[Buddha-l] Dependent arising variants

[Richard P. Hayes]

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."

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.

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.)

-- 
Richard