[Buddha-l] How Khushwant Singh does

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 9, 2011, at 19:32 , JKirkpatrick wrote:

> Often I've
> wondered why the idea of "light" has become such a popular and
> accepted symbol for being wised-up about things.

I suppose it's because for most human beings, sight is the principal source of sensory information. When people understand, they say "I see." (Oddly enough, when people learn of news by reading a letter or a newspaper, they say "I heard some news." I attribute that silly verbal habit to fundamental delusion on the part of speakers of English.)

Alexandra Horowitz says in her wonderful book "Inside of a dog" (and in interviews on the Ideas program on CBC radio) that dogs gather as much or more information through their noses as human beings do through their vision. When a dog enters a room, she can tell everyone who has been in the room for the past week, the state of their health, their moods, how recently they have been sexually active and what they have eaten. When a dog takes a walk, she has no sense at all of the present or the passage of time, because so much of the past still lingers in odors. The past is always present to a dog. Primates, on the other hand, are pretty much trapped in the immediate present, since what is present is the only information that light and sound can deliver. Primates live in an impoverished sensory world. Dogs feel sorry for us, I should imagine. That's why dogs never say they've become enlightened. What's light to an animal with relatively poor vision and a great sense of smell? No, when dogs gain liberative understanding they always say they've become enolfactorated. Well, they don't actually SAY it. That is, they don't actually use that word. Rather than communicating by making a sound, they pee on a bush, and everyone else gets the gospel that way. 

Dogs, I reckon, spend a great deal of their time wondering whether human beings have gandharva nature.


Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy (Cynical Division)
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM