[Buddha-l] Sabba Sutta

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 13:57:28 -0500
"Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Richard Hayes wrote:
> 
> > Aha, I see you are now claiming occult powers to see the intentions of
> other
> > people's minds.
> 
> Nothing occult, just being a Mimamsika for a moment and cognizing an
> absence.

You cognize an absence, but from it you draw an unwarranted conclusion.
You notice I do not mention something and then conclude that I am
deliberately concealing it from view or somehow trying to pretend it
does not exist. There is where you go too far (atiprasanga). You may
have noticed that I also mentioned nothing at all about the current
shortstop for the Minnesota Twins. Are you going to conclude that I am
somehow trying to conceal from everyone that the Twins have a shortsop?

> > I think the theory has better uses than racial stereotyping of any sort.
> 
> Possibly. The problem is Jung himself deployed it in that way.

He also deployed it in a good many other ways that had nothing at all
to do with racial stereotyping. Since I have no interest whatsoever in
racial stereotyping, I tend to be considerably more interested in
Jung's theories that yield useful insights into the human psyche.

> As you admit, grouping people by recent and distant ancestors lends itself
> to racial stereotyping.

I admit it can be used that way by people who are intent on supporting
racial stereotypes. But that something can be abused is no indication
that it cannot also be used constructively.

> He eventually (after a falling out with some Nazi echelons in 1939) came to
> see Nazism and the war as the crystallization of a horrible German shadow
> (maybe a decade of reading Nietzsche finally did its work, maybe getting
> disenfranchised helped).

Yes, in many of his writings in the 1950s Jung expressed in various
ways that the very surival of the human race probably depends on a
critical mass of human beings developing the skill of thinking as
individuals rather than going along with the peer pressures of a
nation, a race, a religious organization or a social club. I think he
was onto something very important. I agree fully with him on this
point, and that is why I am fairly confident that the human race will
not survive very much longer. There is little evidence to be seen of
people learning to think of themselves as sentient beings
interconnected with all other sentient beings rather than as
beings who are essentially Americans, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims
or Dakotas and only incidentally as human beings.

> I'm not sure exactly what I am supposed to have ascribed to him, aside from
> his using the notion of collective unconscious to stereotype "races", i.e.,
> entire groups of people in genetic affinity. It would be one thing to say
> that people sharing a cultural context also share certain attitudes and
> behaviors. It's another to ascribe that to genetic history. To me that is as
> absurd as thinking that East Asian people are "genetically" incapable of
> differentiating "L" and "R" -- either aurally or orally.

Well, if you read Jung in the most absurd way you will arrive at the
absurdities you seem to want to find in him.

But I'm bored with your systematic misrpepresentation of Jung. Let's
move on to your completely unfounded views of Dignāga.

> Again, reasons for his ecumenical system discussed previously. But he does
> have his own arguments, and does allow there is knowledge.

Not as I read him. He sets the criteria for knowledge so impossibly
high that nothing would we ordinarily think of as knowledge would
qualify as knowledge. He was, in short, very much a skeptic. (I see you
have not read my book on Dignāga.)

Richard