[Buddha-l] Re: Magic

[Joy Vriens]

Alberto:
>I just wanted to add my two cents in addition to what Richard Hayes has  
>already said in response to your query. 
>The reason may not be "because it has been seen as wholly rationalist"  
>as you claim. It may simply be due to lack of interest. For instance, I  
>am not terribly interested in magic, miracles, supernatural phenomena  
>and so forth. So I don't look for this kind of things in Buddhism.

I am not into magic, miracles, supernatural phenomena either, but they keep flying into my face. And if I start digging, no scratching the surface, that's why I often find and what often offers the most coherent reading. As a good candidate Protestant Buddhist, I consistently tried to give a symbolic reading to the weird stuff. And it often works, also because 10-11th century Buddhists gave a more symbolical twist to them. But if you give a litteral reading to Tantrist Buddhism, like e.g. White does, then it is much more coherent and makes more sense. Strickmann says the same thing, a litteral reading of Tantrism yields more coherency. And then it's about immortality, vidyadharahood. And if you then read good old Louis, you'll find that immortality was what Buddhists called Nirvana before calling it Nirvana. Coincidence?  

> If I  
>am correct in thinking that a fair share of scholars of Buddhism are  
>equally uninterested in such matters, this explains why you can read  
>thousands of pages on Buddhism without ever coming across anything  
>supernatural: the authors you are reading may simply not be interested  
>in it, or at least not interested enough to publish about it. 

Yes that could be a possible explanation. But if one is treating Buddhism as a human *science* (although human and science are contradictory IMO) then it would be better to study the naked facts first and draw conclusions from that. If the same people start writing books about what Buddhism is really about from that bias, then the poor readers will have to cope with the contradictions, because in practice that's not what Buddhism seems to be about. 

Joy