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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Hi Joy,

Joy:
> Isn't this all about attributing values? What is in the public sphere is
in the public sphere, one can like or dislike it and say it has no place
there, but that doesn't prevent it from being there.

Dan:
The point was not about what ought to be allowed or disallowed, but of
taking stock of an important variable that is different between Western and
classical Indian culture. In the West -- at least here in the States -- we
have lunatics on our city streets and college campuses who carry signs
announcing the apocalypse and the Gospel and all sorts of other apramana
declarations. Some may consider that a nuisance, some that the people doing
so are not "normal," but we take that in as part of the expected scenary of
our culture. In classical India, they would simply have been madmen, if,
when questioned, they failed to be logical. It is a cultural taste, which is
how a culture expresses its "values" once they have become reflexive. It is
useful for those of us who do not live is such a culture to spend a little
time imagining seriously what that sensibility is like, if for no other
reason than to recover some of the cultural context in which the Buddhist
texts we do take seriously were composed and studied, and thus read them
more insightfully.

Joy:
> Ok I take note of these definitions and their different stated objectives,
tarka being merely a desperate shot in the dark and pramana proceding in all
glory on an enlightened path leading towards the light. The tarka adepts
must have felt pretty miffed when they heard what they were considered to be
doing...

Dan:
As I mentioned, Nyaya -- at least some of it -- speaks very approvingly of
tarka. One of the later Nyaya textbooks is actually titled Tarka-samgraha
(Summary of Tarka). In Aristotle, this is analogous to the distinction he
draws between logic (prior and posterior analytics) and "dialectic," by
which he didn't mean what Hegel later used the term to signify, but the use
of logical methods to speculate about those things which, for a variety of
reasons, we cannot have certain knowledge, so that we may at least have the
best guesses possible. So no reason to get miffed. The Buddhist anti-tarka
rhetoric is not necessarily against thinking clearly, but against mistaking
speculative theories for truths.

Joy:
> >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.
>
> And from your own experience does that seem plausible to you? That it is
perhaps one of the many factors that can help to contribute to liberation
seems reasonable, but the only liberation achieved through clarity and
precision I can imagine is liberation from lack of clarity and from lack of
precision and even then to a certain degree. We like to dream of great
achievements and of the sky being the limit, but that doesn't stop us from
knocking our heads against the ceiling of our limited senses.

Dan:
Lack of clarity is not liberation. It might be intoxication, oblivion, or
something else. This is why -- to bring us back to what started this
thread -- it is important to rethink such claims in terms of medicine. Which
physician would you entrust your health and life to -- the one who
understands clearly what is taking place and has a clear plan of treatment,
or the one who practices "from a lack of clarity and from lack precision"?
Buddha is a doctor -- as you already noted.

Joy:
> Are chimeras born or not-born, are non-chimeras born or not-born? What's
the point in listing specific chimeras? Would that list be exhaustive? Does
that knowledge liberate us?

Dan:
Chimeras are the false ideas one attaches to that have to be recognized for
what they are in order to get free from them. The seemingly solid
foundations on which people build their models of reality reveal themselves
to be chimeras when clearly seen. Otherwise one counts the teeth of a crow
endlessly. Only those lacking clarity, of course, may think that crows have
teeth.


Joy:
> What I learned from this text is that I don't have to pick up that
question, that I don't have to decide, that I don't have to direct my
knowledge faculty at it and to arrive at a conclusion. It teaches a
corrective reaction to what it considers shortcomings of earlier corrective
reactions and it undermines its own seriousness so it doesn't require more
corrective reactions.


Dan:
It may be time to re-read Vimalakirti. That is exactly the question it is
raising and addressing on a multitude of levels throughout the text -- the
plot, the discourses, the purpose of eloquence (Vimalakirti's most famous
and repeated quality), the centrality of Buddhism as a response to duhkha,
etc. Vimalakirti teaches little else.

Joy:
> That's not how I see it. It is impossible (in my experience) to exclude
reality. E.g. I don't see the dangers of nihilism or of mere emptiness. You
simply open another perspective and reality will still be there. How could
it be otherwise?  Think or believe or whatever that everything is
non-existent or a dream, do you think that by doing so, reality will
disappear? I think it will change our perspective on reality and that that
is all it does. The same half glass of water can be half full or half empty.

Dan:
That sort of is/isn't daydreaming has nothing to do with nihilism, since, as
you say, it is a game which, no matter how you turn at any one moment, you
are still there turning, and everything significant and stabilizing remains
in place. Nihilism is when one deeply and thoroughly and fervently believes
something so intensely, that reality itself hinges on that being the case -- 
and then discovering it is not the case. That bottomless abyss of
meaninglessness is nihilism. Nothing meaningful or stabilizing remains.


Joy:
> As I see it the non of non-thinking is a modifier it doesn't negate
thinking, it doesn't make it go away, it is different thinking or thinking
experienced differently. Life with detachment and equanimity is still life.

Dan:
One of Nietzsche's greatest chapters comes in the third part of Genealogy of
Morals in which he delves into the logic by which mystics, etc., claim that
non-knowing is true knowledge, and exposes that for the viparyaasa (reversal
of what actually is the case) it is. Might be worth a read.

Dan