[Buddha-l] Bangladesh Muslim lovefest

[Dan Lusthaus]

Erik writes:
> My problem with this is that groups are not real things, but concepts, 
> ways of dealing with phenomena, or do you want to return to Medieval 
> conceptual realism?

They are prajnaptic and samvrtic. When *you* ask "do *you* want..." and 
begin with "*My problem is..." you demonstrate that you too live and act and 
interact in a prajnaptic, samvrtic world. Are you living in a medieval 
conceptual realism?

Karma is samvrtic. As the sammitiyas, yogacaras and Santideva in the 
Madhyamakan camp (and arguably the Sautrantikas as well) realized, without 
prajnapti there is no karma. Because you say there is no forest (because it 
is a prajnapti) does not mean you can't get lost in it. Nor does it mean 
that the forest on its own, interacting ecologically, is "unreal." A certain 
static, abstracted, conceptualized notion of "forest" is unreal, but the 
underlying complex causal processes that are heuristically represented by 
the word "forest" are real.

That "groups" are prajnaptis and hence in an important sense "unreal" does 
not mean that they don't exist at all: samvrti-sat. To mistake samvrti-sat 
for dismissible nonexistence is cheap sophistry, and dangerous for a 
Buddhist; it is precisely the sort of incorrigible trap that Nagarjuna warns 
is like grasping a snake the wrong way.

> The problem here is that karma always has the meaning of some kind of 
> action with consequences. So if I receive passively influences from 
> others...

Mutual influence is neither strictly passive nor active -- there are 
intentions, things one is prone to notice, things one will neglect and 
overlook, propensities toward things, embodied conditioning (samskaras) from 
prior experiences and prior lifetimes. Volitions (cetana) are also 
conditioned, so to some extent choosing action is also conditioned and 
passive, unless you want to return to a Christian medieval metaphysic of 
freewill, which is no longer Buddhism. Anyoniso manasikara means to not 
fully pay attention to the full context. From one perspective, we are all 
passive receivers, even of our own intentions. From another, we are actively 
constructing the frames through which we notice, ignore, evaluate and 
comprehend. And it's all our karma, hence we are responsible for dealing 
with it all, whatever its source. You don't get a free pass just hecause 
it's passively received from a previous life, or from another (you wouldn't 
have even noticed it, had your karma not primed you to, so nothing is 
completely innocently passive).

Thanks, Erik. You are illustrating exactly the sort of problems and 
incompatibilities that arise from  mixing Buddhist thought with some 
contemporary western trends.

Dan