[Buddha-l] Are we sick of dogma yet?

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 22 November 2006 14:27, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Ah, Franz! You seem to have picked up on something Richard intimated --
> which is that the Santideva-type Madhyamaka is merely repackaged
> Pudgalavada. 

I could not possibly have intimated such a thing, for it is not a thought I 
have ever had. And now that the idea has been suggested to me, I think it's 
almost perfectly ridiculous.

> For Pudgalavadins, the pudgala (person) is a praj~napti, a heuristic
> reductionism, though indispensible for doing Buddhism.

Aha, so they were phenomenalists. Funny how every thinker than Herr Doktor 
Lusthaus touches becomes a phenomenalist. Unfortunately, I lack the Lusthaus 
touch to turn everything into a version of myself, and I also lack his 
ability to see so clearly that every scholar in history has completely 
misunderstood everything and that we have all been in desperate need of a 
Lusthaus to come along and set the record straight.

I'm more inclined to agree with Duerlinger and Siderits on this issue than 
with Lusthaus. Their claim is that pudgalavaada is not a form of reductionism 
at all. Reductionism is the claim that person is merely a designation, a 
convenient shorthand way of talking about something much more complex, but if 
one were to speak of the more complex reality, there would be no need to 
speak of persons at all. For a reductionist, when one makes up a final list 
of all the things that truly exist in the full sense of the word, persons do 
not make the list. Dharmas survive the cut, but persons ultimately get put 
into the dumpster.

The pudgalavaadins were not reductionists at all, for they maintained that the 
person DOES make the list of fully existing things and does have predicates 
that cannot possibly be applied to the dharmas upon which the person is 
supervenient. Dan can quibble all he wants about whether Siderits understands 
what the Pudagalavaadins really held, and frankly I don't give a damn what 
the historical pudgalavaadins held. History is not my interest in this 
discussion. 

My claim is not historical but philosophical in nature. I claim that the 
pudgalavaadins as described by Siderits and Duerlinger have an interesting 
and viable philosophical position and that Vasubandhu utterly failed to show 
otherwise. I would go further to say that if one were interested in actually 
promoting a living Buddhist practice in the West, as opposed to constructing 
an interesting but pointless museum of quaint ideas from the dead past, one 
would do well to come up with a non-reductionist form of Buddhism, such as 
the Pudgalavaada as described by Siderits (whom Lusthaus, as is his wont, 
dismisses as clueless).

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes