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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy,

After several messages decrying alleged a priori decisions you suspected of
the debaters, physicians, etc., you now present some of your own.


Joy:
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.

Dan:
I now see what you found attractive in Luther. This is the beginning of
Protestantism -- one becomes one's own foundation (paralleled by Descartes
famous je pense, donc je suis  as the epistemological foundation for all
knowledge). The Indian traditions I have been speaking about don't argue
that knowledge is always outward or doesn't need to be confirmed in one's
own experience, or is simply a matter of logic, etc. What they do say is
that if what one claims to know is not demonstrable -- by evidence (such as
anyone's immediate perception), argument, etc. -- then it is not knowledge
but something else and has no place in the public sphere. Anyone
disregarding this basic civilized requirement is either a quack, a fool, a
madman, or a conman.

Buddhists -- and long ago this was discussed on buddha-l -- are criticial of
tarka (Pali takka), which unfortunately gets mistranslated as "reasoning,
logic, etc." too often. Tarka means rational or logical SPECULATION. That
does not yield firm knowledge (hence, e.g., the Nyaya Sutra clearly
distinguishes between Nyaya -- which is pramana based -- and tarka -- which
is not pramana based). If a conclusion reached by tarka happens to be
correct, that was a matter of luck, not based on methodological reliability.

As for your claim that it is impossible to get anywhere meaningful by
reasoning, logic, etc., neither the Buddha nor the Buddhists would agree.
Ceto-vimutti (liberation by using your mind with clarity and precision) is
precisely that.

Vimalakirti is, at heart, a VERY logical text, profoundly logical, and it
too rejects mumbo-jumbo irrationalities (its listing of chimeras at the
beginning of ch. 7 [in the Tib version], ch. 6 in the Ch and Lamotte, is one
of the most complete in Buddhist literature). We can shift this discussion
over to the logic of Vimalakirti if you wish. Is he truly sick, or only
feigning illness (and isn't that a trick question? Do *we* get let in on the
joke/ploy, even if not all the characters can see through it?

Circular reasoning is tautological, and hence always favored by theological
speculation ("I am that I am", the self coinciding with itself [Hegel],
etc.). It gets you nowhere, and only congratulates you if you ended up where
it wanted you to start from in the first place (I think Rousseau once
compared metaphysicians to the minuet -- You start in one place, prance
merrily about in a complex of permutations of movements, exerting oneself,
"mince daintily about," only to end up exactly on the same spot where one
started.) That's why it such a friend of "faith" which basically involves
the same type of exercise. That is also why logicians -- including
Nagarjuna -- reject tautologies.

It is impossible to change a tautological thinker's mind, since they will
recognize only what was pre-set out for them in the first place as valid,
and explain anything possibly novel in terms of what they already know,
managing not to go anywhere. That's why spiritual zealots are so stubborn
and dangerous. They'd like us all to be stuck in the same place they are.
Can one be detached from the attractiveness of circular thinking? It's fun
to think that outside of circular thinking there is some other kind of
thinking -- let's call it non-thinking -- that is more legitimate, freer,
unrestricted, liberating, nicer, etc. That outside, let's call "inside,"
interiority, subjectivity, spiritual. Let's prize the inside over the
outside -- the outside is small, all of outdoors is tiny and cramped. Let's
delude ourselves and call this double model non-duality. Now let's make
faces at all the dualists who don't buy into our nonduality.

Dan Lusthaus