[Buddha-l] Dependent arising variants

[Stanley J. Ziobro II]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Richard P. Hayes wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 20:39 -0500, SJZiobro at cs.com wrote:
>
> > Is birth the cause of death, or is it simply a necessary condition without which speaking of death would be meaningless
>
> Vasubandhu and Dharmakirti both argue at considerable length that birth
> is a sufficient condition for death. No other cause of death is needed
> than birth itself. The argument is complex. You can read about it in the
> Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy sub voce "Potentials, Indian
> theories of."

Thank you for the reference, Richard.  I have no disagreement with birth
being a necessary and sufficient condition preceding death, since only
living existents die (inanimate existents are neither alive nor dead).  I
cannot help but think, though, that positing birth as a cause of death
results from the fallacy of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc."  In other words,
one is not justified in assigning cause to something simply because it
stands in a certain condition prior to its change to an opposite
condition.  The cause is either intrinsic to the thing or extrinsic.

> Zeno Vendler wrote an article on causal relations in which he noted that
> all causal relations are not between things and things but rather
> between events and events. Events are always complex. So when we say
> something like "The bullet caused his death," we are using a shorthand
> expression for something like "A bullet discharged from a gun entered
> his body at a high speed and damaged a vital organ, as a result of which
> he lost so much blood that he heart stopped." He points out that a good
> many things have to be true, such as the fact that the victim's heart
> had to keep beating to pump blood to the place where it was leaking out
> of his body. So one could say, though it would sound odd, that the
> victim's beating heart caused his death.

This may be, but in the example it clearly was not the person's birth
that caused his death; it was the person who discharged the gun.  The
bullet was merely an instrumental means instantiated in the "event" of the
shooting.

> Vendler's article gives us a useful way to look at causality in
> Buddhism, I think. (But then I think that architects designing
> skyscrapers causes terrorists to fly into them.)

You've done it again.  This has to be the definitive argument against
building skyscrapers.

Stan Ziobro