Has anything changed since the Buddha's days? Re: Re: [Buddha-l] David Loy

[Joy Vriens]

Jamie Hubbard,

>I also find his critiques of current culture, institutions, and "lack"  
>unconvincing and somehow looking to the past as free of these problems  
>of our time-- like Hershock's _Reinventing the Wheel_ critique of  
>technology, I just don't think it works as a Buddhist critique. The  
>Buddha identified the roots of dis-ease as greed, hatred, and ignorance  
>a long, long time ago, and I really don't feel that much has changed in  
>all these years. The critique of current culture, technology,  
>globalization, capitalism, whatever is great and close to my own  
>politics, but I just don't see that it has the sort of Buddhist currency  
>with which David wishes to spin it. As I said, I doubt that the world  
>has any more suffering than it did in the Buddha's time-- after all, he  
>did identify *all* conditioned things as dukkha, no? 

What has changed I think is that there is an increasing alienation process going on. The 19th century Tibetan poet Patrul Rinpoche wrote in his "Propitious Speech from Beginning, Middle & End" that the Buddha said all phenomena were like illusions, but that in "our degenerated age" we now have illusions of illusions, echos of echos and words and their meaning disagree. This may always have existed to some level, but I have the impression that with the development of more and more intruive technical means and of narcissistic tendancies the level of illusion is growing and therefore people are more and more alienated from their "core" greed, hatred, and ignorance. Guy Deborde talked about "the society of spectacle" which could be a modern translation of Paltrul Rinpoche's intuition.

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

Deborde's book, starts with a quote of Feuerbach that Paltrul Rinpoche would have agred with too.

"But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."
Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity.

Joy