[Buddha-l] the true authority on meanings

[John Whalen-Bridge]

Hello all.

In Response to Montaigne's Dialogic Deadlock:   "Montaigne said that words are defined for half by the one speaking and for half by the one hearing them. No rules will change that reality. Appealing to dictionaries, conventions or other expressions of authority is a different matter. They dont apply to what happens but to what ought to happen or is conventionally expected to happen.
Joy"....

The dictionaries and rule-books must alter Montaigne's 50/50 division of meaning, at least if there are witnesses.  Two attorneys in court can each claim something (a word, a piece of evidence in a zip-lock bag) means something different, but then there are jury-members and a judge. Their uncertainty can be figured in, but the dictionaries and claims about context/convention and other rules & practices of common usage are there to limit what one can do with free association.  

One could turn it around and say not that dictionary definitions are not so relevant to the efforts to own the meaning 100% and instead say that dictionary meanings are secondary to the attempts at actual communication between speaker and listener or reader and writer.  Orwell says something like this when he waives off grammarians in "Politics and the English Language":  

"To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a 'standard English' which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a 'good prose style.'"


The pragmatist conception of language is quite consistant, as we see from the very first paragraph of the famous essay:

"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. "

Language is involves a series of tools for creating meaning rather than a box of meanings to be arranged.  One could say, to get to the obligatory Buddhist content (OBC), that language is "empty" but hardly meaningless.  It's meaning-making rather than meaning-full.  (I have never been tempted to use the words "Orwell" and "Emerson" in a sentence before now...and I'll resist so as to stick with the OBC.)

The poet Gary Snyder once advise, in relation to my questions about how a number of Buddhist poets and prose-writers were discussion/treating/deploying? emptiness, that I should consider "mahayana attitudes toward language," but when I asked what those were he said I should work it out myself.  It was probably a koan and I was too daft to catch it, something like "Only a Buddha and a Buddha can see a Buddha," but, that said, do we have any expertise on list about "Mahayana attitudes about language"?  Is this term a non-starter, or would there seem to be a consistant, uhm, set of references and conventions and rule-books to tell us what this should mean?

cheers dears,    jwb

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