[Buddha-l] Dharmapala

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 15, 2010, at 8:37 PM, andy wrote:

> I feel that many of us are at cross-purposes on this topic.

That's the way buddha-l works. Somebody writes something intelligent, and everyone else gets cross on purpose. Before you know it, the original topic has been completely forgotten. That notwithstanding, you are to be heartily congratulated for starting a topic that has brought some exceptionally high-quality postings. It has been especially delightful to see Lance Cousins bringing his careful thinking and deep expertise of Buddhist literature to the thread.

Andy, you say something with which I am compelled to agree. At the risk of rupturing the traditional culture of buddha-l by agreeing with someone, let me elaborate just a little. Here's what you said:

> My interest is philosophical, so I am interested in a consistent Buddhist ethical position on 
> violence.  Historical practice does not have much bearing on that, and so the 
> charge of "idealist" Buddhism.  So to me there is only one Buddhism, and it is 
> just what I say it is

My only disappointment in that wonderful statement is that I suspect you may have written the last sentence thumb in fist (if that is the keyboard equivalent of speaking tongue in cheek). I think you got it completely right, even if you were joking. For anyone there really is only one Buddhism at any given moment (a moment being defined as the amount of time it takes for a crisis to arise, persist and go away by itself before anyone figures out how to cope with it intelligently). And the only sensible way to arrive at the Buddhism one needs is to focus on the speakings, writings and thinkings that promise to be helpful in the crisis at hand and to ignore the rest. True, that strategy will provoke some deeply unimaginative anal-retentive scholars to cluck a tongue or two and accuse one of reinventing Buddhism. But as Bob Dylan put it so well many years ago, "Any Buddhism that is not busy being reinvented is busy dying."

One of the other Richards on this list recently recommended a book to me, which I purchased and am reading with great joy. The book is Lisa Randall's <title>Warped Passages.</title> Although the title sounds as though the book must surely be about Buddhist hermeneutics as practiced by Dan Lusthaus, it's actually about something else. Physics, I think. Despite it's not being about Buddhism, the book does have a passage (which I'll try not to warp too much) that strikes me as germane to, well, just about everything.

<passage>
Selecting relevant information and suppressing details is the sort of pragmatic fudging everyone does every day. It's a way of coping with too much information. For almost everything you see, hear, taste, smell, or touch, you have the choice between examining details by scrutinizing very closely, and looking at the "big picture" with its other priorities. Whether you are staring at a painting, tasting wine, reading philosophy, or planning your next trip, you automatically parcel your thoughts into categories of interest—be they sizes or flavors or ideas—and the categories you don't find relevant at the time. When appropriate, you ignore some details so that you can focus on the issue of interest, and not obscure it with inessential details.
</passage>

When I was in elementary school in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the 1950s, my sixth-grade teacher announced to the class that the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world was stored about two miles away from our school and that therefore Albuquerque was the mostly likely target of a Russian nuclear attack. We were then told that if the Russians started firing missiles to destroy Albuquerque's nuclear stockpile, we should get down under our desks and put our forearms over our eyes. Somehow, that day's advice lived on in my mind for years, and I spent the next fifty-five years thinking about war. I have to admit, I have looked upon war as something to avoid if at all possible. That is a little prejudice of mine, and it probably warps the passages through which my mind wanders.

When I was first entering the dangerous passage into early adulthood, I met a fellow student who had just taken off a semester to go down to Mississippi to work for civil rights. He and a few other friends had lived in a tin-roofed shack, and he said many nights it sounded as though hail was falling on the corrugated metal roof. It wasn't hail. It was bullets shot by good old boys exercising their right to own and use firearms to preserve their freedoms to keep nigger-lovers (as my friend and his comrades were affectionately called) at a safe distance. My friend was a Quaker, and through him I began to learn about the Friends' peace testimony. 

As I learned to love the Quaker peace testimony, I naturally got interested in reading more about the Quakers and about what had inspired them. What inspired the early Quakers, of course, was the Bible. So I spent several years studying the Bible. I recall turning page after page after page in search of passages that could be warped to justify an orientation to peace, but mostly all I could find were passages that talked about evildoers and how peaceful the world would be if the evildoers would all have their heads smashed in and their crops destroyed by hungry insects and if their women were all rendered barren. The biblical approach to peace seemed to be through being better at violence than the bad guys. This isn't what I was hoping to find. Subsequent forays into the bible have not done much to make me think I had missed the subtle gentleness of the texts. 

Eventually, by a series of flukes and coincidences, I stumbled upon the Dhammapada. One thing led to another (as adulterers are fond of saying), and before too long I had read quite a few Buddhist texts. One of the first (and most enduring) impressions I had was that there were not many passages in Buddhist literature I had to distort very much to warrant a life dedicated to striving to achieve peace by being, well, peaceful instead of warlike. There are, to be sure, plenty of references to enemies, and there is a lot of military imagery. Nearly always, however, the enemies are internal. They are unwholesome psychological habits that should be discovered, invited to leave and discouraged from returning. References to dangerous external enemies against whom one needs to build fortifications and stage pre-emptive invasions are few, and when they exist they are most often used as metaphors for doing battle with one's own unwholesome habits of thinking and acting.

You describe yourself as being "interested in a consistent Buddhist ethical position." In this you and I may have somewhat different temperaments. I don't give a hoot about being consistent. Consistency is vastly overrated. (I desist from quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman here, or even from mentioning their names.) As another Richard skillfully said, I think it is important to avoid being harmful to oneself and others, and I think the best way to do that is to avoid being harmful to oneself and others. On the other hand, I think there are thousands of ways to go about doing that, and that employing the best ones when the occasional demands requires being on the whole somewhat inconsistent. That's a pity, since the only thing I give a hoot about is being consistent. But that's the way the tofu gels.

Recovering from your venture into facetiousness, you followed "So to me there is only one Buddhism, and it is 
just what I say it is" by saying:

> It is what the Buddha said it was?

When I was majoring in English, one of my professors quoted something that T.S. Eliot allegedly said. When asked about the meaning of one of his poems, he supposedly said "It means whatever you think it means." Eliot unwittingly described with uncanny accuracy the way Buddhists have traditionally used texts. To a Buddhist, the Buddha means whatever you think he means. And if you can't find any words that expresses what you need the Buddha to have meant, you can always write words of your own and preface them with "Thus have I heard."  

> Nope, that won't work either.

Perhaps not philosophically. But historically it has worked for two and half millennia.

> But I think we can get 
> more out of the discussion w[ith] more clarification of exactly what we are 
> saying,

What are you trying to do, Andy? Destroy the culture of buddha-l?

By the way, just in case you have a modicum of interest in what I make of the Quaker peace testimony, I posted something on that very topic on my blog site this morning. It was inspired by the discussion here on bul-l.
It can probably be found at http://dayamati.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/wear-it-long-as-thou-canst/

Thanks again for starting a lively thread, Andy!

Richard Hayes
Department of Inconsistent Philosophy
University of New Mexico