[Buddha-l] Another query

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 20:29 -0400, Richard Nance wrote:

> But Naagaarjuna aimed for liberation from suffering, not tenure. The
> two goals are not the same.

I'm not so sure. I have been liberated from tenure, and I have never
been happier. So my experience suggests that liberation from suffering
may indeed be similar to, if not exactly the same as, liberation from
tenure.

As for your comments on scholarship, thank you for making them. Perhaps
uniquely in the United States of America, any kind of careful
scholarship on anything is viewed with suspicion. Good scholarship just
doesn't feed good material to Jay Leno's comedy routines or make for
exciting movies or justify invasions of countries. Ours is a cultural
that feeds on superficiality, spectacle and scandal, and careful work
(which comes close to being a species of what Buddhists call
mindfulness) threatens all three.

I've never heard of this Zizek character you have been writing about.
And from what you and Stormy say about him, I haven't missed much. Now I
have to get back to creeping through subcommentaries on Dharmakiirti and
trying to figure out what the hell he meant (while all my colleagues
assure me that trying to understand what an author meant is a quaint
18th century enterprise that has gone the way of phlogiston, ether,
slavery and curing hysteria by applying leeches to the labia.)

-- 
Richard Hayes