[Buddha-l] Prapanca

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 12 February 2008 23:37, Weng-Fai Wong wrote:

> All prapancas... and further reinforcing my refutation of your claim that
> the more understanding of the Buddha-Dharma you have, the less prapanca you
> have. In fact, if anything, the more detail of any knowledge one gets into,
> the higher the likelihood of prapanca arising. 

Let me problematize this a bit. (I can't believe I just wrote that. I deplore 
the word "problematize.") If we look at how the word "prapanca" is used, it 
is pretty clear that one's own doctrinal commitments are never characterized 
as prapanca. For a Buddhist, the doctrines of the Brahmanical schools are 
prapanca, but the doctrines of the Buddha (or at least the doctrines as 
understood by one's own particular school) are not. So if one became very 
learned in all the doctrines of one's own school, that would not entail 
generating prapanca. In fact, the more one knew one's own schools doctrines, 
the les one would be prone to falling for prapanca. That it least is how the 
term seems to be used.

The problem is that prapanca is always defined with reference to a particular 
set of doctrinal commitments. This makes it impossible to speak of prapanca 
as such, or prapanca as seen from nowhere (to borrow a phase).

> Now that doesn't mean that 
> ignorance is the solution. I am just saying that knowledge alone (even to
> the level that you can advise PhD students) is not it either.

That is already to take a particular stance. Some might well hold that the 
more one studies, and the better one understands what one has studied, the 
more liberated one is from prapanca. If to be fully liberated from prapanca 
is to be enlightened, then surely study and acquiring knowledge is an 
excellent way to achieve enlightenment. So saying that knowledge alone is 
insufficient might already be stating a prejudicial attitude about knowledge.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes