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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy,

We are entering deep but interesting waters.

One of the lessons of cross-cultural studies is that all cultures -- while
sharing certain similarities -- are not the same, and that differences
emerge simply by shifting the influence of certain variables. One important
difference between Indian culture and European culture -- which needs to be
taken into consideration when projecting analogies back and forth -- is that
contrary to the totalitarian function exercised by the Catholic church (with
fluxuating success over the centuries), India has been, since vedic days,
pluralistic. No pope. A certain religious tradition may temporarily win
favor in some region, and may try to suppress opposing groups, but these
remain local and variable. That doesn't mean India should be imagined as an
idyllic ecumenical uptopia at all times and places, but it does mean that
the tendency in India was to have rival schools of thought settle or engage
their differences in the field of debate (an ethos to which CS
enthusiastically subscribes), rather than scouring every nook and cranny to
root out and exterminate heretics and deviants.

This simple difference has profound repercussions throughout Indian culture.
One of the most undeveloped forms of philosophy in India, as compared to
Europe, Islamic and Chinese culture, is the virtual absence of "political"
philosophy (some exceptions such as Kautilya's Artha-sastra aside). Where
one does find political critique is, often satirically, in Sanskrit drama.
This probably reflects a pragmatic turn amongst Indian philosophers -- they
could openly and aggressively debate the most important and precious
components of their doctrines, with the king or ruler as moderator, without
the ruler suspecting sedition was afoot. Hence faith and obedience emerge as
major tools of social control theologically reinforced, while the Indian
consensus was that rational debate and epistemology (pramana, etc.) are the
sine qua non of any legitimate religious tradition.

That the French Revolution degenerated in the 19th century into a monarchal
near-totalitarianism which mirrored the Church, while the American
Revolution has not done so yet, probably owes something to two factors:
American political thinking owes much to British Anglican anti-Church
developments (and the seeds of democracy that had been sprouting there since
the Magna Carta), and the States were not in Europe, steeped in the
immediacy of European history, and so could imagine that one could envision
a new telos afresh and pursue it without the same degree of historical
burden. These days the pockets of religious intolerance have joined hands
and have seized a good bit of power in Washington and at the state and local
levels, especially in the ever expanding Bible belt (but not just there),
but these things are also cyclical. McCarthyism reached a pinnacle and then
was discredited (though it never went away entirely), and we are currently
witnessing the Republicans, who have been currying support from these
elements, self-destructing as their loudest anti-gay spokesmen are being
outed, and the infidelities of their leaders (e.g. Newt Gingrich) not only
temper the outrage against the Clintons, but expose the Republicans for the
hypocrites they are ("hypocrite" is the buzzword in the media these days).
Unfortunately, as always, the Democrats remain dumber than the Republicans,
so there is not single spokesman on their behalf who has managed to exploit
the situation in an effective way.

So now I digress as well. You ask:

"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?"

Caraka-samhita attributes its own ultimate authorship (aka inspiration) to
Siva, so no conflict of interests. The opposition between science and
religion is largely a Western phenomenon, especially since science in the
15th-16th centuries overturned rather than confirmed church dogma. It was at
that point that faith was taken to be more important than knowledge (the
Church, up to that point, considered the two commensurate -- even current
catechisms still vestigially extol the value of logic and knowledge
alongside faith). Unfortunately, whatever else Luther rejected from the
Church, he turned faith into an even greater foundation, made it individual
instead of communal, and engendered the proliferation of alternate faith
communities, each thinking only its own faith was true or at least truer
than the others (prominent American evangelicals have said the Pope will go
to hell; the current pope has gently suggested more or less the same about
the evangelicals). Faith never played that kind of role in Indian
traditions, and it was always subordinate to knowledge, logical debate and
reasoning.

One of my teachers, an Indian, when asked by a student what he would say if
he met Jesus, indicated he would ask a question: "Sir, what are your
arguments?"

Dan Lusthaus