[Buddha-l] five elements

[Jim Peavler]

On Oct 24, 2005, at 7:59 AM, Richard P. Hayes wrote:
>

> 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.
>

This is not entirely unlike the age of the scholastics in mediaeval 
Europe. How many lives were wasted arguing between the Universalists 
and the Nominalists. Perhaps such minute reasoning is a disease of 
monastic life.

In my opinion none of this nonsense would have happened if they had had 
enough contact with women, who are far to pragmatic and practical to 
have ever engaged in such nonsense. Probably a little sexual relief 
would not have hurt them either.