[Buddha-l] Buddhas Meditation

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 11, 2011, at 08:35 , Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> The tree does not care what formulation someone leans on to find a reason to 
> leave it alone. The tree is a consequentialist. It just wants those who 
> might destroy it to desist.

I have had two friends over the years who spend a good deal of their time talking to trees and other forms of vegetation. One of them insists that most edible plants actually want to be eaten. That is their raison d'être. Even trees, he said, don't mind at all being cut down and used for habitation. (I'm not sure how they feel about being made into roller coasters. My friend didn't tell me.) We may be here in a realm where we have nothing much to go on but projections, speculations and assumptions based on our own experiences as human beings. There may be a certain wisdom in refraining from imagining what plants, rocks, sharks and squid want out of life. 

> The labels obscure, pidgeon-hole; 
> we're better off without them;

Labels are also useful heuristics, aids in arriving at better understanding. Understanding can be impeded if one takes labels as rigid and absolute—no one reminds us of that better than Mādhyamikas. But it can also be impeded if one refuses to form working hypotheses and testing them, which often consists in applying predicates (which are, after all, labels) provisionally and seeing what the limits of the predicates are.

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