[Buddha-l] Re: Moment of individuation

[Peter D. Junger]

"Richard P. Hayes" writes:

: 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.

I happened to be reading in Sextus Empiricus's _Outlines of 
Pyrrhonism_ last night.  (I really was, though I cannot recall
how it came to be sitting on my bedside table.)

I gather that Sextus would say that skeptics like Pyrrho and himself
would deny that appearances are any evidence either that they have 
being or that they don't:  a position that seems to correspond to
that of the Theravadan tradition, which is perhaps not surprising
since the Gymnosophists, who influenced Pyrrho, were Jains or, at
least, members of the Indian skeptical tradition from which many
of the Buddha's followers came.

I can't help but thinking that in the West the closest thing to the
Buddha's teachings are the teachings of the skeptics like Sextus that
culminate in the teachings of Hume, who would pretty clearly have
qualified as a Great Bodhisattva were it not for his mistake in
awakening Kant from his dogmatic slumbers in violation of the
precept to let sleeping dogmatists lie.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger at samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu