[Buddha-l] Gandharan Buddhist Art at NY Asia Society

[Richard Hayes]

Joanna Kirkpatrick schreef:

> These two signal systems--experience and
> body language-- cannot be used with email. This is why most email lists
> maintain speech codes based on courtesy and reject the posting of snotty
> language, no matter what the intentions may or may not be. This list has
> never chosen to maintain verbal courtesy, even though on a few occasions
> list members have acknowledged that joking doesn't easily come across in
> digital word media.

There is a reason why this list has never imposed an artificial code of verbal etiquette on its contributors. I think a bit too much has been made of how digital communications are impoverished because one cannot see facial expressions, twinkles in eyes and body language and other clues to an author's intentions. Exactly the same can be said of any written medium, but that has never prevented satirists and parodists and humorists and absurdists from publishing their words in ink. From the very beginning of buddha-l, the hope of at least some of us who founded it was that it could be a place where people could publish essays and squibs and not simply short announcements. Several of us love the style of such authors of Horace, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Stephen Leacock, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood, and even though none of us can claim to be as skilled as those masters of irony, we hoped there could be a forum where people who use language playfully with their tongues in the cheeks and their fingers up their nostrils. The whole thing has been a literary experiment of sorts, and like many experiments it has often failed. As Joanna rightly points out, many of the early subscribers did not find the experiment a good use of their time, and they left. Other poor souls, who obviously have nothing important to do, have stayed on year after year and watched the flow of verbiage from all manner of amateur literateurs.

One form of humor that my family has always engaged in, and that I have found I have in common with dozens of other friends, consists in taking a theme and mercilessly beating it into the ground, seeing if one can wring one more tiny drop out of a well-squeezed lemon. (I apologize for the whiplash caused by ingesting that unannounced mixing of metaphors). My father and I still keep alive running gags that began sixty years ago; it makes us laugh when one or the other of us trots out one of our running gags for one more lap around the track. People who have been around buddha-l for a while may recall the running gag about Republicans, who managed to get blamed for everything evil in the history of the Milky Way. That was completely tongue in cheek, of course. Eventually the joke petered out, probably about the time that everything evil in the Milky Way really was the fault of Republicans. A running buddha-l gag that has not completely died of old age is the supposed rivalry and animosity between Dan Lusthaus and myself. Some think it is genuine karping (or hayesing), but those who think that fail to detect the irony and the buffoonery. The very idea that there would be genuine hostility between people who have dedicated their lives to grappling with the uplifting visions of great thinkers such as Nga?gga?rjuna and Dharmakºrti is so obviously absurd that it hardly requires the use of inane emoticons to signal to everyone that the principal tone of much of the dialogue is a mock hostility meant for comic relief. It is by no means required that anyone find the attempt at humor successful, but it may not hurt to remember that a great deal of what appears on buddha-l is not at all what it appears to be.

We have been reminded before by earnest philologists, bhikkhus and historians that joking was regarded by the Buddha as a form of lying and that he told his son Rāhula that he, Gotama, would never say anything that was not true, even in jest. What a sobersided old fart he must have been if he really meant that. I, for one, am convinced he was joking.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM