[Buddha-l] Dependent arising variants

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 08:18 -0500, Stanley J. Ziobro II wrote:

> Thank you for the reference, Richard.  I have no disagreement with birth
> being a necessary and sufficient condition preceding death

It is worth bearing in mind that the concept of necessary and sufficient
conditions is relatively modern. When we ask whether the Buddha taught
that vedanā (evaluative feeling) is a necessary or sufficient condition
for attachment or aversion, we have to say that he taught neither. The
question itself is anachronistic, like asking whether the Buddha taught
that baseball or hockey is the better sport.

> that positing birth as a cause of death results from the fallacy of
> "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." 

Not really. That fallacy consists in falsely positing a causal relation
where there is none. In the case of birth and death, they are causally
connected. Birth really is one of the many contributing factors to
death; it really is part of the hetu-sāmagrī (totality of causes)
without which no death will occur. But "pst hoc ergo propter hoc" is the
fallacy of saying that a thing that precedes a second thing is the cause
thereof, as, for example, if one were to see "my computer keyboard froze
right after the dog walked into the room, so clearly the dog caused by
computer to malfunction." (Believe it or not, I have known people who
routinely committed that fallacy.)

> The cause is either intrinsic to the thing or extrinsic.

According to Dharmakīrti, the essence (svabhāva) of a thing is nothing
more nor less than the totality of causal factors necessary for that
thing's arising. So an essence is a complex, never a single thing,
because no conditioned thing has only one condition. (This principle is
behind the Buddhist rejection of the idea that the conditioned world
came out of a single cause, such as Brahman or God.)

> 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.

The person's death was caused by everything without which it would not
have taken place, namely, the person's birth, the gun, the gun's
manufacturer, the seller of the gun, the bullet, the person's parents
and so on. One can never enumerate all the causes of any event. So saith
the Indian Buddhists with whom I am familiar. Vasubandhu even goes so
far as to say that everything that does not prevent an event is part of
that event's causal nexus. So in the example I gave of a man dying after
being shot by a bullet fired from a gun, it would be accurate to say
that Jesus's preaching the sermon on the mount was a cause (not the
cause, because of nothing can anything be said to be THE cause---even if
it is a cause) of the poor man dying of a gunshot wound.

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

That's right. The Empire State Building was one of the causes of this e-
mail message. Probably if some bozo had not built that skyscraper, you
wouldn't have been a victim of this message. (So don't blame me, eh?)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico