[Buddha-l] Wealth and excess

[Katherine Masis]

Hi, Joanna
 
Yes, true enough.  I'm trying to get at where this emphasis on the individual is coming from.  The Buddha lived in a time when everything and everyone had its own dharma: minerals, plants, animals, humans, castes.  By emphasizing the individual, he was empowering people to take their own liberation into their own hands.  Rather than having a designated class of people dedicated to the task of achieving enlightenment, any and every individual could do the same.  In this day and age, it can be useful and insightful for us to see the social and cultural influences at work in our lives (“I’m not as uniquely individual as 'I' thought 'I' was in ‘my’ choices in life”).  But in the Buddha’s time, it was probably comforting and empowering to see that an individual, irrespective of traditional social roles, could liberate him/herself (“I myself, regardless of social norms, can follow this path of liberation if I so wish”).  
Katherine

 
=============================

Hi Katherine,

Yes, that was probably a large part of it. 
Also, don't "spiritual" teachers (or whatever one should call
them) usually tend to address the individual as THE moral
subject, to be liberated or reformed, with the goal in view being
that reformation of a population will end up being a reformation
of society. 

So there's no concept of "culture" here, of the power of shared
values influencing behavior. 
Maybe that's the illusion I was getting at, but if so it's a
powerful illusion that runs huge social aggregations that share a
culture.

=============================

Joanna, could it be that the Buddha didn't "do sociology" and
emphasized the individual precisely because he took his own
context for granted, i.e., a context in which a family or clan
"wego" prevailed over an individual ego?
 
Katherine