[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 13:01 -0400, curt wrote:
>
>   
>> I think this is the fundamental reason why western 
>> scientism has to be rejected as a valid "take" on Buddhism: because it 
>> insists on a crude and unexamined reductionism 
>>     
>
> Again, I would invite you to ask whether physicalism is any more an
> instance of "crude and unexamined reductionism" than standard Buddhist
> attempts to eliminate aatman from polite discourse. Is, in your view,
> ALL reductionism crude and unexamined? Is physicalist reductionism any
> more crude and unexamined than Yogacara reductionism?
>
>   

Surely most (or possibly all) reductionism is crude and unexamined. 
Reductionism's Achilles heel is the insistence that *everything* must 
reduce to *something* - combined with insisting (arbitrarily) that this 
"something" (the something that everything else reduces to) does not, 
itself, reduce to anything else. One can avoid embarrassment of this 
sort by adopting an explicitly axiomatic approach in which you assume 
(knowing and stating clearly that it is an assumption) that:

(a) most things are caused by something else (caused things) - but
(b) some things are not caused by anything else (uncaused things).

And if you want to be meticulous you would need to add that:
(c) among the things that do not themselves require a cause, one or more 
of them "ultimately" cause all of the things that *do* require a cause - 
these are uncaused causes.

And if you want to be tiresome and somewhat redundant then you can add that:
(d) there may be also one or more things that are not caused and do not 
cause anything else either (uncaused non-causes).

And if you want to make sure no one pays any attention whatsoever to 
what you say you can even go further and add that:
(e) there may also be caused things that constitute causal dead-ends - 
caused non-causes.

Now that I think of it - point (e) might have some interesting 
Buddhistical ramifications (with respect to the idea of "nirvana").

I am not a Yogacara expert, not by a million miles. But the idea that 
"everything is (caused by) mind alone" (to cast Yogacara in a crude 
reductionist light) has something very important going for it, at least 
when compared to "physicalism". This is precisely the fact that, on the 
one hand, the physical can only be known through the mind, for to "know" 
requires a "mind" - while, on the other hand, at least in theory one can 
(and many have) suppose that "mind" is "prior to" the physical.

Curt Steinmetz