must be some object to be known, and if there is this object it is not liberated. Or if the soul be declared to be unknow­ing, then what use to you is this imagined soul? Even without such a soul, the existence of the absence of know­ledge is notorious, as, for instance, in a log of wood or a wall. And since each successive abandonment is held to be still accompanied by qualities, I maintain that the absolute attainment of our end can only be found in the abandon­ment of everything."!

As long as the dualistic conception is maintained in regard to the liberation of the soul, there will be no real freedom as is truly declared by the Buddha. 'The aban­donment of everything' means the transcending of the dualism of soul and body, of subject and object, of that which knows and that which is known, of 'it is' and 'it is not', of soul and soul-lessness ; and this transcending is not attained by merely negating the soul or the will, but by throwing light upon its nature, by realizing it as it is in itself. This is the act of the will. An intellectual contem­plation which is advocated by the Samkhya philosophers does not lead one to spiritual freedom, but to the realm of passivity which is their 'realm of nothingness'. Buddhism teaches freedom and not annihilation, it advocates spiritual discipline and not mental torpor or emptiness. There must be a certain turning away in one's ordinary course of life, there must be a certain opening up of a new vista in one's spiritual outlook if one wants to be the true follower of the Buddha. His aversion to asceticism and nihilism as well as to hedonism becomes intelligible when seen in this light.

What? Equating with scepticism, linking to christian mysticism, not Western?

Thats because Epistemology is pretty much a universal where thought is concerned. That its a 'western label' is exactly why it was named as such.
I happen to agree but think its one you follow and meditate upon. You brought-up the 'post-modern', I was just observing that some of your words could be considered as such.

Yours
a_uk

What the Buddha teaches about the mind is what parents teach their toddlers about fire: keep your hands out of it.

Buddha tells you how to keep your mind out of suffering.

What Buddha doesn't teach is how to put your hand in the fire and keep it safe. There is a way... the Western way such as democracy, marriage, rule of law, etc.

What are your thoughts on Arthur Schopenhauer?

From his wikipedia entry:

"he believed that women were meant to obey"

I agree. This is why women today are unhappy. They can't find dominant men that they feel forced to submit.

I was thinking more along the lines of his synthesis of Eastern and Western thought.

so you are interested in your own thoughts, not mine?

I found this interesting. Since avoiding suffering is impossible, Buddha seems useless.