[Buddha-l] Hindu Fundamentalism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 09:29 -0700, Bob Zeuschner wrote:

> To bring it back to Buddhism, consider "Mt. Meru is the center of the 
> universe." This is a tough one. Is it intended to be empirical or a 
> value judgment? In an expanding universe, is every point the center?

That is an interesting question. An interesting read is Paul Veyne's
<cite> Did the Greeks Believe in the Myths? </cite>, which explores
various senses of what it might mean to say of anyone that they believe
something. It is not at all clear in what sense someone at the time of
the Buddha might have believed that Mount Meru was the center of the
world. What is more clear is that a modern Buddhist has no real
alternative to thinking of Mount Meru in purely mythic terms rather than
as a geographical reality. Moreover, a modern Buddhist who has a pretty
good understanding of the notion of infinity would have to say that
Mount Meru is indeed at the center of whatever infinite universe it
might be in (even if that universe be nothing but a possible world), and
that every other point in that same infinite universe is also
necessarily at the center.

-- 
Richard Hayes