[Buddha-l] Sabba Sutta

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Monday 01 December 2008 07:29:40 Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> I brought out the aspect that you were trying to suppress,

Aha, I see you are now claiming occult powers to see the intentions of other 
people's minds. Have any swampland in Florida you'd like to try to sell me?

> You claimed Jung's
> collective unconscious, despite how others have understood it, is also not
> that type of collective. 

I made that claim on the basis of having studied the volume of Jung's writings 
on the collective unconscious and archetypes of the collective unconscious in 
the Bollingen series.

> I pointed out in response that he used it for 
> racial stereotyping of the crudest sort.

I think the theory has better uses than racial stereotyping of any sort. The 
racial stereotyping is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the 
collective unconscious is seen as a sort of shared Oversoul, a consciousness 
in which a plurality of people participate. Jung clearly rejected that view 
in his 1936 writings and his writings of the 1950s. He argued instead that 
the so-called collective unconscious is a name of convenience for inherited 
genetic propensities to think in a certain way that has been passed down from 
one's recent and distant ancestors. That version of the theory is, I think, 
the most promising (even though it could easily be abused and made into a 
basis for racial stereoptyping---after all, just about every theory of 
genetics that anyone has ever devised has been exploited by racists).

So I agree with you in saying "Racism, boo!" It is naughty to be racist. On 
that I bet everyone on buddha-l agrees. But I also still hold to the view 
that Jung denied exactly the sort of collective unconscious that you ascribed 
to him.

> I don't know whether Nick Lewin's book, _Jung, War, Politics and Nazi
> Germany: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious_ (Karnac Books) has been
> published yet. When it is, we can return to these questions...

They would not be likely to clarify anything in this discussion.

> E.g., for Theravadins like 
> Buddhaghosa, and Vasubandhu while still Vaibhasika, merely eliminating
> erroneous cognitions was never enough; one had to also acquire "positive"
> knowledge, primarily insights into the four noble truths dissected in
> multiple ways.

That was also very much Dharmakirti's project. I am not sure what Dignaga was 
up to. I don't think he was especially interested in Buddhism at all. I think 
he was interested in assessing whether it is possible to claim to know 
anything. But surely that interest was in no way unique to Buddhists or to 
any particular school of thought. It was a topic of interest to everyone, and 
Dignaga wrote about it in the most general possible terms, as if he were 
writing a text that anyone anywhere could find valuable regardless of 
sectarian affiliation. With an agenda like that, it makes as much sense to 
label him a Unitarian-Universalist as a Buddhist, let alone as a Yogacari.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico