[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 28 June 2007 02:02, Vicente Gonzalez wrote:

> Sense of superiority exists everywhere despite
> our public showers.

According to some abhidharma traditions, one of the last obstacles that a 
person overcomes on the road to liberation is maana, usually translated as 
pride. (Maana can have a very positive sense; it could, for example, be a 
translation of Emerson's famous self-reliance.) In abhidharma literature, 
maana is described as the tendency to think in one of three ways: 1) thinking 
of oneself as better than others; 2) thinking of oneself as inferior to 
others; and 3) thinking of oneself as equal to others. What all these ways of 
thinking have in common, of course, is that they are thinking of oneself in 
comparison with others. The English word "pride" does not fully capture the 
meaning of "Maana" at all. I think a more literal translation might do better 
here. The Sanskrit word is derived from a verbal root that means to measure. 
So maana is the act of measuring, or perhaps comparing. It is the kind of 
thinking we do when we wonder, whether to ourselves or out loud, "Is mine 
bigger than yours? Is mine as good as yours?" Abhidharma is right, I think, 
in pointing out that all of us who are not arhants (and I'm guessing that 
would be several of us even here on buddha-l) are busy measuring ourselves 
against the standards set by others.

Having acknowledged that we are all prone to looking around to see how well we 
stack up in comparison with others (for we are, after all, social animals, 
and we learn best by imitation) and whether we're still okay in the imagined 
eyes of other beholders, even those whom we pretend to disregard, I think one 
can cultivate the habit of focusing so much on flaws that one fails to see 
what is good in things. This, I know from lifelong experience, is one of the 
real dangers of academic life. Academics are trained to see faults, and 
sometimes this training is so thorough that a well-trained academic manages 
to see only garbage-filled gutters and fails to notice that the gutters run 
alongside streets that are paved with gold. (For an example, just look at 
what Curt thinks of Stephen Batchelor.)

But why do that? Why deprive oneself of the beauty of a good Dharma talk by 
focussing attention on the real or imagined imperfections of the teacher, or 
by thinking of all the ways in which someone might misunderstand the talk, or 
by seeing oneself as somehow undeserving of hearing such a good talk? Why 
pick nit when one could be harvesting a bumper crop?

The academic world is filled with intellectual diseases, and one of the 
diseases that has reached epidemic proportions in Europe and America is a 
morbid fear of ethnocentricity. Like all morbid fears, that one spoils many 
an otherwise good day. It results in a kind of moral paralysis. Rather than 
letting themselves be inspired by great ideas beautifully expressed, 
academics remind themselves sans cesse that the words were written by someone 
who owned slaves, or lived without sufficient objection in a culture that 
marginalised Jews or denied women the right to vote, or belonged to a 
religion that stole Canaan from its original habitants, or held inquisitions, 
or conducted crusades, or waged jihad, or had a caste system, or trained 
kamikaze pilots during an imperialist war. The result is that one can see 
very little of beauty. Everything is ugly and stinks in the nostrils, and if 
one refuses to savor the stink, one is accused of being naive. Bah! Who needs 
such a Weltanshauung as that? (O mon dieu, I just used a German word, 
forgetting for a moment what the Germans did to the Jews, the Gypsies and the 
homosexuals in their midst. But wait, I'm writing this in English, the 
language of a people who laid waste to North America, after stealing it from 
the Spanish and the French, who had stolen it from the native Americans, who 
were busy killing each other and raping women and enslaving children from 
rival tribes. Perhaps I should write only in the language Adam and Eve spoke 
in Eden, if only I knew the grammar. Then again, even if I spoke that 
language, I might be overheard by a snake. Better perhaps not to speak at 
all. Better yet, perhaps I should avoid thinking anything at all. But I 
digress. My fondness of words compels me to go on.)

> Nobody talks
> about changing the education system.

Actually, I know quite a few people who talk about that all the time. And some 
of them actually manage to do some of the things they talk about. It is a 
huge task. It is a lot more obvious what is wrong with the educational system 
than how to fix it. But efforts are being made. And rest assured, there are 
plenty of people wringing their hands about all the potential disasters that 
may result from those efforts.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico