[Buddha-l] Non attached & mindful culinary triumphalism?

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 13, 2011, at 18:47, andy <stroble at hawaii.edu> wrote:

> The delightful thing about budda-l is the range of disciplines.  That is also 
> the frustrating thing.

Andy, you have just put your finger on what I find frustrating about being me. My first undergraduate career was in mathematics and creative writing, and my principal enthusiasm was for satire and comic writing (my hero was Tom Lehrer), as a result of which I am never sure when I'm being ironic. Suffice it to say tongue is rarely far from cheek. My second undergraduate career was in religious studies and philosophy. In graduate school I got swept up in linguistics, philosophy of language, philosophy of langage, and traditional Sanskrit grammar and Tibetan and Mongolian. Outside the academy I was practicing Buddhism in a really superficial way. When I got kicked out of graduate school—they wouldn't let me stay after I'd made the fatal blunder of earning a doctorate—I had to get a job, but I didn't know a damn thing and had no disciplinary focus. By some crazy fluke I got a job and could never figure out what the hell I was supposed to be teaching and had even less of an idea what I was supposed to be writing about. As a result, I write very long sentences in which I start out with the aim of telling a story, switch to being an amateur historian of ideas by the end of the first subordinate clause, move into epistemology by the time the verb comes along and end up with an adverbial flourish with a slight comparative religions flavor. I go to Quaker meeting to practice vipassanā and to Benedictine monasteries to practice Quakerism. It's all terribly confusing to me. Only Jim Peavler can make any sense of anything I say. 

Richard