[Buddha-l] Abdhidharma vindicated once again

[Dan Lusthaus]

> 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.
>

Like Paul Williams, he converted to Roman Catholicism after many years as a 
disintguished student and scholar of Buddhist philosophy. Also like the 
other Paul, he is originally British. He taught from many years at the 
University of Notre Dame, and then at the U. of Chicago, where he helped 
turn that dept. into one of the best places in the states to study Buddhist 
philosophy. He has a sharp analytic mind. He left U of Chicago about the 
same time he got tired of Buddhist studies.

Paul and I have agreed and disagreed about a lot of stuff over the years 
(his Buddhist interests also brought him often to Yogacara texts), but he 
was always friendly, open and civil, unlike some other academics.

The two books of his that have been mentioned so far are (the first is on 
nirodha-samapatti, the second on, as Jamie said, how the impulse in 
traditional Indian buddhological thinking was to conceive of Buddha[s] as 
"maximally perfect" which inevitably led to a variety of philosophical 
dilemmas):

On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem, Open 
Court, 1991
http://tinyurl.com/5srohno

On Being Buddha (Suny Series, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions), 
SUNY Press, 1994
http://tinyurl.com/6c27zof


Dan