[Buddha-l] life force vis a vis Buddhism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 16:38 -0600, jkirk wrote:

> But is it not the case that the Buddha refused to discuss final
> principles or ultimate reality?

There were some questions he declined to answer. They had to do with how
big the universe is, how the universe began (if it began at all),
whether a tathagata exists after the present life, and whether the mind
and body are one thing or different things. (The Buddha would not have
found Steven Pinker very interesting, I guess.)

> But somehow it seems to me that some later Buddhist schools
> smuggled ultimate reality back in.

No need for smuggling. It was never declared illegal. Indeed, when one
considers that one of the three poisons is delusion, which consists
(among other things) in thinking that what is not a self is a self, it
is clear that one cannot avoid the question of what is and what is not.
>From the outset a self was seen as real in a conventional sense but not
in an ultimate sense. So unless one creates Buddhism Lite by eliminating
the very idea of delusion, one cannot get away from questions of
ultimate reality. Buddhism without metaphysics, in other words, would be
like Christianity without a concept of sin.

-- 
Richard Hayes