[Buddha-l] Victimized vegans

[Richard Hayes]

On Saturday 12 May 2007 02:23, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> You suggest that the value of a
> text depends solely on it's interpretation. So do you deny the relevance
> of historical data, like Richard Rorty ? 

The answer to that depends on which pair of trousers I have on at the moment. 
When I'm wearing the trousers of an historian of philosophy (which is pretty 
rare, since I have never been any good at all at thinking like a historian), 
I try to pay some bit of detail to historicity. When I am wearing the 
trousers of a philosopher, the only thing that interests me is ideas and 
arguments. (Sorry, but all my training in philosophy was in analytic 
philosophy, with a tiny sprinkling of Pragmatism.)

> If a text falls apart and 
> children sample the pages which are not numbered and put them together
> in a new order, which allowes another consistent reading, would you
> consider this text or the voice in it an authority on the subject?

I would see no problem in that, provided that the rearrangement did not in 
some way disturb the flow of ideas and arguments. It is said of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson that he wrote all his lectures on individual sheets of paper in such 
a way that no sentence began on one page and ended on another. Before he 
lectured, he would pointedly shuffle the pages of the text and then read them 
in whatever order they came out. In this way no two lectures were the same. 
But the underlying ideas were. It seems to me that a large percentage of 
Buddhist literature could be approached in the same way, that is, quite 
randomly, without being any less effective as Dharma teaching.

-- 
Richard