[Buddha-l] Withdrawal of the senses

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 23:43 -0500, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Richard wrote:
> 
> > I have never encountered a Dignaaga who stressed radical momentariness.
> 
> His retooling of svalak.sa.na entails momentariness,

Dignaaga's concept of svalak.sa.na ENTAILS radical momentariness? Sorry,
but I am slow-witted and must see all the steps in this entailment
spelled out.

>  and it was so
> understood long before Dharmakirti

and long after Dignaaga.

> Ekacitta, even the Buddha's, is itself momentary and radically particular.

Each moment is aparticular episode, but there is a unity of knower, and
this makes it one of the nine forms of monism that have been recognized
since at least the time of William James. You asked for one example of
perennielist monism in clasical India. I have given you three.

> As I suggested, we might want to wait until Parimal's book comes out before
> taking this further, unless you have specific texts or passages you'd like
> to put into evidence.

We need no further texts to shed light on the point under discussion.
Like you, I very much look forward to Parimal's next work. His book on
the philosophy of self is superb. He advances the sophistication with
which modern interpreters willbe discussing various "Hindu" and Buddhist
views of self.

> In terms of Ramanan and the Dazhidulun, I assume
> you are familiar with Nagarjuna's writings and with the thrust of the
> Prajnaparamita literature (on which the Dazhidulun purports to be a
> commentary). Do you find Ramanan's presentation accurately representative of
> their contents? If not, what then?

I have no idea how one measures the accuracy of an interpretation of a
text. Accuracy is an entirely subjective category. When unpacked,
itinvariably turns out to be a veiled way of saying "in agreement with
my own biases." Venkata Ramanan's work has a bias very different from my
bias. But when I set my biases aside and ask whether Venkata's
interpretation of Nagarjuna is plausible, I see no reason to rule it out
as one of several plausible interpretetations of a corpus of literature
that is far from univocal. Indeed, I would say that what makes the
Prajanaparamita so durable is precisely its polysemous nature.

> So you are supporting the idea that all thinking in Asia is mystical and
> neoplatonic? Am I really the first person to bring that problem to your
> attention?

No, but you are the first person I have encountered whose ability to
interpret texts is so abysmal that he reads someone saying that there
are SOME texts from INDIA that CAN legitimately be seen as having a
family resemblance to neo-Platonism and interprets that to mean that ALL
thinking in ASIA is NECESSARILY mystical. If you can't even summarize a
carefully worded proposition from a contemporary text in your native
tongue without distorting it beyond recognition, why would one have
confidence in your ablity to read difficult Chinese, Sankrit and Tibetan
texts written many centuries ago?

Richard Hayes