[Buddha-l] five elements

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 15:24 +1000, Kate wrote:

> Why do I get the impression I just asked one of my "insultingly basic"
> questions........

No, it's not a basic question at all. I have no idea what the answer to
your question is. I was taken by surprise by it, because it had never
occurred to me that Buddhist scholastics had busied themselves with
associating the five basic elements with colours. That sounds very
Chinese to me. Everything comes in fives for the Chinese, and all sorts
of associations are made between the groups of five. The five vital
organs, the five spices, the five fingers of the left hand, the five
cardinal directions, the fifty ways to leave your lover....

All this reminds me of an observation that Edward Conze made once about
abhidharma. Monks did not have enough to do, he said, so they kept
themselves busy by putting every teaching into a neat category and then
drawing an infinite number of meaningless correlations between one
category and another. Better to do that, I guess, than starting wars.

-- 
Richard