[Buddha-l] Fsat Mnifdlunses?

[Dan Lusthaus]

> You'll be wanting to get a copy of the Canadian news weekly magazine
> MacLeans.

It's amazing how you leap to conclusions. Anyone who expresses reservations 
about the Canadian health care system must be working for the insurance 
companies or a Palin-ite? You've taken ad hominems (conflated with straw 
men) to a new level. Just days before sending that message to this list 
someone called me from Canada (to discuss other things) and related his 
present experiences with Health care there. I conveyed the summation. I 
don't believe that person admires Palin either. As it turns out, that person 
does live in Alberta. Shame on him for doing so. And over the years I have 
had comparable discussions with other north-of-the-border friends. Would I 
want to trade the current US system for the current Canadian system? As far 
as I can see, both suck. And both have their pros and cons. Both have way 
too many cons.

I see nothing in what is allegedly passing for a debate about health care in 
the US that has the slightest bit to do with what is wrong with health care 
in the US, so for all the bluster and polarization, a "cure" is not likely 
to emerge. That's tragic. Having myself this year undergone several major 
run-ins with what passes for health care in the US (and Boston is supposed 
to be one of the better places!), I can assure you it is a thorough and 
utter mess, very primitive, and in need of drastic reform.

Pretending I'm a Republican (which I am not, and never have been) won't 
solve anything. But it shows you have adjusted to living back in the US, and 
have adopted the US form of political debate: name calling.

Misattribution, I might add. You just seem to ooze that kle"sa for some 
reason.

>>
> If you were a reliable source, I would take your word for it.

Take no one's word for anything. (Oh, nevermind, I forgot. You are a Nyaya. 
Go ahead, then.)

>Given,
> however, that I know that Dignāga was not at all interested in
> niścaya,

Dignaga is interested in ekantika. He was not interested in justification 
(pace Arnold), and he allows there can be viruddha avyabhicarin (which 
Dharmakirti strenuously denies can be the case). Unlike Dharmakirti (and 
Hayes) he is less interested -- perhaps not interested at all -- in 
"practical" outcomes, what some try to see as Dharmakirti's "pragmatism". So 
ni"scaya as a springboard to action is not his great concern, true. Reaching 
sound conclusions that further the acquisition of knowledge to see things 
more clearly (and convince others) is his concern.

I can see you have made at least one enormous mistake in your
> characterization of the pramānavādins. Dharmakīrti all but destroyed
> the careful epistemological structure that Dignāga had built by
> injecting into it all kinds of ideas that did not belong there: the
> bankrupt doctrine of two truths, the laughable concept of niścaya
> (certainty), the ridiculous dogma of radical momentariness, etc.

Katsura says that he has found a mention of momentariness in the new 
Jinendrabuddhi materials (maybe in the 3rd chapter?). I argued with him that 
even if that is so (I haven't seen that section yet), it still is absent 
from Dignaga's treatment of perception (which I have seen). The two truths 
ARE present, though undeveloped, in PS 1 -- he explicitly excludes samvrti 
from legitimate pratyaksa (says the same thing in Nyayamukha), which, is a 
major innovation post-Nagarjuna that influenced all subsequent Buddhists, 
not just Dharmakirti. And I agree it is a problem.

>> Without Buddhavacana there is no Buddhism.
>
> Is that something you know through direct sensory experience or
> through inference? The last time I checked, those were the only two
> sources of knowledge accepted by the pramāṇavādins.

There are things which, according to Dignaga, are so patently obvious that 
to rephrase them as a sādhana would be an automatic fallacy. This is one of 
those things. Nyayapravesa labels this prasiddha-saṃbandha, the ninth 
pakṣābhāsa.

> a third pramāṇa, namely,
> sukhagṛhavacana (the word of Lusthaus)?

I prefer harśitāgāravacana.

cheers,
Harśitāgāra