[Buddha-l] Withdrawal of the senses

[Dan Lusthaus]

So, we are flushing out the perennialists!

> Let's not debunk the baby while we're debunking the bathwater. Here are
> some "greatest hits" in Perennial Philosophy:

Curt, I have no interest in either debunking or affirming
neoplatonic-gnostic perennial philosophy per se. It is the superimposition
of neoplatonic-gnostic perennial philosophy onto INDIAN thought that needs
debunking.

>
> Plato's Timaeus
> Plutarch's Isis and Osiris
> Apuleius' Metamorphoses
> Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians
> The collected works of Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa

You might want to add Proclus, Suhrawardi, Nikolas Cusa, and a host of
others.

> M.L. West has stated that Greek literature should be considered a
> sub-genre of Near-Eastern Literature.

That sort of generalization -- shot through simultaneously with value
judgements and homogenizations -- is useless and misleading. Near Eastern
lit. is quite different in type(s) and language, with occasional blendings
and crosspollinations.


>He also once quipped "Culture,
> like all forms of gas, tends to spread out from where it is densest into
> adjacent areas where it is less dense."

An autobiographical expression of hopes for hegemony of his own flatulence?

Bottom line: when one actually carefully reads Indian works in their own
context (same goes for Chinese works like the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, which
also get dragged into this flatulence), one discovers they are not
neoplatonic, and often strongly committed to things antithetical to
neoplatonic thinking. On the other hand, if one examines the literature
produced by the people trying to superimpose that reading on the asian
materials, one finds it riddled with major and minor misreadings and
misrepresentations. If there really is any such thing as a perennial
philosophy, it is to perennially misread the thought of others to make it
more comfortable (or condemnable) to one's own way of thinking.

Dan Lusthaus