[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Chan Fu]

On 6/24/07, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:
> On Sunday 24 June 2007 13:07, Katherine Masis wrote:
>
> > I for one don't know what business, if any, is the
> > proper Buddhist one, but if no Buddhist had ever had
> > the inclination to lead the examined life, no Buddhist
> > cosmology, no Buddhist epistemology and no Buddhist
> > psychology would ever have developed.
>
> As one who have spent the past thirty years pouring over works dealing with
> Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology, I am inclined to agree with you. I
> have to long argued that the dichotomy between study and practice is as false
> as it is popular.

Jesus H. Christ, Richard, it's "poring", not "pouring" (as in maple syrup).

> It is not that false dichotomy, or any other kind of anti-intellectualism,
> that I was endorsing. Rather, I was echoing the kind of sentiment (probably
> hopelessly outmoded nowadays) that Husserl expressed when he said that
> philosophy never existed outside Europe. What he seems to have meant by
> philosophy in that infamous claim is closer to what we might call "pure"
> science, that is, an inquiry done purely for the sake of knowledge, with no
> regard whatsoever to anything practical. I don't think Buddhists qua
> Buddhists ever engaged in anything like "pure" science, because they were
> always interested in theory only as a handmaiden to the practical task of
> reducing unnecessary forms of suffering, especially those that arise from the
> way we think (or fail to think).

Only if you take Husserl's idiotic definition of "science" - like "pure reason"
and the independent existence of mathematics...

> > I bring this up because for 15-plus years I was a
> > member of a very harsh, anti-intellectual and
> > hierarchical Zen group based in the U.S.
>
> My condolences for 1) having lived in the U.S., 2) been involved in such a Zen
> group. (If I were more inclined to rudeness, I might ask why the hell it took
> you more than fifteen years to bail out. Fortunately, I am the very picture
> of politeness, so such questions never even enter my mind.)

Not to mention that you live in the U.S., which is marginally more rational
than Canadia (maybe not lately...)

> > To quash sincere inquiry, intellectual or otherwise, was
> > standard fare at that place.
>
> I know the type. My classes always have at least a few students whose main
> purpose seems to be to tell their fellow classmates that every hour spent in
> a philosophy class is an hour that could better have been spent on a zafu.
> The only known remedy is to send them to my office to spend the class period
> on a zafu and then flunk them for not understanding anything about
> philosophy.

That's actually true, unless you're talking about the philosophy of science.

> > For some of us, removing the arrow is the work of a
> > lifetime (if not myriads of lifetimes).  While we're
> > at it, I see no problem with inquiring about the
> > nature of the arrow, where it came from and why it was
> > shot.  Must its removal and examination be exclusive
> > of each other?
>
> Does a rhetorical question need an answer? What I would want to add to the
> answer implied in your question is that when inquiry into arrows becomes an
> end in itself, then one has left the project of eliminating suffering behind
> for the project of promoting fletchology. That is probably what the Buddha
> was warning against. And what I was warning against was getting so caught up
> in working out the mind-body problem that one forgets all about dealing with
> all those things that can make having a body and/or mind so messy and
> unpleasant if one is not careful.

There is no mind-body problem and there's no real difference between
fletchology and the avoidable habit of sticking your thumb in your eye
when you actually meant to suck on it a bit for comfort.

What Sid warned about, we can now do to a reasonably useful extent.
The interesting bit(s) from a swampologist's POV is that we spend a great
deal of time and effort trying to knit together apples and alligators,
re-editing history and slipping those revered bits of old films into our
current reality-TV show (likewise for the rest - I wasn't picking on buddhism
in particular).