[Buddha-l] Re: Diversions, distractions and off-topic discussions

[Chan Fu]

On 10/8/05, Richard P. Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 10:55 -0400, Dan Lusthaus wrote:
>
> > This list has, for some time, devoted more attention to playing out certain
> > political demonizations than it has to discussing anything Buddhist.
>
> Over the past twelve years or so I have seen you say quite a few silly
> things, but this may be the silliest. I have seen quite a lot of
> political discussion here, and that seems appropriate given that we are
> living in times when public policies are generating quite a lot of
> dukkha. But I have not seen any "demonization" as you call it. I have
> seen what struck me as honest attempts to sort out some very complex
> issues, but no one here seems to be slavishly spouting ideological
> rhetoric or indulging in cheap demonization. (I attribute the lack of
> cheap facile rhetoric to the scarcity of Republicans on this list.)
>
> Thomas Berry made an interesting observation in his address to Harvard
> Divinity School in 1996. He said that he felt that the division of
> policies into left and right had run its course and was essentially
> backward looking. The way of looking at policies that he offers as an
> improvement to the now-useless rightist-leftist liberal-conservative
> dichotomy is to examine the extent to which policies are geocentric
> rather than humanocentric, nationalistic and selfish. Ways of thinking
> that place human beings at the top of the hierarchy of creation are, he
> argues, decidedly morally inferior to ways of thinking that are based on
> recognizing that human beings are deeply conditioned beings who depend
> on everything else on earth. Ways of thinking that place American (or
> Israeli or Saudi or Pakistani) interests above all others are defective
> and in need of stern criticism, as are ways of thinking that place
> Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist interests above the interests
> of other religions. Given that Berry, a Passionist brother, studied both
> Chinese and Sanskrit and wrote books on Buddhism and Vedanta in the
> early part of his career, it would not be difficult to support the claim
> that he learned much of value from his study of Asian writings.
>
> Another writer who learned a thing or two from Asian sources was Ralph
> Waldo Emerson. Early in his career as a Unitarian minister and
> missionary (yes, even Unitarians have missionaries) in the 1820s and
> 1830s, he advocated a view that morality is the principal business of
> religion and that all else that one finds in religion is a non-essential
> sideshow. Morality for him was the cultivation of character, and this,
> he argued, could best be achieved by studying nature until one
> recognized one's own interconnectedness with every other thing, living
> and dead. This interconnectedness of all things Emerson called God. The
> principal revelation of God, he wrote, is the universe itself, and those
> of us who busy ourselves with studying how people in the past understood
> the revelation presented to them run the risk of failing to see that the
> up-to-date revelation we need to be studying is all around us.
>
> Later in his career, Emerson refined the views expressed in his early
> sermons and devised, however unsystematically, his Transcendentalist
> philosophy of religion (which academic philosophers studiously ignored
> until around 1985 and which most American religious leaders ignore to
> this day, leaving it to professors of English to keep it alive). As
> Thomas Tweed points out, Emerson is one of the most Buddhist thinkers of
> the 19th century, with the possible exception of his student Thoreau.
>
> What I find interesting about the trajectory of Emerson's career is that
> he began with personal ethics, evolved into a metaphysics of
> interconnectedness and universalism, and then spent the later decades of
> his life sharply criticizing the public policies of his day, most
> famously in his passionate criticisms of slavery (which the majority of
> religious "leaders" of his day were either defending or ignoring
> altogether).
>
> Like everyone else, Emerson managed to defend a few things that now seem
> questionable, even astonishing, such as the American invasion of Mexico.
> (Actually, Emerson did not advocate that awful war so much as he thought
> it inevitable, given the expansionist passions of the day, and therefore
> he seems to have concluded that there was little point trying to stop
> the American juggernaut.)
>
> But questionable positions aside, Emerson offers reflective people an
> admirable example of how an essentially contemplative person might go
> about getting involved in trying to straighten out the crooked thinking
> of his times. It is an example that I recommend to serious Buddhists
> everywhere, and especially to those who tune in to buddha-l. After all,
> if we on buddha-l do not use our collective compassionate wisdom to help
> straighten out a world gone pathological, who will?
>
> --
> Richard Hayes
> ***
> "Where the clear stream of reason
> has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...
> Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
>                              --Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

All agreed.  So where does simple reason, a tool available to most
common folk (when properly instructed), end, and Buddhism - a
difficult thing,
to say the least - begin? The fuzzy boundary of self, or somewhere in
metaspace? Is it at all possible they're are twins, separated at
birth?

Persons in general, in my experience, are not
"essentiallycontemplative", in fact, they're impulsive, reproductively
oriented, and hardly inclined to use their highly evolved
computational machines. So if we collect all these "essentially
contemplative" persons do we wind up with the same "little dust in
their eyes" crowd? My point, in it's entirety, is SO WHAT? We simply
haven't got an answer -
we keep describing the problem. That's the whole thing - Buddhism is
famous for inaction. While Ralphie was "cultivating character",
slave's feet were being chopped off to prevent their escape. Hell of a
saint, ol' Ralph.

"Buddhism is like salsa - you can't dip a Cool Ranch Dorito in it and still
expect to taste it."

-- Giant Asteroid of Magnificent Awakening