[Buddha-l] JBE has a fancy new website

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 13:34 -0600, Joanna Kirkpatrick quothe:

> Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. By Adrian
> Kuzminski. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, 170 pages, ISBN:
> 978-0739125069 (hardcover), US$65.00.
> Reviewed by Kristian Urstad
> 
> excerpt: 
> The author goes on to expand further the points of similarity
> between Madhyamaka Buddhism and Pyrrhonism. He argues that,
> between them, there are important points of agreement in five key
> areas: method, belief, suspension of judgment, tranquility and
> appearances. 

This reminds me of some of the first lectures I ever heard on Buddhism
when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s. Leonard Priestley was
seriously pursuing Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonism and pointed out so many
similarities that I became convinced the two systems had a great
affinity. In my first book, the one that is too expensive for anyone to
buy, I tried to argue that Dignaga was pursuing Nāgārjuna's skeptical
leads and that both D and N could best be seen as skeptics. Although I'm
skeptical of all my own claims, I still have not been convinced that
this line of pursuit was wrong.

Kuzminski's book was discussed here when it first came out, as I recall.
My only quibble is with the word "reinvented". It is not at all clear
whether the Greeks or the Indians were earlier in their excitement about
learning how not to get excited by all the prejudices one has acquired
and elevated to the dubious stature of justified beliefs. A case can be
made for parallel discoveries of very similar principles, so that no one
was reinventing was someone else had preinvented.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu>
University of New Mexico