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

[Joy Vriens]

Dan,

As I see it we are talking about different approaches with different sets of rules, based on the split between religion and spirituality. The former is turned outwards and targets the collective, the latter is turned inwards and concerns the individual experience, including experiences that are felt as going beyond the individual. Renunciates are more spiritual and mystical than the religious officers who are asked to define things and to work at the moral edification of the members of a society. There are different types of knowledge but if the objective is e.g. detachment how can ratio and logic accomplish it. How can they accomplish equanimity? Detachment and equanimity are not reached through knowledge. There is no logic chain leading up to them. 

So when a king asks two parties to debate in order to establish a "truth", it is a certain type of truth he is after. Kublai Khan asks "What is the best way to rule?" The perhaps fictional debate of Lhasa was about what Buddhism is best for a society? And the choice fell on the form of Buddhism that didn't renounce society, but gave it the strongest moral foundations. I think I know what sort of answer Kublai Khan would have got if he asked Zhuangtsi what the best way to rule is. I am less sure about the hypothetic answer of the Buddha (or what the scriptures make him into) to that question, because his sangha is already one step away from renunciation and one step towards life in and with society.  

The Prajnaparamita with its apparent sophistry, Nagarjuna with his with syllogistic arguments, the Lankavatara and the Vimalakirtinirdesa with their love of paradoxes can be seen as logically sloppy mumbo-jumbo or as "posers" but I see them as having a different function than to try and define reality in a logical way. I recently said as a joke that there is no happiness outside of circular reasoning. I guess it is another way of saying that there is no happiness in logic or through logic or at least not the sort of happiness that is the result of detachment and equanimity, or emptiness for that matter. Feed logic to the logic mind to keep it busy and out of harm's way, hence the circular logic, a dog hunting its own tail. 

>Joy: 
>> Having a king judge on the validity of the arguments and the main 
>objective being access to the absolute is very strange. A king guarantees 
>the safety of its citizens, stands for the moral order etc. It is difficult 
>to see how in his function he could judge favourably on arguments that 
>relate to absolute values instead of the temporal ones that are his onw 
>domain. 
 
>Dan: 
>Why odd? Many rulers fancy themselves "wise." Obviously some were sharper 
>than others, and many were quite sharp and enjoyed a good contest. 

Odd because we have a person very biased towards and having direct personal interest in a society-friendly logic being the judge in a debate which could possibly - in theory at least - involve a more mystically inclined renunciate. In practice, such a person would likely not be interested in debates about how to run a society. The Buddha's first intuition was not to teach, i.e. not to become involved in the world again. But again since only debaters with a view of playing a role in society participated, the argument of the bias is hardly worth mentioning.  

>Dan: 
>It would seem the so-called Lhasa debates never happened -- they were a 
>later invention by certain Tibetan elements hoping to convince themselves 
>that all pollution from "Chinese" Buddhism and its weirdo ideas had been 
>successfully purged from that date forward, and that only a pure 
>transmission from India took root. There was no Mohoyen. 

But that doesn't remove my argument, since there was a need to invent the story and to support the "works" approach in the opposition "faith" versus "works". An approach based on absence of will versus one that is will-based.
 
>In China, Buddhists and Daoists were often at each other. Buddhists were 
>particularly scandalized by a set of texts that alleged that Sakyamuni was 
>actually instructed by Laozi (Lao Tzu) after he went West and discovered 
>Sakyamuni struggling under the Bodhi-tree. Hence, Daoists would claim, 
>Buddhism is just the re-importing to China of Daoism through the distorting 
>filter of Western Barbarian misunderstandings. During the days of Kublai 
>Khan, according to an important work called The Secret History of the 
>Mongols, the two schools arranged a debate, with Kublai as the arbitrator: 
>the stakes were that the winner would become the state religion, and the 
>loser would have to close all its monasteries, burn all its books, and the 
>clerics would have to return to lay life. Both "teams" sent their best 
>debaters, and the contest began with Kublai asking a question that both had 
>to answer: "What is the best way to rule?" The Daoists went first, spinning 
>a long and metaphysical yarn about yin and yang, ethers, and whatnot. When 
>it was the Buddhist's turn they took a page from the Confucian Mencius, 
>brought things back down to planet earth, and offered a version of the 
>Golden Rule based on compassion for all living beings. Everyone enjoys 
>happiness and pleasure, and loathes pain and suffering; alleviate the 
>suffering of your subjects, don't do to them what you wouldn't want done to 
>you, provide them the means for pleasure and prosperity, and they will honor 
>you. Kublai declared them the victors. They were particularly eager to see 
>the scandalous works burnt (and many of them have not survived), but they 
>insisted that the Laozi text itself (Daodejing), NOT be destroyed, that it 
>was an authentic spiritual classic. It has always been interesting to me 
>that the Buddhists had no clear Indian prototype on which to draw, and had 
>to "borrow" from the Confucians (albeit packaged in Buddhist garb) in order 
>to have anything to say that would even address the question. 

I think we have a fair chance to be right when we say that those going after secular power or befriending secular power and who want to influence on the organisation of society fall under the heading "religion". For the sake of argument I have set out the differences between religion and spirituality in black and white features. Of course in practice there is a lot more of grey, probably only grey.

JOy