[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada

[Dan Lusthaus]

To reply to a couple of Richard's specific questions:

>"Then why did Vasubandhu, who was not an entire
> fool, think there was a difference of opinion that needed to be
> addressed." The only answer Dan suggests is that the opponents of
> pudgalavaada were queasy about something.

Sarvastivadins were engaged in a long-term turf war with Pudgalavadins. It
was the equivalent of the 30 Years War and the Hundred Years War and
Ireland, fought with words (for the most part) rather than bloodshed. Why
did Augustine get the Manichaeans wrong? He wasn't a dummy. Why did the
Early Church Fathers -- some of who were creepy, but most were not
dummies -- get the Gnostics and most of the alleged heresies wrong? Because
this is religion, not pure philosophy, perhaps? Why do otherwise intelligent
people get Zionism wrong? Is Vasubandhu the only person in history to attack
a straw man? The only prominent Buddhist? Why does Richard turn me into a
straw man?

> The very idea of heuristic constructs seems potentially misleading to
> me. What exactly is the Sanskrit term for a heuristic construct?

As I wrote, we have two different Chinese translations based on two variants
of the same text. Both selected different equivalents for praj~napti, which
I take as illustrative of two distinct interpretations of that term.

1. 施設 shishe (give a linguistic set up, organize through words, nominalism)
2.  教授 jiaoshou (teaching device, heuristic)

For those who know no Chinese, here are links to Chuck Muller's online East
Asian Buddhist Dictionary. (type "guest" for the user ID and leave the
password blank; that's good for ten look-ups). Make sure to include final
closing parentheses in the url -- that sometimes doesn't get included when
you just click the link, and has to be added manually.

For the binome shishe, go to
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?65.xml+id('b65bd-8a2d')

for shi by itself,
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?65.xml+id('b65bd')

for she by itself,
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?8a.xml+id('b8a2d')


For the binome jiaoshou (which is NOT usually used for prajnapti) go to
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?65.xml+id('b6559-6388')

for jiao by itself, go to
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?65.xml+id('b6559')

for shou by itself,
http://www.buddhism-dict.net/cgi-bin/xpr-ddb.pl?63.xml+id('b6388')

> What is the deeper understanding
> that a pudgalavaadin, on Dan's account, claims can be gained by
> postulating the heuristic construct of a person? What can one do with a
> heuristic Person that one could never do without one?
>
> Siderits attempts to respond to all these questions in his book

As I mentioned awhile back, everything Siderits is trying to do was already
addressed by the Pudgalavadins, and is covered in Thich Thien Chau's book
(but not Priestley, who ignores quite a bit of that material). And they were
satisfied with terms like prajnapti, having no need for monstrosities like
""non-reductive mereological supervenience". How inconvenience!

As for them saying what we already know -- the point is they said most of it
first, and paved the way for much of what we have come to know as Buddhism,
though their rivals gave them no credit, only straw man dismissals.

Cf., e.g., Bryan Cuevas, "Predecessors and Prototypes: Towards a Conceptual
History of the Buddhist Antarabhava," Numen, 43, 3, Sep 1996, 263-302.

Dan Lusthaus