[Buddha-l] Re: on eating meat

[Vicente Gonzalez]

Richard Nance wrote:

RN> The Sanskrit noun "karman" means action, though people tend to forget
RN> this. Hence, the term itself is really not any more metaphysical than
RN> the English "action".

well, I think it is not very right. Action here is part of a
metaphysical discourse because karma is devoted to explain the
relation between causes and effects. Therefore, it is part of a
discourse about time, space and causality. This three things are
in the same core of any metaphysics.

As you well says, in Buddhism the karma notion points directly to
our intentional action. The most important thing here is that this has
a direct connection with the investigation of a moral basis in
Buddhism. I'm reading now some recent papers in the JBE site leading
with this subject but mostly without remarkable news, at least in
my view.
It is logical at all, because in Buddhism doesn't exist some discourse
devoted to explain the metaphysical basis of his moral which, as
everybody knows, it's compassion.  This absence forces to some authors
to a hard wandering by different western philosophical references.
It's logical because in Buddhism, the final point of such
investigation is practical, not intellectual. In this way, the same
practice of compassion already shows the best moral that we can know,
and any rational demonstration of this immediate experience supposes
a road in the inverse order. It becomes a very hard task for our
understanding, while developing any compassionate action is an
instantaneous possibility to experience this truth for anyone.
Because in Buddhism the metaphysics always is subdued to the practice,
then such intellectual demonstration doesn't have many sense.

However, because in the West the religion was centered in a God who
was understood as the supreme good in itself and auto-explained by the
faith, the philosophy and rationalism had the task to investigate the
qualities of such thing. Therefore the investigation of the basis of
Moral had firstly the high interest of knowing if our actions were
in concordance with the God's qualities. In this way, the western
philosophy starts a way in where we find developments to investigate
the metaphysic of this problem. Across the history, we see that of all
western philosophers, only Schopenhauer arrive to the same conclusion
of Buddhism. In Schopenhauer, compassion appears in his metaphysic
system as the only basis of any moral ("On the Basis of Morality",
Arthur Schopenhauer, Tr. E.F.J. Payne").

Being the only philosopher in the West and East who has become fully
coincident with Buddhism in a metaphysical investigation in this
subject, his work would have to be a fundamental reference for any
western investigation around the matter. However, it's really
astonishing to see how no Buddhist scholar has take care of this.
On the contrary, we only can find a pair of generalist, scarce and
clumsy analyses about Schopenhauer and Buddhism, i.e. "Schopenhauer
and Buddhism", Peter Abelson, Philosophy East and West,V.43, 2.

Knowing the ancient prejudices in front this author in the intellectual
western world, his absence today still is quite significant.
However, I want to recommend the reading of this book to any searcher;
I mean not mainly a communist searcher, fascist, liberal, democrat,
devotes to the many promises lands, enemies or friends of various
intelligent projects, etc... but to any Buddhist searcher, son of the
Buddha message, and truly interested in knowing why compassion is the
only basis of any moral and ethics.
Surely he will find that this work can be a very good help to
investigate the metaphysic fit of compassion inside the Buddhist karma
and causality. Later, he can wander across books and works around this
topic, and maybe he will be aware of some obvious things that probably
before were invisible for him. 


br,

"When the words lose their meaning, people lose her freedom."
Confucius