[Buddha-l] Aung San Suu Kyi and the latest Burmese prosecutions

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Ben Carral <info at bcarral.org> wrote:

>   Since  I  have  known  some  Zen  masters  who where
> rational   authorities,   I  must  conclude  that  your
> observation   has   been   quite   limited  or  wrongly
> interpreted.

I suspect there may be another way of saying this. What I would
suggest is that we all have different ways of interpreting
experiences, and that no one is right or wrong. To use the hackneyed
phrase that some philosophers use these days, "There is no truth to
the matter" on some issues. The claim that a given Zen master is
rational is a claim for which there is no test. It cannot be verified,
nor can it be falsified. There are no widely agreed upon criteria by
which to arrive at a true value for the proposition; therefore, it is
neither true nor false. The same can be said for the opposite claim.
So what I would be inclined to say is that my experiences have been
differently interpreted than yours, and that it is meaningless to say
that my experiences have been wrongly interpreted.

As for my experiences being limited, I must agree with you. My
experiences are limited in that they do no include your experiences or
even Jim Peavler's experiences. They are limited in exactly the same
way yours are limited, for your experiences do no include mine
(although they may include Jim Peavler's, only because he has a leaky
mind from which experiences dribble out into other people's
consciousness continua).

>   BTW,  I'm interested in knowing how do you test your
> university  students.  Do  you decide their marks in an
> authoritarian   fashion?  Or  do  you  decide  them  by
> consensus?

That question is completely irrelevant to the issues under discussion.
Let me remind you of my original claim. I said this: "The Buddha,
after all, was an authoritarian teacher, and almost all Buddhist
traditions have a deeply authoritarian structure. One can hardly
expect to get much of anything but lemon juice out of lemons."

As far as I can tell, you are not in any way disputing this claim.
Indeed, you appear to be agreeing with it. You appear, however, to be
reading far more into my original claim than was warranted. You seem
to have assumed (wrongly) that I am somehow opposed to
authoritiarianism. If I were opposed to it, I would have a difficult
time going for refuge all day long every day to the Buddha, the Dharma
and the Sangha, all of which I take to be authoritarian in nature.
(It may be worth reflecting on the significance of the fact that you
told us all, not so long ago, that you are not a Buddhist. Perhaps the
significance of going for refuge to the Buddha means less to you than
it does to a Buddhist such as myself. I am not in a position to know.)

This discussion has been filled with all manner of red herrings.
(Criminals used to thrown herrings on the ground in the hopes that
tracking dogs would get distracted by the fish and lose interest in
the scent of the criminal.) Joanna Kirkpatrick tried to throw all the
dogs off the scent by tossing a Quaker herring onto the trail. Others
have talked about Fromm and Zen masters they have admired. All of
those distractions, as is so often the case with distractions, were no
doubt entertaining for a while. But they were, after all, completely
irrelevant to the topic being discussed, which is the authoritarian
nature of the Buddha and the Sangha. I take it that that has now been
established fairly well, although Mr Zelders has provided excellent
reasons to be wary of being rash in arriving at an overly rigid
conclusion on the matter.

As for your own contributions to this discussion, Señor Carral, I
would give it a C+. Joanna gets a C, and Mr Zelders gets a B+. I trust
that answers your irrelevant question.


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