[Buddha-l] Re: Moment of individuation

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 15:13 +0100, Alex Powell wrote:

> Distilled, my rather muddled point of view is that either one views
> acceptance (awareness?) as evidence of Being or one don't (whether on
> a list, on the bus, in the courtroom, UK, Alpha C).

Buddhists, of course, tended to be divided on this. People following
Theravada Buddhist tradition are usually content to say that there are
individual awareness events but that there is no such thing as awareness
as such except as an abstraction, just as there are individual ants but
no such thing as anthood except as an abstraction. So this tradition
would be reluctant even to admit that there are beings, much less that
there is anything as wonderful as Being.

Other Buddhists might be more willing to entertain the concept of Being,
provided it could be qualified in just the right ways.

> By implication I just thought this was a decisive way of talking about
> universal frameworks via Shantideva (no being accepts suffering), as
> this is a Buddhist list and Shantideva is seminal.

It was evident that you were following the line of reasoning put forth
by Shnatideva, who points out that suffering is by its very nature
something that no one wants, and therefore wherever suffering occurs, it
is to be eliminated, no matter whose suffering it happens to be.

As you yourself pointed out, however, this Shantidevan framework is not
universally accepted, so it is not a counterexample to Charles Taylor's
claim that there are no frameworks that are universally accepted as rock
bottom. Frankly, I have never quite understood Paul Williams's worries
about Shantideva, but I could easily dream up worries of my own on other
grounds.

My main worry about Shantideva's argument is that suffering is quite
complex and can't therefore be a candidate for a brute fact that no one
can dispute. To give an example or two, eating a chile pepper causes
pain, but it is a pain that some people enjoy. If a pain is enjoyable,
is it still a pain? Or if a pain is associated with what one hopes will
be a greater good, as when a patient undergoes a painful medical
treatment in the hopes of avoiding death or some pain that is worse than
the pain of treatment, is that still pain? Is it pain to do a penance
for a wrongdoing? Is it pain to attend a ten-day intensive meditation
retreat? Is it pain to work out in the gym? Does anything without which
there is no gain still qualify as pain?

Some people (over here, we call them Republicans) seem to believe that
it's quite acceptable for beings to be in pain so long as they "deserve"
it for having been lazy or naughty, or so long as putting them through
pain is somehow good for the profit margins of corporations. So again we
have a counterexample to the claim that Shantideva provides us with a
framework that can be accepted unproblematically as fact.

All told, I'm afraid I still see no intellectually honest alternative to
relativism, even though Pope Benedict XVI clearly states that relativism
is a dictatorship that forces us all to be hedonistic and egotistical
and leads us into the allegedly false view that there are legitimate
religions aside from Roman Catholicism. Alas, I can only find his claims
a sad bit of silliness. One can only hope that if there is a God, she
will protect us from the new pope.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico