[Buddha-l] Abdhidharma vindicated once again

[JKirkpatrick]

 OK--so it's Paul J Griffiths ---a search yield's a Catholic
theologian of the same name at Duke Divinity. One has to scroll
far down on his list of publications to find that he's written on
Buddhism. So a chameleon of sorts.
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Since Paul Griffiths has already been pulled into this, let me
continue by noting that what you describe sounds like what he
calls (in his subsequent book, _On Being Buddha_), the push to
maximal greatness. I don't have the book at hand, but the idea is
something like any property that is considered important to a
religious community will be attributed maximally to those the
tradition considers maximally great.

BTW, Buddha doesn't come off much better in this later book than
nirodha-samapatti does in _On Being Mindless_. Especially fun is
the section on What It Feels Like To Be a Bat/What It Feels Like
To Be Buddha, in which it feels like nothing to be a Buddha: "We
know all that there is to know about what it's like to be a
Buddha precisely because there is nothing to know" (p. 192).

Jamie