[Buddha-l] Re: Aama do.sa I

[Joy Vriens]

Hi Dan,

>Interesting image. I suppose if the physician makes generous donations to 
>the Shaivite priest's favorite charity, everything would be alright -- and 
>if he is a good physician who has effected some dramatic cures for members 
>of the royal family, the priest will tread lightly. 

There is a link between religion and healing, at least that's the way many people feel it. The Buddha compares himself to a physician and we even have a medical Buddha, Bhaishajya guru. That link is - I will be careful - less present and/or perceptible in medical science. There is a link between religion and political power, i.e. there is always a good (= more or less linked to religion) reason for the person in power to be in power (kings get their power from God, karma or what do we have more). Siddharta could have become either a cakravartin or a Buddha. There is even a link between political power and healing; not that long ago healing power was still attributed to e.g. French royalty, who could heal by apposing hands etc. Since the upanisads, kings in India like to clearly and openly peddle their religious power or ambition thereof. All those powers communicate and are more or less vaguely, inconsciously or consciously attributed to the same source. We could also add th!
 e power of wealth and celebrity. I expect that the further we go back in time, the stronger those links will be felt. But I am digressing.

After Descartes, the Enlightenment period and the French revolution, there was an attempt to separate those powers and especially to decrease the influence of religion. Paradoxically, France assimilated the methods and dogmatic attitude of the Catholic Church, whilst fighting it. In the 20th century, religion was banned from schools (l'école laïque). Since then there is a great sensitivity to anything religious or superstitious creeping into public education. The same is true for the medical science, particularly intolerant in France towards any alternative forms of medecin and healing. And as I already wrote, we find the same intolerance towards sects. The official religions are officially represented by councils under the authority of the Inner Office. There is no opportunity for sects. As soon as a sect pops up, a case of pedophilia will be revealed and that will be the end of it, but the Catholic church continues to exist in spite of it. Communism had the same ambition t!
 o cut out the religious fact. And then there is science. But I am digressing again.

When you describe your physician as a sort of rational hero like a lotus blossoming in the midst of superstition, I may be wrong, but I get the impression you are also projecting the contemporary image of a doctor onto him. How could he have existed in such world? If the only method of healing he put forward was the "scientific" one based on pramana, then wouldn't that be considered as an implicit attack on the people or entities to which healing power was attributed? Think of Galileo. I expect it probably was one of the methods he used. Like Socrates he could have been open to more rational methods, whilst continuing to sacrify cocks to Asclepios.             
 
>In a more general sense, however, as the Daoists and dialecticians like to 
>point out, pretty much everything that happens also engenders and enters a 
>relation with its opposite. The tendency to embrace the rational and reject 
>the "superstitious" was not an invention or triumph of the Enlightenment, 
>but a constant struggle in human history. Confucians were rejecting 
>superstition back in the Han (ca. 2000 years ago); Buddha in his day tried 
>to replace magical thinking with causal analysis and causal etiology (the 
>four noble truths are a medical model, still taught in medical schools today 
>under the label "Pathological Model of Disease:" 1. Symptom, 2. Diagnosis, 
>3. Prognosis, 4. Treatment Plan).

I don't know whether the Confucians were fighting superstition in general or some specific elements of superstition. I am not sure I would think the cult of ancestors and the preservation of rites etc. to be exempt from superstition. The Buddha did indeed introduce causal analysis in his methods but I wouldn't think him (or Buddhism) to be entirely free of what we would qualify as magical thinking. 

>This, on the one hand, suggests that there 
>was a great deal of "superstition" at that time against which one had to 
>mount an organized critique; on the other hand, as we know, in Buddhism (and 
>China) superstitious thinking always returns with a vengeance, and magical 
>thinking has become integral to many forms of Buddhist thinking.

Yes, and as another parallel, after the attempts to cut out religion from power I mentioned above, it is coming back in the form of excessive "religionism". Same thing for the attempt to attenuate the power of nations. Nationalism and nationalistic or even regionalistic tendancies are stronger than ever. I see both of them as superstitions. :-)  

>In addition, I am intrigued by the role medicine -- in the form of medical 
>causal thinking -- has played in the history of philosophy. That 
>pramana-theory was invented by physicians and only afterward appropriated by 
>"philosophers" makes perfect sense. Aristotle was primarily a botanist, and 
>secondarily a biologist... philosophy was the byproduct, and his writings 
>(e.g., on melancholia -- what today we tend to include under the label of 
>depression) were influential in the Western medical traditions.

That makes sense somehow. First you survive, then you can think about life.

Joy