[Buddha-l] Rice & Dragons

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 16, 2012, at 2:25 AM, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

>> The boundaries between religions in India seem awfully porous. 
> 
> Is this the fairy tale you tell your Rel St 101 students? It's a lovely vision, but unfortunately bears no relation to actual Indian religions on the ground, in the past, present, or future. 

I teach philosophy these days, not world religions. This year I am teaching an upper-level course in Indian philosophy, and I have been struck by how much overlap there is among the various schools. The purported differences between any given school of Buddhism and any other school of Buddhism have always seemed quite minor to me, but what has struck me this year is how minor the differences are between the Buddhists and the Naiyāyikas and the Sāmkhyas and the Vedāntins. For most of my life I, like you, have studied the literature in which these schools criticized each other and scorned one another, but I am coming more and more to regard the disputes as nothing more than logomachy. Focusing on the trivial differences seems like a major distraction from the important message that all the schools are teaching in common. If one approached the practice of Buddhism with an attitude that Buddhism is different from and superior to, say Yoga or Vedānta, then one's Buddhist practice would be compromised, perhaps even undermined. One would not be heeding the Buddha's observation in Sutta Nipāta that the wise call the attitude, that one's own view is the highest and all else is a waste, a fetter. The point seems to be that one cannot be liberated if one is still going around claiming one's own perspective to be superior to that of others. And the Buddha was not the only person making that observation. It comes up again and again, stated in various ways, throughout Indian philosophical literature. Moreover, it seems to me a message worth heeding. I see little to be gained by dismissing it as a fairy tale, and much to be gained by considering it as a lesson it would do us all well to try to learn. It might even be a refreshing alternative to hostility. 

Is all this what I tell my students, you ask. Well, I rarely tell my students anything. I prefer to give them readings and to let them arrive at their own understanding, whatever that may be. I may correct their spelling and suggest they tidy up their sentence structure, but that's the full extent of my explicit mentoring. That's the way nearly all my philosophy professors taught (with the exception of one rather dogmatic Marxist), and I guess I've never had enough imagination to come up with any other way to do philosophy.

Religion on the ground has never interested me very much. It's too much like the rest of life—a study of pointless and counterproductive conflicts. It makes me sad. 

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
The University of New Mexico