[Buddha-l] Batchelor

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Op 19-05-10 06:30, JKirkpatrick schreef:
> Stephen was interviewed after publishing Living with the Devil,
> and had this to say about pratityasamutpada, contingency, and
> samsara (excerpt):
> http://www.dharmalife.com/issue25/devil.html
>
> 'Some of the first material I wrote for the new book was a
> development of material that appeared years ago in a booklet
> called Flight, which was an afterthought to Alone with Others. I
> wanted to develop the idea that existential flight, which is the
> human tendency to flee the difficult reality of experience
> towards distraction or entertainment, is a natural response to
> contingency. This word 'contingency' is how I translate
> pratityasamutpada, or Dependent Arising, the Buddha's fundamental
> teaching on the nature of Reality.'
>
> Batchelor's previous book, Verses from the Centre, was a poetic
> rendering of a work by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, in
> which this contingency is identified with sunyata or emptiness,
> the lack of essential identity in phenomena. Samsara, the endless
> cycle of suffering, is, Batchelor might say, this flight from
> contingency. Instead of opening to the contingent, empty nature
> of things, we endlessly seek for identity, security and
> permanence. But this sets us in a vicious circle, since in our
> quest for happiness we are evading Reality. In German, Batchelor
> notes, a vicious circle is a Teufelskreis, a 'devil's circle': it
> is the devil who deceives us into circling, getting nowhere. In
> Buddhism this devil is called Mara.
>
>    
I understand that this image of the Devil is a poetical expression. 
Batchelor's use of ' contingency' is however at least confusing. 
Pratītyasamutpāda is a relation between events, while contingency means 
that there's no relation at all. A philosopher for whom contingency was 
very important was J-P Sartre. He liked movies very much and observed 
that the difference between a movie and reality is that reality has no 
director, so contingency is the trademark of the real. Has Batchelor 
been reading Sartre?

erik