[Buddha-l] life force vis a vis Buddhism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 12:44 -0600, jkirk wrote:

> Has anyone seen the film, _March of the Penguins_ or _la Marche des 
> Empereurs_, a French documentary that is having a big fling in the USA?

Judy and I loved that movie, not only because we saw it on a really hot
day. The main question I had while seeing it was "How on earth can
anyone honestly think that penguins and their two-footed cousins, human
beings, are the work of an intelligent creator?"

> I'm usually not into metaphysics, I resist it in Buddhist literature. But 
> where both paticca-samuppada or the three poisons could almost stand as 
> metaphysical principles

The word "metaphysics" has been used in so many ways by so many people
that I never know what people mean when they say they are not into it.
As most philosophers use the word, metaphysics is the study of
existence, absence, causal theories, possibility, necessity and theory
of truth. I can't imagine being at all interested in Buddhism without
also being interested in those issues, and therefore in metaphysics.
Assuming you do not resist thinking about existence and causality and so
forth, what is it that you do resist when you resist things in Buddhist
literature?

> How long can those penguins survive on an Antarctic that is melting off? 

I'd give them about thirty years, probably less.

> According to the Pali texts the Buddha refused to speculate on such matters, 
> he had more sense than I do at the moment, but he was not faced with rapidly 
> and universally disappearing trees, land, species, water, soil, clean air.

I don't think the Buddha refused to think about such questions as what
we human beings may be doing to the biosphere. Indeed, some of the
vinaya rules are testimony to his having a remarkable amount of concern
for how people affect the world of animals, insects and plants. The
questions the Buddha did not answer were those that, if answered, would
make no difference at all to how we act. Reflecting on how human beings
are destroying the very possibility of many kinds of life on the planet
is not in that category at all. Questions of the well-being of living
things are of utmost importance to Buddhists. And that is why some of us
insist on drawing attention to barely sentient beings, such as George W.
Bush and his cohort of greed-driven, hate-filled and delusion-saturated
advisers, and to the contribution they are making to the suffering of
sentient beings everywhere in the present and in the future.    

> Any ideas, folks?

For starters, I would recommend that we impeach George W. Bush, exile
him to the south pole and leave him there with nothing but one loaf of
French bread and one German sausage encased in a condom. 

-- 
Richard Hayes