[Buddha-l] Withdrawal of the senses

[Dan Lusthaus]

Now that I'm back from the AAR, I can respond to these past threads...
apologies for the retrogression.

Richard wrote:
> Without too much difficulty one can come up with at least a family
resemblance
> between neo-Platonists and advaita vedaanta. Among Buddhists, Ratnakiirti
> could legitimately be interpreted along neo-Platonic lines.

Ratnakirti is too radically dignagan -- stressing foundational
momentariness -- to elicit even the slightest monistic sentiment, so I
simply don't see that. A chapter in a forthcoming book by Parimal Patil
devotes its climactic chapter to Ratnakirti, with the most accurate and
insightful treatment I have seen to date, so we can table this until that
book appears, unless you have some specific issues or passages in Ratnakirti
in mind that you'd like to air now.

The advaitans are different problem. I will not only concede that much
neo-vedanta is perennialist, but insist that we recognize that it was
hobbled together in the last couple centuries in deliberate collusion with
and in response to Western perennialists. We can easily point to multiple
decisive moments in this fairly recent development in Indian thought,
starting with 19th c. universalistic tracts certain Indians produced in
order to "modernize" ( = make palatable to Western sensibilities as they
were being embraced in certain circles in India) Hinduism, to classic
influential works like Rudolf Otto's _Mysticism: East and West_ in which he
perennializes Meister Eckhardt and Sankara as mystical twins, to some
current hindutva reconfiguration of "Hinduism" as monotheistic ("All Hindus,
no matter how many gods they worship, nor what name they give their chief
deity, believe in only One god" -- a statement that even at the beginning of
the 21st century remains factually incorrect. By the end of this century,
who knows). That for almost the entire 20th c. Neo-vedanta in its
perennialist forms became a displacive metonymy for "Hinduism" (and even for
"Eastern" religion as a whole), is precisely the problem.

Not only was Vedanta -- especially of the Sankarite variety -- never that
important nor predominant in pre-modern India (the critiques of it from
Vi"si.staadvaitans, Dvaitaadvaitans, Kashimiri Shaivites, et al. well
document this), but in the classical six Darsana system the Vedantins (of
whom the Advaitans were a minority) share category space with Mimamsikas,
who are not only non-perennialist, they are avowed atheists (as were the
Samkyhans).

So the question would then be whether these pre-modern Sankarites were
especially neo-platonic, as they are often presented in Western texts (and
increasingly in some Indian works). I would say no, but that is probably a
topic better taken up on a hindu-l list than here. The quick argument would
be that while nirgu.na-brahman has certain affinities with neoplatonic
monism, that is hardly all there is to Sankara, and the rest, which is
ignored or de-emphasized in modern treatments, does not fit that mold.

> As you and I read Nagarjuna, he is not very neo-Platonic at all. But not
> everyone agrees with us. Nagarjuna as depicted by Venkata Ramanan and
T.R.V.
> Murti is much more similar to a neo-Platonist approach.

First, Ramanan is not really dealing with the authentic Nagarjuna of the
Madhyamaka-karikas, Vigraha-vyavartani, etc., but with a Chinese text,
Dazhidulun, whose relation to Nagarjuna is highly questionable (many of us
would reject his authorship outright). I don't think he is even getting the
Dazhidulun right. It was the vogue in 20th c religious studies to depict
Asian thought as neoplatonic, and Ramanan is simply a casualty figure in
that trend (that seems, finally, to be coming to an end, at least in
academic circles).

As for Murti, two points:

1. It is not just you and I who might differ from his neovedantic casting of
Nagarjuna; that has been pretty much a unanimous response from the entire
academic community.

2. His neovedantic moments come late in the book, disconnected from his
actual treatment of Nagarjuna's texts and thoughts -- which is often very
good. He never supports that turn with evidence, and that late portion could
be excised from the main body of his work without affecting his actual
treatment of Nagarjuna. Most of us feel it would have been a better book if
that nonsense had been left out.

> Their way of seeing
> Nagarjuna is not one that I prefer, but I am unwilling to dismiss their
> depiction as wrong-headed or just plain illegitimate.

This makes it sound as if merely the caprices of personal preference are the
determinants and criterion for deciding whether such interpretations are
valid or not. That would be sad. Nagarjuna's own texts preclude -- in
explicit ways -- reading him in such ways, so it is a matter of careful
analysis and reading.

> As you and I read Vasubandhu and Dignaga, these folks are quite a bit more
> like phenomenalists than like Berekleyan or Bradleyan idealists. But I may
be
> less willing than you to dismiss the idealist interpretation altogether. I
> see it is a perfectly legitimate interpretation (that is, an
interpretation
> that one could arrive at without too much straining of the texts), but one
> that I personally find so incompatible with my own personal beliefs that I
> would prefer not to advocate it.

Again, this should not be a matter of personal caprice, but of careful
reading. Most who claim they are idealists have not read them either deeply
or comprehensively (it is, after all, a vast corpus). Others are so wedded
to that interpretation that even when they do read them, all they see are
"bad" arguments for idealism, i.e., arguments that don't work (think, e.g.
Thomas Wood, Jay Garfield, etc.). So for these folks not only are Yogacaras
idealists in spite of their texts, they are lousy philosophers! The ones who
come closest to agreeing with my characterization of Yogacara are, not
coincidentally, those who have read most widely and carefully the fuller
range of Yogacara literature, while resisting the doxographic
misrepresentations that others embrace as a substitute for reading the texts
themselves (or that can carry over into their actual reading, distorting in
their mind what appears before their eyes -- which is basically what
Yogacara was designed to caution us about).

So I see nothing legitimate in the misrepresentation of Yogacara as
idealism, much less gnostic or neoplatonic mirrors -- starting with the fact
that ruupa is considered "pure", and sensory perception is "pure", devoid of
negative karma, that it is the mind that introduces all the problem (Dignaga
and Dharmakirti agree with this). That is the opposite of gnosticism,
neoplatonism, manichaeanism.

Dan Lusthaus